The faith of God.

In stately prose, the terror in its opening chapter describes the unfolding of the universe,

the effortless creation of a single creative force.

Repeatedly, we read and God said, let there be, and there was, and God saw that it was good,

until we come to the creation of humankind.

Suddenly, the whole tone of the narrative changes.

And God said, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness,

and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of heaven and the cattle and all the earth,

and over every moving thing that moves upon the earth.

So God created man in his image.

In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them. The problems are

obvious. First, why the preface, let us make? In no other case, did God verbally reflect on what he's about to create before he

creates it? Second, who is the us? Let us. At that time, there was no us. There was only God.

There are many answers, but here I want to focus only on one given by the Talmud. And it's quite extraordinary.

The Us says the Talmud refers to the angels with whom God consulted.

He did so because he was faced with a fateful dilemma.

By creating Homo sapiens, God was making the one being other than himself

capable of destroying life on earth.

Read Jared Diamonds, guns, germs and steel, or his collapse, and you will discover how destructive humans have been

wherever they have set foot, creating environmental damage and human devastation on a massive scale,

and we're still doing so. So this is how the Talmud describes

what happened before God created humankind. When the Holy One Blessed Be He came to create man,

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