Becoming Excellent With What HaShem Has Given Us: Parashat B’reshit 5787

Every year, when we return to Parashat B’reshit, we return to the beginning of the Torah and to the beginning of the human story. Creation unfolds through distinction, development, cultivation, and action, moving from light and darkness, waters and dry land, vegetation and living creatures toward the human being created b’tzelem ELOQIM, in the image of G’d. From the opening verses, Torah places before us a fundamental question: What will humanity do with the world, and with themselves, that HaShem has given them?

That question leads us to another question, specific to us as Jews: What does Judaism ask of us beyond simply possessing Jewish identity, belonging to Jewish community, or fulfilling individual obligations? What does it mean to become increasingly capable, disciplined, knowledgeable, physically vital, spiritually developed, and prepared to use whatever HaShem has placed within us?

In short, what is m’tzuyyanut (מְצֻיָּנוּת)?

M’tzuyyanut is the Jewish discipline of becoming excellent with what HaShem has given us.

The word m’tzuyyanut comes from the language of excellence, distinction, and being outstanding in one’s capabilities. Within a Jewish framework, however, “excellence” begins with a theological premise: every person receives capacities, circumstances, relationships, responsibilities, talents, and opportunities from HaShem. Our task involves developing those gifts with intention and using them in service of Torah, mitzvot, community, and our relationship with G’d.

That gives m’tzuyyanut a distinctly Jewish question:

What are you doing with what HaShem has given you?

Your Torah knowledge can be developed. Your body can be strengthened. Your intellectual and creative gifts can be cultivated. Your capacity for mitzvot can become more disciplined. Your spiritual life can continue ascending. Each of these dimensions belongs to the work of becoming the person you are capable of becoming.

Jewish mystical and Chassidic traditions give us a deeper architecture through which we can understand this process. The Torah—that is, the Five Books of Moses proper: B’reshit [Genesis], Sh’mot [Exodus], Vayyiqra [Leviticus], B’midbar [Numbers], D’varim [Deuteronomy]—correspond within this spiritual framework to five ascending levels of the human soul:

•  Nefesh (נֶפֶשׁ): The lowest level, acting as the basic life-force and physical engine of the body. It governs physical actions, instincts, and animal desires.

•  Ru‘ach (רוּחַ): The spirit or emotional self. It rules the heart, personal character traits (middot), and emotional feelings.

•  N’shamah (נְשָׁמָה): The intellectual self and higher inner soul. It resides in the brain, governs comprehension, thought, and understanding of divine wisdom (mochin).

•  Chayyah (חַיָּה): The “living” or supra-rational level. It represents the transcendent spark of divine will, desire, and faith that goes beyond logic.

•  Y’chidah (יְחִידָה): The highest, singular essence of the soul. It is an unbroken, direct spark of G’d Itself—representing total oneness with the Creator.

These levels correspond in turn to five ascending spiritual worlds:

•  Asiyyah (עֲשִׂיָּה): The World of Action, which is the lowest, material, and physical universe (our mortal reality) where spiritual concepts are completely veiled and expressed through physical deeds.

•  Y’tzirah (יְצִירָה): The World of Formation, associated with the emotional heart, moral attributes (middot), and shaping the forms created in the higher realm of B’ri‘ah.

•  B’ri‘ah (בְּרִיאָה): The World of Creation, representing the realm of the divine intellect and the first point where distinct individual souls and creations come into being.

•  Atzilut (אֲצִילוּת): The World of Emanation, where divine light flows without a sense of independent self.

•  Adam Qadmon (אָדָם קַדְמוֹן): The primordial spiritual level; the initial manifestation of divine consciousness, will, and potential before the creation of the distinct lower worlds.

This fivefold structure gives us a way to understand Torah, human development, and spiritual ascent as dimensions of one larger Jewish journey. Torah accompanies the development of the soul, while the soul moves through increasingly elevated dimensions of consciousness and relationship with HaShem.

For the work of m’tzuyyanut, we must also draw five practical dimensions from this spiritual architecture:

•      Limmud (לִמּוּד)—Torah Study: Excellence begins with learning because Torah develops the knowledge, language, discernment, and intellectual discipline through which a Jewish person understands the world and understands their responsibilities within the physical world. Limmud gives us the intellectual foundation upon which the other dimensions of m’tzuyyanut can develop.

  
  

•      Guf (גּוּף)—Cultivation of the Body: The body is not merely the vessel that carries out the soul’s intentions; it is the place in which a person learns to embody them. The guf provides the physical capacity through which we study, work, pray, perform mitzvot, care for others, and participate in the world HaShem created. To cultivate the guf is therefore to develop strength, health, energy, discipline, presentation, and physical habits that enable the person to give form to what he or she intends to become.

  
  

•      Kishronot (כִּשְׁרוֹנוֹת)—Development of Divine Talents and Gifts: Every person possesses capacities that can be cultivated and directed toward meaningful purposes. Intelligence, creativity, leadership, craftsmanship, communication, scholarship, empathy, artistic ability, and countless other gifts can become avenues through which a person contributes to the world and to the community. Kishronot asks us to recognize what HaShem has placed within us and develop those capacities with intention.

  
  

•      Mitzvot (מִצְווֹת)—Observance of the Commandments: Excellence becomes embodied through practice. The mitzvot exist beyond human logic, and give Jewish life a disciplined structure through which knowledge becomes action, values become habits, and intention becomes conduct, where they flow almost seamlessly. Mitzvot therefore transforms what we know and what we aspire to become into the ways we actually live.

  
  

•       Siyyu‘a (סִיּוּעָא)—Divine Assistance: Human beings study, cultivate, practice, strive, and develop, while spiritual ascent ultimately depends upon assistance from HaShem. Siyyu‘a names the dimension of Divine assistance through which human striving can reach beyond its ordinary limits and become spiritual elevation. Our work creates the conditions for growth, while HaShem provides the assistance through which that growth can ascend.

  
  

The first four dimensions represent the 80%: the portion of our development entrusted to human effort, discipline, responsibility, and choice—analogous to the more classical Jewish concept of hishtadlut (הִשְׁתַּדְלוּת), the concept of taking practical, natural human action to achieve a goal, rather than passively waiting for a miracle. Siyyu‘a represents the 20% that lies beyond our control, the Divine assistance through which HaShem completes what our efforts alone cannot accomplish—a corollary to bitachon (בִּטָּחוֹן), trust and confidence in HaShem. M’tzuyyanut calls us to give everything we can, while recognizing that human effort reaches its fullness through Divine assistance.

The result is a life brought toward its fullest potential: 100% of what we can cultivate, joined with 100% of what HaShem can bring forth through siyyu‘a.

Together, these dimensions give us a Jewish vocabulary for excellence that encompasses the mind, the body, one’s gifts, one’s actions, and one’s relationship with HaShem.

B’reshit begins that journey at the level of Nefesh and Asiyyah.

Nefesh represents the foundational life-force associated with embodied existence, while Asiyyah represents the world in which intention becomes action and spiritual possibility enters physical reality. The opening chapters of Torah therefore begin with a human being who exists within a physical world and must learn how to live, act, choose, cultivate, discern, and develop within it.

Genesis 2:7 gives us one of the most important descriptions of that beginning: HaShem forms the human being from the dust of the earth, breathes into that form the breath of life, and the human becomes a nefesh chayah, a living being.

The Torah begins our spiritual journey through the body.

That beginning has consequences for how we understand excellence. Our spiritual lives take place through embodied existence. We learn through our minds, serve through our bodies, create through our hands, communicate through our voices, and encounter other human beings through the physical world around us through our heart. Nefesh therefore gives us the foundation upon which the higher dimensions of spiritual development can be built.

Adam’s encounter with the animals gives us another example. HaShem brings the creatures before Adam, and Adam names them. Naming requires attention, discernment, language, memory, and the ability to recognize distinctions. Human beings begin exercising intellectual capacity within creation itself.

Torah therefore places learning and discernment remarkably close to the beginning of human existence. The human being receives a world and begins learning how to understand it.

That has particular significance for Eidot CHeMDaT”A Jewry as we consider the future of African-American and Caribbean-American Jewish life.

Much of our communal work in recent years has involved recovering history, identifying predecessors, documenting communities, correcting misconceptions, and preserving stories that deserve to remain part of the Jewish record. That work has given us an inheritance. B’reshit now invites us to ask what we will do with it.

Who are we becoming?

For Eidot CHeMDaT”A Jewry, m’tzuyyanut means developing the capacity to know our Judaism deeply and to participate fully in Jewish intellectual, religious, cultural, and communal life. That requires children who receive serious Jewish education, adults who continue learning Torah throughout their lives, teachers who have the resources to facilitate curiosities and to teach well, scholars who have opportunities to produce new knowledge, and institutions capable of preserving and transmitting what our communities build.

A community practicing m’tzuyyanut therefore develops more than individual achievement. It develops infrastructure for excellence.

We build libraries because knowledge requires places in which knowledge can live. We cultivate teachers because Torah requires transmission. We support scholars because communities require people capable of thinking deeply about Jewish life. We create leadership pipelines because institutions require people prepared to carry responsibility forward. We educate our children because every generation deserves access to the inheritance it will eventually be responsible for transmitting.

Then B’reshit gives us Cain and Abel —another early encounter with responsibility and the quality of one’s work. HaShem asks Cain why he is distressed and teaches him that he must exercise mastery over what threatens to govern him. Human excellence therefore includes the cultivation of character and the capacity to direct one’s own impulses toward constructive action.

At the conclusion of creation, Torah gives us Shabbat.

Human beings work, cultivate, create, and develop, while Shabbat establishes a sacred rhythm within that labor. Excellence requires disciplined effort alongside the recognition that human beings remain creatures within HaShem’s creation. Our productivity exists within a larger spiritual order.

This is where siyyu‘a becomes essential to m’tzuyyanut. We develop what we have received while recognizing that every capacity ultimately depends upon the One who gave it. We strive toward excellence while remaining open to Divine assistance. Human effort and Divine assistance therefore participate together in the ascent of the soul.

That ascent begins here, with Nefesh and Asiyyah, with life and action, with the physical world and the human being learning how to live within it. From there, Jewish spiritual development moves through Ru‘ach and Y’tzirah, N’shama and B’ri‘ah, Chayyah and Atzilut, and Y’chidah and Adam Qadmon, with Torah accompanying the soul through each stage.

For us, the work begins with a simple question that can become increasingly demanding as we grow:

What are we doing with what HaShem has given us?

What will we do with the Torah we have inherited? What will we do with the talents and intelligence present within our communities? What will we do with the children entrusted to our care? What will we build for the scholars, teachers, rabbis, leaders, artists, educators, and thinkers who will come after us?

This year, as we begin again with B’reshit, I want m’tzuyyanut to become part of how we answer those questions.

We study Torah deeply. We strengthen the bodies through which we serve. We cultivate the gifts HaShem has placed within us. We honor the mitzvot through disciplined practice. We open ourselves to siyyu‘a, the Divine assistance through which human striving can become spiritual ascent.

And together, we build.

Eidot CHeMDaT”A Jewry has inherited stories, traditions, knowledge, challenges, accomplishments, and generations of Jewish life. Our responsibility now includes transforming that inheritance into capacity for the future. We can build communities where Jewish knowledge is cultivated with seriousness, where excellence becomes a shared communal value, and where every generation receives the tools necessary to become more capable than the generation before it.

B’reshit gives us the beginning.

M’tzuyyanut asks what we will make of that beginning.

May this new cycle of Torah become a new stage in our development, as individuals and as a community, through Torah, disciplined living, cultivated gifts, mitzvot, spiritual ascent, and Divine assistance. May we become excellent with what HaShem has given us, and may what we build from those gifts become part of the inheritance that generations after us will receive.

Shabbat Shalom.