Let’s posit that G-d made the world because He wanted a source of external conversations, someone to seek to connect with Him. G-d sought something separate, different enough to provide interesting contrast and conversation, but similar enough to have enough in common in order to seek a connection.
G-d already had angels. We can understand angels the way the Torah describes them: extensions, programmed entities of G-d, unable to act in any way differently than G-d intends. Angels have no free will. Consequently, angels are not men: they are not distinctively separate from G-d, nor are they unique from each other. Most critically, given that G-d makes men afterward, it seems that the qualities of angels did not achieve G-d’s purposes.
Perhaps this is because angels have no grounded physicality. Because they have no connection to earthiness, they are unable (lacking even the desire) to disconnect from G-d. And so angels have no agency, no free will.
So what was G-d’s purpose? We can work backward… the Torah tells us that man is a uniquely hybrid creature, neither purely heavenly nor purely earthy. G-d created us by breathing out some of His essence: a “soul”. Souls are loaned out to each person for a lifetime term, to be returned to their source after the body expires. As long as the soul and the body are bound together, that spark has a spiritual magnet that tries to align to, and reconnect with, its spiritual/magnetic source. The Torah tells us that G-d’s spirit is found in each person (as well as in the Mikdash, Tabernacle, when we have one).
But mankind also has an earthy character that is rooted in the dust and seeks animalistic pleasure. The body wants to ignore any higher calling. Left to their own devices, people (as we can see from the Flood generation as well as in every pagan and atheist society on earth), deny the existence of the intangible and thus unprovable soul, and they instead seek to maximize physical pleasure.
In the gap between body and soul, there is space for Free Will. All humans live in between the waters above and the waters below, in tension between both, and able to choose, at every conscious moment, to rise or to fall. We might choose to be more like animals, or we might choose to be more like G-d, to walk in His path. The forces are essentially balanced, so our Free Will is how we move in either direction.
So man is a hybrid, spanning the gap between pure physicality (like rocks, plants, and animals), and the pure spirituality of angels in heaven. G-d made us in order to connect with us, to reach across the gap and create holiness. Which is why G-d talks to man but not, as far as we know, to any animal, vegetable or mineral in the physical world. The soul provides the means of connection, the divine two-way radio.
Our souls serve a similar function for us as well: we can know that we are never alone, that in some sense we are also part of a much larger whole, connected in an intangible way to G-d and to everyone else.
Why do I think any of this? Because the text points us in this direction. And because it is the best explanation I have seen so far for why the Torah refers to G-d, in three places, as plural – despite the fact that in D. 6:4, G-d is described as being ONE – or at least, a unity.
I think it is to teach us three distinct lessons, one for each verse in which G-d is plural. Here they are:
1: G-d creates us, in part, in order to connect with Him;
2: When we get too close, G-d makes a change in order to preserve the gap; and
3: G-d does not accept mankind forming societies that eliminate or replace G-d in their world.
I’ll be exploring each verse in a standalone “bite-sized” piece… stay tuned!