# The Servants of the King

> There is a verse at the end of the fourth chapter of Bereishit that most of us read without pausing. After the murder of Abel, after Cain's exile, after Lamech's dark boast of vengeance, the Torah tells us that Seth had…

By David Raitan · 2026-10-08 · Parashat Bereshit · https://torahmeirah.com/en/parasha/bereshit/bereshit-5787-5

There is a verse at the end of the fourth chapter of Bereishit that most of us read without pausing. After the murder of Abel, after Cain's exile, after Lamech's dark boast of vengeance, the Torah tells us that Seth had a son named Enosh, and adds: "Then people began to call upon the name of the Lord" (Gen. 4:26).

After so much darkness, it reads like the first light of prayer. But the sages heard it differently. The word *huchal*, "began", shares a root with *chol*, the profane. And so the Midrash, followed by Rashi, reads the verse as the beginning not of prayer but of its corruption: in the days of Enosh, people began to bestow the name of God on other things. Ibn Ezra protests that the grammar points to a simple beginning, and on the grammar he may well be right. Yet the tradition held on to the darker reading, and it is worth asking why.

The question is not merely one of language. Enosh was Adam's grandson. Within three generations of the Garden, humanity had lost its way. How does a world so close to its Creator come to forget Him? And why does the Torah record it so quietly, in half a verse, as if hardly anyone noticed?

Maimonides answers in the opening chapter of his laws of *avodah zarah* – literally "strange worship", the Torah's term for idolatry – and his answer is one of the most penetrating passages he ever wrote. In the days of Enosh, he says, humanity erred, and the error began with the wise. Their reasoning was not rebellious. It was devout. God had made the sun, the moon and the stars to govern the world. He had placed them on high and given them honour. They were His ministers. Surely, then, it was right to honour them too, as one honours the servants of a king – for to honour them was to honour him.

What follows is a story told in stages. First came temples, built in gratitude. Then offerings. Then, over generations, a subtle change in the reason for the worship: people came to believe that the stars themselves dispensed rain and harvest, health and wealth, and that serving them was the way to secure prosperity. Reverence had become a transaction. At the end, says Maimonides, the name of God was forgotten from the speech and thought of humankind. People knew the stars. They no longer knew the One who made them.

Note three things about this account. The error began with the wise, not the foolish. It began with respect, not rebellion. And no single step was unreasonable; each followed plausibly from the one before. Idolatry, in Maimonides' telling, was not a decision. It was a drift.

Every idol begins as a servant.

In 1998, two economists, Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, conducted a small experiment in ten day-care centres in Haifa. The problem was a familiar one. Some parents came late to collect their children, and a teacher had to stay behind and wait. In six of the centres a modest fine was introduced: ten shekels for arriving more than ten minutes after closing. The expectation was obvious. A penalty would bring lateness down.

The opposite happened. Late arrivals rose, and settled at roughly double their earlier level. And when, some weeks later, the fine was withdrawn, lateness did not return to what it had been. It stayed high.

The explanation the researchers offered, in a paper entitled "A Fine Is a Price", is quietly profound. The fine did not merely add a cost. It changed what parents understood the situation to be. Before, lateness was a small failure of obligation towards a teacher who was waiting. Afterwards, it was a service that could be bought. The instrument introduced to protect a relationship had rewritten the relationship. And once rewritten, it could not easily be written back.

That is the generation of Enosh in miniature. The fine was a servant, meant to support punctuality, and it became a master that reshaped how people saw. The stars were servants, meant to light the world, and they became masters that reshaped how people prayed, turning gratitude into a bargain.

The Psalmist had already said it: "Those who make them shall become like them" (Ps. 115:8). We imagine that we use our instruments. More often, over time, they teach us how to see. That is the true difference between a servant and a master. A servant does what we ask of it. A master changes who we are.

Here the opening chapter of the Torah reveals a quiet wisdom. Describing the fourth day of creation, it does not even name the sun and the moon. It calls them "the greater light" and "the lesser light", and defines them entirely by their task: to give light upon the earth (Gen. 1:15–17). In a world in which the sun and moon were gods, the Torah calls them lamps. It does not diminish them. It honours them precisely by knowing what they are for.

This matters, because the lesson of Enosh is not that we should live without servants. Judaism is not an ascetic faith. It blesses wealth honestly earned, honours work as a partnership with God in creation, and has never asked us to turn our backs on the instruments of civilisation. Abraham, who would later "call upon the name of the Lord" (Gen. 12:8) in the very words used of Enosh's generation, did not tear the stars from the sky. He restored them to their place.

The difficulty is that the drift is invisible from within. Money is a blessing, and it becomes, almost imperceptibly, the measure by which we value people. Technology connects us to those we love, and it comes, without anyone quite deciding it, to stand between us and them. Many of us now reach for the phone before we have said good morning to the person beside us – before even the *Modeh Ani*, the words with which a Jew is meant to greet each day, thanking God for returning the soul. It came to serve us. Now, often, we serve it. Work gives dignity and purpose, and it can consume the very family it was meant to sustain. Even religious observance, the most sacred of instruments, can become an end in itself – which is why the prophets protested not against the Temple but against worship that had forgotten justice. In none of these cases does anyone choose idolatry. As in Haifa, as in the days of Enosh, the meaning of a thing changes while its outward form stays the same.

How, then, does one notice a drift that cannot be seen from within? Only by stepping outside it.

That, I believe, is the deepest meaning of the way the story of creation ends. On the sixth day, the Torah tells us, God "saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31). Then, on the seventh, He ceased. Creation ends not with a further act of making but with an act of looking back: seeing the whole, and seeing that it was good.

Shabbat gives us that vantage point. For six days we live inside our work, absorbed in means. On the seventh we stop. We neither buy nor sell; the screens fall dark; the instruments rest. Shabbat is a day given to things that have value but no price – family and friendship, prayer and study, the simple gift of unhurried time. It is the day our blessings finally catch up with us. And from there, the servants can be seen for what they are.

It is no accident that the Torah's command concerning Shabbat begins with the word *zachor*, "remember" (Ex. 20:8), or that in the Kiddush we call it a memorial of the work of creation. The failure of Enosh's generation was forgetting – not denial, not defiance, but forgetting. Shabbat is the Torah's answer: not a single act of repentance, but a weekly act of remembering. And Haifa suggests why it must be weekly. Once the meaning of a thing has shifted, it does not easily shift back. What drifts every day must be recalled every week.

"Then people began to call upon the name of the Lord." Perhaps every generation begins again as Abraham did, by remembering what Enosh forgot. The lights of heaven were made to serve the earth, and so were all the instruments we have made since – and kept in their place, they can help us bring a little more light into the world.