God’s appearance as an “I” is all-important, for it makes God an individual like ourselves, an “I,” moreover, whom each of us can emulate, because, like God, we too are aware of being “selves,” a personal “I” that persists through time and circumstance. The last four books of Torah provide laws for all of Israel, for the social order, that is; but the first book, Genesis, is a set of biographies, an ambling preamble about a collection of human “I”s struggling to grow in league with God.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, “What Unites Us With God”, The Jewish Week (8 August 2014), 32.