Parashat Bereshit
Genesis 1:1 – 6:8
Our Torah portion tells us that God created the world. This is the Beginning. But what is it the Beginning of? Many of us are familiar with the concept, elucidated in the Middle Ages, that “creation” means the bringing of something into existence out of nothing – creatio ex nihilo. Thus, before the Beginning, there was nothing at all, and the implication is that this is the Beginning of All. This idea has a powerful hold on our imaginations, conjuring up God as Creator, possessing a unique power that no “creative” human being can claim, for we, unlike the True Creator, cannot start from nothing, but can only work with the materials we find before us.
Scholars question whether the doctrine of “creation out of nothing” is actually implied in the Torah. It is not explicitly stated. What was clear to the early Rabbis, if not to the philosophers, however, was that the Creation story did not necessarily imply that our story tells us of the Beginning of Time. Searching deeply into the Biblical text, the Sages tell us, “from here we learn that there was an order of times before this… We learn that the Holy Blessed One created worlds and destroyed them, created worlds and destroyed them, until God created these. God said: ‘Those do not find favor with Me; these do.'” (Gen. Rabbah 3:5)
In this view, what we are hearing when the Torah tells us of the creation of this world (- understood by the Sages to be a complex of many worlds) is not a story of a pure beginning from nothing. God has been trying to create worlds already. The mysterious, awesome and miraculous Beginning of which the Torah speaks is not a temporal one, nor an ontological leap from nothingness into existence. What the Torah puts before us, to borrow the phrase (- if to use it somewhat differently) of a wonderful contemporary teacher of Torah, Avivah Zornberg, is “the Beginning of Desire.” And this desire begins, not with the unfortunate temptation of Eve and Adam, but with God’s own desire for a world with which to be connected, with which to be in relation. The story of Creation is not the story of the beginning of existence, but of – finally – the beginning of the possibility of goodness.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Greenstein
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