Bereshit – Gainesville
Welcome back to the beginning of the Torah and probably the most misunderstood portion in Western religious history. This is because, more than any other section of the bible, so many people take this portion completely literally. The earth was created in 6 days. Man and woman created on the seventh. There was a talking serpert and a tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. In fact, there a museums created to the premise that the earth is 6000 years old and they are complete with animatronics of children riding on the back of dinosaurs.
There are solid reasons that biblical literalists believe as they do. After all, if the creation story is not true wholly and completely, then everything that flows from it is also potentially untrue. Adam and Eve. The serpent. The origin of sin and so forth. Hanging on to this story is the very foundation of everything that follows if one is inclined to believe it literally.
Jewish tradition and rabbinic learning tend not to take this story literally because we do not base who we are on a story, but rather an ongoing exploration and discovery of holiness and righteousness through law and custom and practice and ritual. In fact, in the creation story there is a fascinating midrash that our Sages taught.
In Genesis 1:2 we read: “the earth was a chaos, unformed, and on the chaotic waters’ face, there was darkness.” Read this carefully, especially the phrase, ‘on the waters face there was darkness.’ Where did the water come from? And since there was water, it must have been on some kind of solid land. Where did that come from? This verse screams out ‘interpret me!’
The 11th and 12th century biblical commentator Nachmanides suggests that the world was created ex nihilo, “out of nothingness.” But Rashi and Ibn Ezra explore the possibility that something existed before this world. After all, we read: And there was evening(Gen. 1:5). Well, if there was evening, that implies there was a sunset of some type and evening also implies time. Therefore, time must have existed. The problems begin to pile up for Rashi and Ibn Ezra. In fact, for them, evening, the earth, water, and time were realitie prior to God creating anything else, which leads us to wonder: Was ours the first world God created?
A midrash filled with rabbinic imagination says that ours was not the first world created at the moment of creation. Listen to the midrash:
Rabbi Judah son of Rabbi Simon said: “Let there be evening” is not written here [in Torah], but “And there was evening” [was]; hence we know that a time-order existed before this [world’s creation]. Rabbi Abahu said: This proves that the Holy One, blessed be God, went on creating worlds and destroying them until God created this one, and declared, “This one pleases Me; those did not please Me.”
So what are they saying? Simply this; that when the text reads chaotic, unformed earth and the chaotic waters they are the ruins of the unfavorable universes created beforehand. Remember, the rabbis are creating ideas and they aren’t concerned here with God’s omnipotence or omniscience. They are asking a question based on the hints in the text. And the question is, Why wasn’t God pleased?
This is where it gets interesting: Maybe in the other creation, those versions of Adam and Eve actually listened to God and did not eat their way out into the world. This would bore God to tears. The pinnacle of God’s creation would eternally be children. No partnership with God. No struggle with life. No growth. Simple stagnation with zero desire, need or want to understand the Divine. It was a boring and useless existence. As I have often said in studying this portion, the best thing in the world was the expulsion from the Garden of Eden for, without that expulsion, we would create absolutely nothing and our humanity would consist of being fish: namely, eat, sleep and make little fish. Hardly the pinnacle of creation. Knowing this, God simply started over.
The implications are profound because this midrash paints God as so much more relatable. Not just the unknowable transcendent Divinity, but rather a Presence that needs us to learns about us and, at the same time, to learn about God’s self. This is a profound idea. God needs us. We need God. And only when we recognize the need for each other, is there a partnership. And maybe that’s what the midrash is teaching us: that the real experience of God is not just in prayer or study but in partnership and covenant with mutual respect. I believe that this is what it means to be what the Torah calls Adam and Eve as creatures ‘in God’s image’ – btzelem Elohim.
In fact it is accurate to say that the whole purpose of created and then destroying worlds was God’s way of learning that the only way to have a real relationship with humanity, is to give them the one thing that no infant or child has: the gift of freedom. It took a few tries but God finally got it right. And what is that God finally got right? God created the universe; therefore God is free. By endowing human beings with His “image and likeness,” He gave them freedom as well. We may be, like the first human, “dust of the earth,” but there is within us the “breath of God.” As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, taught, ‘We are shaped by our environment, but we can also shape our environment as well. We are created, but also creative. To a degree shared by no other life form known to us, we can choose how to act and how to react. That is good news, but also bad, as we rapidly discover in the Torah’s narrative. We can obey but also disobey; we can create harmony or discord. The freedom to do good comes hand-in-hand with the freedom to do evil.’
Creation and re-creation has taught God. And, it has taught us. We set our own course. We don’t have a fate. Nothing is predetermined. Our fate does not lie in the stars, nor in the human genome, or in any other form of determinism. We become what we choose to be. And this story demands the answer from each of us. What exactly is our relationship to God going to be. And what exactly does it mean for each of us to live ‘betzelem Elohim’ – in God’s image. Indeed, the rest of the Torah and the rest of the bible is a struggle with exactly that question. And when we learn it, when we struggle with it, even without coming to an answer, God smiles. For in our learning and struggling, we create and re-create a new partnership with God and, in that constant re-creation we fulfill God’s fantasy and desire and wish for us: namely to live in God’s image. God is not looking for perfection. God is looking for partnership. This year, as we begin our Torah and new year, let’s give God that gift: our partnership in everything we do.
