The process of creation, with which we start our story, may be the single most telling section of the entire Torah, when it comes to catching a glimpse of the Divine Nature. There are two things of paramount importance to Bereshit: how God creates, and what God creates.
We join the story already in progress, as it were. Naturally, the text does not even begin to approach the most unfathomable questions about The Beginning: what was there Before It All, was there a point at which God began to exist (or in other words, how eternal is eternity?), what were God’s motivations in Creating the universe, and did He try it before. When we join in, God is there, God already knows He wants to create a universe, and He’s already taken some steps in doing so. “Bereshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim ve-et ha’aretz, ve-ha’aretz hayeta tohu-va’vohu, ve-choshech al penei tehom.” “At the beginning of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth, the earth was chaos and void, and darkness was upon the deeps.”
There is ‘aretz’ ‘earth,’ and though it exists, it is ‘tohu-va’vohu,’ ‘chaos and void.’ What does this mean, chaos and void? In his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, the medieval mystical master-work, the late Rav Aryeh Kaplan z’tz’l tells us that ‘tohu’ ‘chaos’ denotes pure substance, free of any information-- what we might call undifferentiated proto-matter. ‘Bohu’ ‘void’ indicates information without substance, what we might perhaps refer to as kind of a metaphysical glue: the mystical quasi-energy permeating the universe which allows matter to form in response to physical laws, and which allows the physical substances of the universe-- energy and matter-- to hold meaning and value transcendent of its actual existence. For example, it would be the energy which flows from the primeval bohu that allows us know things by the names we give them, to be able to sanctify the food we eat with the brachot we make over it, to be able to work the magic of making art and language. Tohu and bohu complement and complete each other, but they must be formed and shaped together by God, as a potter takes water and clay to make a vessel, before they can support a stable universe.
At the beginning, the universe is in a natural state of darkness. Therefore, we know that darkness, being a primeval state of the universe, is not by nature a thing to be feared or associated with evil. It merely exists, having no more innate quality to it than a canvas has as a thing upon which to display or view paint. “Va-yomer Elohim, ‘yehi or,’ va-yehi or; va-yaar Elohim et ha-or ki tov; va-yavdel Elohim ben ha-or u’ven ha-choshech.” “And God said, “there will be light,’ and there was light; and God saw the light, that it was good; and God separated between the light and between the darkness.” God can see the light and be pleased with it, because the darkness existed. Thus, darkness serves a good from the first, because we cannot appreciate the beauty of light without anything to compare it to, and by unspoken inference, the reverse is true. We would not appreciate the value of Night were there no Day to rest from. Also, in the division of light and darkness into Day and Night, we are introduced to the concept of Measured Time. There must always have been something like Time, since physical time as we know it is a function of entropy, and without it, existence would be motionless, and hence impossible. But this introduces us to the concept of kept time, Time which is delineated and organized, a primal function of creating order from chaos.
“Va-yomer Elohim, ‘yehi rakia betoch ha-mayim, va-yehi mavdil ben mayim ve-mayim...’ va’yikra Elohim la-rakia ‘shamayim....’” “And God said, ‘there will be a vast-dome-emptiness between the waters, so there will be a separation between water and water...’ and God called the vast-dome-emptiness ‘sky....’” Thus we see the initial formation of the most primeval creations-- darkness and light, undifferentiated matter, water and air-- into those groups which our ancestors knew as the primal Elements: earth, air, fire, and water, which they believed were the prima materia of which all things are composed. Of course, we know our ancestors’ Elemental system to be wrong in the scientific sense, and yet the metaphor remains true. Before one can make anything complex, one must take primal ingredients, make more complex ingredients from them, and then proceed.
Even so our universe was formed from sub-elementary particle clouds, elementary particles, atoms, molecules, amino acids, and thence to complex worlds of life and thought. And we are indeed composed, in a sense, of the same stuff, uniformly. We are all made up of the same elementary particles, even many of the same molecules. The physical difference between humans and animals is trivial from the molecular biologist’s point of view: both are organic, carbon-based heterotrophs requiring similar temperature spectra, liquid water, and a supply of food resources involving similar chemical compounds to survive. To a physicist, even the physical difference between ourselves and stars is largely a matter of mass and balance of chemical makeup. We are less massful, we have less free hydrogen, and we do not engage in involuntary nuclear fusion within ourselves-- for which we are generally thankful. But our ancestors were correct in that all things in our world can be said in a way to contain earth, air, fire, and water. It is not a question of difference in the nature of things, merely in the way the elements are organized.
So having organized His materials, God proceeds to create life of various kinds, finally creating “Adam” “humanity,” the creature with sentience. And then, just as we might potentially wonder what even more wondrous and advanced creation the universe might require for completion, God does something wholly unexpected. There are no more complex life-forms, no additional primal elements. “Va-yechal Elohim ba-yom ha-shevi’i melachto asher asah, va-yishbot ba-yom ha’shevi’i mi-kol melachto asher asah; va’yevarekh Elohim et yom ha’shevi’i va-yekadesh oto....” “And God finished with the seventh day the work He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all the work He had done; and God blessed the seventh day, and made it holy....” What completes the world? What completes all of God’s labors in creating a whole universe? Rest. The thing that makes everything complete, and fulfills all the promise of labor is rest. As any artist will tell you, a thing is done when you sit back from it, and put down your tools, and look at it, and enjoy it, and revel in the fact that here is this thing you worked so hard to create, and now it’s finally done, it’s a real thing separate from yourself!
The Shabbat-- which our midrashic tradition, drawn from this text, tells us is not only observed by us on earth, but by God as well in Heaven-- is created by God not because He’s tired and needs to recuperate: we all know God doesn’t get tired. God doesn’t need Shabbas. God wants Shabbas. That’s the key difference. A day of rest, to rejoice in the completed creation, is not a necessity. It’s a privilege. We have it not because it is something God wishes to enforce upon us: it is a gift He wishes to share with us. And so the process of creation goes: primordial creation, Measured Time, elements, organized matter and energy, life, Holy Time and philosophy. I say philosophy because God-- who has no actual need for rest-- nonetheless not only creates Rest, but blesses and sanctifies it, and consecrates it as an eternal institution on a weekly basis. And what is this if not aesthetics, pure and simple? To stop and take joy once, randomly, that may not mean anything. To make stopping and taking joy an institution is an aesthetic choice. So much for the ascetics among us....
So we have what God has created. The other important thing, if you will recall, is how He created it. We use many metaphorical images of God as an artisan in our liturgical poetry: God as a potter, an engraver, a smith. Our Christian cousins image God as a carpenter, Jesus. But the text here clearly shows God to be an artist indeed, but not an artisan. God is a poet. He speaks the universe into being, thing by thing. Or, if you prefer the story with trop, God is a bard, singing the poetry of the universe into being. But either way, language is the first and foremost tool God uses to make art. In our mystical tradition, we say He used the twenty-two letters of our Hebrew alphabet, plus the ten primary numbers represented by the Sefirot, to create our universe and the ways of transcending it. We are thus taught in Sefer Yetzirah that the three ‘sefarim’ ‘books’ or ‘divisions’ of God’s Creation are Sefer (Text), S’far (Numbering), and Sipur (Communication).
The proverbial shlosha devarim (three things) upon which the world stands actually are ‘written’ words, mathematics, and told stories. With ‘written’ words-- written by any means, or set down in any lasting way-- we too make order from chaos: we create laws, we create all the many formal, ritual, awesome and solemn things using language that (ideally) bring justice and righteousness to our societies. With mathematics, the hidden language of the universe, we peer into the mysteries of our physical and temporal surroundings, using our advancing wisdom to continue shaping the world around us. And with stories told and shared, we take our society-- which would be otherwise sterile in solemn language and dispassionate mathematics-- and infuse it with passion and joy and grief and the wealth of all our other emotions that make life more than a formula or an equation, and we thus turn society into culture. And yet these three things are interdependent, inseparable. A society without any one of the three will stagnate and wither. In this way, we fulfill our nature as beings created, as God says, “b’tzalmenu, ki’demutenu.” “In Our Reflection, Like to Our Image.” As God creates the universe with Sefer, S’far, and Sipur, we create our worlds, our social divisions of the universe, by the same means, and sometimes even using the same tool.
It is no accident that among the three pillars, two have to do with words and language. All human beings are creatures of language, to some degree or another, and we Jews-- as a people known for words-- are exemplars of this. Now, no society we know of on earth has no language. Some may be more or less complex, some more tonal, some nonvocal-- comprised only of gesture, like Sign Language. But everybody has a language of some sort. The other sentient creatures on this planet, whales and dolphins, both have tonal languages of vast depth and wide vocabulary. Even those lesser creatures closest to true sentience, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, form rudimentary languages of tones and gestures, and they base their primate societies on communication. It seems clear that language is the primal art, for not only does God use it as His tool of creation, we too use it as our tool of creation. Sometimes it is the only tool, like when we create poetry or literature. Sometimes it is only an initial tool, such as when we describe a structure we wish to build, a sculpture we wish to create, a scene we wish to capture with paint or ink or camera. Language is our initial tool when we create each other, too. Even in this day and age, few people indeed have sexual intercourse without ever speaking to one another first.
Whatever the language of Heaven may be-- since though I love our mystical tradition, I doubt God is a native Hebrew speaker-- spoken, thought, gestured, or communicated in some way infinitely beyond our comprehension, we know it is a language capable of poetry, since here we are. It is a language full of holiness, since it is God’s, and He uses it to bless this universe He has made, these living things within it, and the Day of Rest He shares with them.
Ultimately, of course, we cannot really know God-- at least not while we occupy this plane of existence. But since we are like God in our free will and our use of language, since we are a people He has chosen to emulate him in such ways as we are able, we may come to know Him somewhat, in something of the same way He reveals himself to Moshe on Mount Sinai: “Ani a’avir kol tuvi al panecha, ve-karati be-shem YHVH lefanecha, ve-achonti et asher achon, ve-richamti et asher archem...ve’ra’ita et achorai, u’fanai lo yira’u.” “I will pass before you all my goodness, and call out my name YHVH for you, and I will be gracious as I do, and I will be compassionate as I do...and you will see what comes after me, but my face none shall see.” So we struggle to understand the infinity and paradox implied in the ineffable name YHVH-- the verb ‘to be’ in Hebrew, in all three tenses simultaneously. We wrestle with the language and meaning of Torah, our link to the Creator. We know by examining our world around us the vastness of God’s artistry. We seek to touch, through tefillah, the presence of God. We know by looking at one another the wisdom and the wonders He has created.
Shabbat Shalom.