Shabbat shalom
About two months ago, when I volunteered to do this derash, I really had not thought about the actual parshat. Then, after reading it, I realized that amazingly this is really interesting chapter and as the first, it does set the tone for much of what follows. Just in these first few chapters, there are tales of creation, destruction, beginnings, ends, fratricide and guarded forgiveness, a whole bunch of begetting. It ends with the introduction of a hero. This is the stuff of compelling, award winning drama. The stories that are told around the campfire, in the kitchen, passed on from generation to generation until they are collected and published. It is our history. Yet, as I read and reread the chapter, my mind reverted to it’s seemingly natural state- it began to wander (which I should have expected since Cain’s punishment described later in the parshat made him the first wandering Jew).
There are so many rich topics in this parsha to explore that I did not know where to start. Creation, snake, garden of Eden, Cain and Able. In the end I felt that the best place to start is “in the beginning”, and what I thought about was nothing. Well, not really nothing as in “my mind is blank” (although there are at times some connection).
At this time I could bring up the story about the may in the synagogue addressing God as being nothing. But I digress. I began to reflect on the actuality of there being no thing, what Torah describes as tohu v’vohu- the state of an unformed void and chaos.
Torah says “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Now that is an attention grabber. It is interesting to note that the first words in Torah are not talk, not dialogue, not an adjective, but action- creation. I was engaged. But as I read, I became progressively more interested in what was not said, what was not described. What interested me were the spaces between the words and stories- space itself.
Tohu v’vohu. Hertz translates this as “the earth was unformed and void. Darkness over the face of the deep.” What does this really mean? As a visual person, I tried to imagine what this looked like. I remembered laying on an APC in the Negev, looking up at the infinite desert sky at night But tohu v’vohu there would be the infinite dark sky, but without the stars. My imagination entered a realm where I do not have the words or understanding, and feel that this area may best be left to the physicists, astronomers and mystics. Perhaps to hu v’vohu is the black hole as described by Hawking.
I turned to the mystics. Daniel Matt says that it tohu refers to an empty state, and bohu (bo hu) means, “in it is something with substance”, as opposed to pure chaos. Perhaps it is like the state of pre-production, before a movie is made. Matt also describes tohu as matter and vo hu as form. Tohu is the material sitting in a pile or stack of stuff, or the raw ideas of a project. Vohu is the completed project, the actual building, or the organized thoughts and forms. When these two principals come together, then heaven and earth is formed and everything else follows. And when this transition happens, the spirit of God is present.
Transition happens.
And from nothing comes something.
When we return to breishiet we read that on the first day we get light and dark, day and night. On the second day we get firmament, sky, mists and heaven. The third day brought us seas, land and plants. On day four, God created stars the sun and moon. God gave fishes and birds on the fifth day and on the sixth, well the sixth was a big day. Animals on the earth and man and woman together to be blessed and to multiply. That is a lot of work for week, so on the seventh day, God made Shabbat and rested.
This is important stuff. Without getting into the issue of time frames, which would bring us back to the physicist (especially relativity) and specific details about how things were made, we have a blueprint and milestones for the creation of life.
It gets more interesting. In the following chapters, the Torah reviews the process and order of creation. Hertz says that chapters 2.4 – 3 is not a second account of creation, but is rather a sequel, providing additional details that were left out.
Yet stylistically, it is different. In “Who wrote the bible”, Richard Elliot Friedman describes the Documentary Hypothesis that has been developing over the past 400 years or so since Thomas Hobbes suggested that according to literary analysis, the Torah could not have been written singularly by Moses, It was not until the late 1800’s that Julius Wellhausen described the different authors and their political and religious agendas. One of the interesting issues that these authors describe is the two versions of the creation of humans. In the first story- man and woman are created together as equals- to be blessed and to go about their business of being fruitful and multiplying.
In the second, man is made first out of the earth, then put to sleep to enable God to remove a rib and make woman. She is to be a helpmate to man.
There are other stylistic anomalies that continue though Noah, Abraham and other stories and events. The version that you choose to believe in depends on your outlook on whether the Torah is God given or God inspired.
Although I have my views, I am going to attempt to promote one or the other. I am going to suggest an idea that returns to my initial discussion about nothing. As an artist, part of my training was learn to see negative space to define a solid object and to view an object by looking around the object, and the object itself not there. Perhaps these different versions of events reflect a similar process. By not having one definitive version of the narrative, we are left with our own selves, teachers and traditions to define what we are and how we got here. Perhaps the attempt to look at just one version can blind us to the complexity and nuances of narrative and history.
There are people who can take the leap of faith that Kierkegarrd wrote about, and accept the anomalies, couplets, mysteries and stories as they are, as part of God’s infinite wisdom and plan. That people have been discussing and learning from these narratives from before they were written down and continue to discuss and learn from them illustrated their power and beauty.
Yet there are others who are more comfortable with the unknown ambivalence and lack of definitive versions of singular events of our history, people who are concerned and interested in the spaces between the words and the stories and with not knowing for certain what did or did not happen. An example of this idea found in popular culture is when Han Solo says, “I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field controls my destiny.”
So in the end, we have many examples of couplets- two versions of the same story. Are they conflicting stories or do they compliment each other? I would suggest the latter, because having the two versions introduce us to the idea of their not always being a definitive version of life and of the chaos and tohu v’vohu of contemporary life. This can teach us to learn from the transitions that come into our lives in the forms of thoughts and actions and to meld together form and matter. And in the final analysis, we can learn how the transition of tohu to vo hu can help us become more aware of how it brings the spirit of God, in all of the infinite ways and forms into our lives.