Amazingly, the biblical description of the creation of the world has lent itself to countless essays, interpretations, theologies, counter-theologies, commentaries, controversies, legends, mystical visions, paintings, poems, and plays in many, many languages over many, many centuries. American culture is still split, to this very day, between those who insist upon the literal truth of the biblical account and those who see it as story – with all the power and suggestiveness that a brilliantly conceived story can possess , all the rich, spiritually significant interpretive possibilities, but nevertheless a story rather than a factual account. The biblical account privileges the power of language to create the world, and, indeed, that is just what the author(s) of Genesis themselves did – out of their own words, they created worlds of potential meaning that have engaged our civilization since the time those words became known.
One of the tractates of the Talmud tells us that the world was created with ten "words" [d’varim]: words of wisdom, insight, understanding, strength, rebuke, might, righteousness and justice [BT Chagigah 12a]. In the midst of a very different discussion, the tractate Rosh Hashanah (31a, ff) makes what I see as quite a beautiful connection: according to the ancient rabbis, the psalm sung by the Levites each day of the week is subtly related to the act of creation that took place on that same day. In other words, each time we chant the "psalm of the day" – and we 21 st century Jews are singing the same daily psalm as the Levites sang in the Temple – we are recapitulating the creation of our very world.
The Mishnah tells us which psalm the Levites recited each day. The Talmud explains why. According to Rabbi Yehuda, who learned it from Rabbi Akiva, on Sunday, the first day of the week, we proclaim in Psalm 24, "The whole world and all that is in it belongs to Adonai!" to honor the moment that, indeed, God created the universe from nothing, a world in which there are no beings other than God. On the second day, the psalm we sing, Psalm 48, celebrates the power of God and the existence of Mount Zion, that "high place" of our tradition: "Great is Adonai, and greatly praised, in the city of our God, on the holy mountain." As lovely as that image may be, it takes on an even richer spiritual power when we connect Psalm 48’s description of Mount Zion to the second day of creation: "Let there be a dome amid the waters, and let it separate waters from waters! God made the dome and separated the waters that were below the dome from the waters that were above the dome. It was so. God called the dome: Heaven!"
One of the most delightful correspondences that the rabbis see is Thursday’s, when we recite Psalm 81: "Sing joyously to God, our source of strength, shout out to the God of Jacob!" According to the rabbis, since on the fifth day birds and fish were created, it is they who are joyously singing their little hearts out to God, blessing their Creator!
The rabbis’ creation --or discovery! -- of the correspondence between, on the one hand, the story of the six days of creation in Genesis, and, on the other, the recitation of the particular psalm assigned to each of the days of the week, has a great spiritual and emotional significance. For it suggests that, in the act of reciting each day’s psalm are we implicitly partnering with God in creation. That means that, day by day, we, along with God, create the world anew. May we too do our share with wisdom.