Overture: Our Place in God’s
Purposive World
A Dvar Torah for Bereshit
“In the beginning God
created heavens and earth” (older translation)
or
“When God began to create
the heavens and the earth
- - the earth being
chaos-shmaos (Yochanan Muffs’ paraphrase of tohu
va-vohu)
with darkness over the
face of the deep
and the spirit of God
hovering over the face of the waters - -
God said, Let there be
light,
And there was light.
Any way you translate it,
it is a fitting opening to the most formative book in the world. Like a classic
overture, the beginning chapters of Genesis articulate the themes that will
reverberate through the rest of the Torah as well as the historical and
prophetic writings, the psalms, and the other components of the Bible. In broad
strokes, it lays out the important elements of the biblical world view:
- The world is ordered by God’s creative plan.
- Everything in the world - - skies, seas, land, plants and
animals, birds and fishes, sun, moon and stars - - is good, at least
potentially.
- The human being, at the center of it all, has the power to choose
good or evil, which is the same as to cooperate with God’s plan or to
rebel against it.
- At least a major part of the evil in the world is our fault. We
are complicated creatures, easily lured from the right path by short-term
illusory benefits.
- In the long term, history has a direction - - to try to wean
recalcitrant humanity from their destructive impulses and get them back on
track to commit to furthering God’s plan and making this world the
paradise that God intended it to be.
The narrative details in
which this message is couched are charming but naïve, and are there to serve
the broader message. Already in the first century the rabbis (Avot 5:1) and Philo (On the Creation) observed that an
omnipotent God could have created the world in a single day and a single
utterance, and that the six-day narrative is there to engage our attention or
teach a lesson. Maimonides in his Guide
(II, 30) observed that the main point of the opening narrative is to teach the
principle of creation itself, and that the details may be understood
symbolically - - a lesson the modern-day creationists and fundamentalists would
be well to take to heart. Maimonides would have welcomed the modern discovery
of the Big Bang as a scientific counterpart to the poetic account of God’s
creation in Genesis. The question is still open among contemporary physicists
whether to interpret the origin of the universe as purposive or random. Stephen
Jay Gould (in Rocks of Ages) probably
gave us the wisest advice when he said that it is the task of science to
describe the “what” of reality and the task of religion to address the question
of “why.”
Of all the narratives in
Genesis, that of Adam and Eve probably has had the most influence and echoes in
the imagination of the Western world, in literature, art and religious thought,
ever since. Joseph Soloveitchik (in The
Lonely Man of Faith) drew from it the moral that the human being is in a
primal state of loneliness and vulnerability, and that we can find meaning in
our lives only through the companionship of our human counterpart and of God.
Reading the Eden narrative
after the magnificent first chapter of creation, I have come to the conclusion
that it tells the story of our awakening as moral beings and shattering the
innocence of the idyllic basking in the bosom of nature. The entrance of human
beings onto the natural landscape adds something radically new, with potential
for good and for evil. In nature, all creatures live by instinct. We are
capable of reflection and choice, of cooperating with God’s purpose for the
world or living for self-aggrandizement. History as a moral enterprise and
quest is uniquely human.
The challenges facing us
since Genesis have changed not in nature, but in scope. We still have the
power, like Cain and Abel, to make life on earth murderous hell. We still have
the power, like the generation of the Flood, to bring on catastrophe that will
spell doom for us and for the planet. But we still have the capacity, like
Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, and the prophets and psalmists, to
dedicate our lives l’takken olam
b’malkhut Shaddai - - to perfect the world under the governance of the
Almighty.
It is up to us. And the
message of Genesis is still our wake-up call, the beginning of our journey.
___________________________________________________________________
Rabbi Len
Levin teaches Jewish philosophy at AJR.
