This diary uses some parts from one I published in 2013.
This season in the Jewish calendar is all about beginnings.
First we have Rosh Hashana, the "birthday of the world," when we are called to attention by the shofar. In the shofar service, we read of all God's creatures coming to have God judge their lives over the past year. This leads to ten days of making our peace with the people in our lives until Yom Kippur, when we struggle to make peace with God and most importantly with ourselves.
There is a custom that after breaking the fast of Yom Kippur one should begin to build a succah before going to bed. After this most solemn of days, we should begin at once to perform mitzvot and to prepare for the days of rejoicing. Life goes on. At the end of Sukkot we end the days of our rejoicing with Simchat Torah, celebrating and rejoicing in Torah. We roll the Torah scrolls all the way back to the start of it all, the stories of creation. We have an entire year to learn and to do better.
Rashi asked why Torah, which is a code of laws, does not begin with the first laws given before the Hebrews leave Egypt, but rather with creation, and I would add, with such a mystical story of creation? It certainly is not to tell us that the world is 5778 years old. I have seen and heard different commentaries over the years. Some emphasize that we all share common ancestors, so no one is intrinsically better than anyone else. Some point to the importance of the Sabbath.
I have also heard that Torah does begin with a paramount commandment, the commandment to create, to act on our world. The custom of starting to build a succah before going to bed after Yom Kippur reminds us of this; we must begin with an act of creation.
The modern JPS translation of these first verses is:
1. When God began to create heaven and earth -- 2. the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water -- 3. God said "Let there be light"; (sic) and there was light.
I found a 2004 review by John Updike of Robert Alter’s translation of the Pentateuch, which is interesting in many ways, including Updike’s thoughts about translation in general and about the way God is portrayed in these opening books of the Bible. For this diary, though, the relevant passage is this, which gives three translations of these first lines of Genesis, Alter’s, the King James, and the 1995 translation by Everett Fox:
Take Alter’s version, for starters, of the opening verses of Genesis:
**{: .break one} ** When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. **
The King James has it thus:
**{: .break one} ** In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. **
Fox’s version, set in lines like poetry, reads:
**{: .break one} ** At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters— God said: Let there be light! And there was light. **
The modern concept of creation is that before God created the world there was nothing. The King James translation supports this, breaking the first three verses into separate sentences, so that the fact of God creating heaven and earth comes before a description of the dark chaos at the beginning of things. The Jewish translations, however, treat the first verse as a clause describing, and the three verses as one sentence describing what there was before creation began. Think of a potter contemplating a block of clay before deciding what to do with it — that’s the ruah elohim hovering over the dark waters, translated variously as a wind of God, God’s breath, God’s spirit, or rushing-spirit of God in the above translations.
This adds to the mysticism of the first chapter of Genesis (and the first three verses of the second). The Jewish Study Bible says it is usually attributed to the Priestly source, dating it much later than the second creation story. God is distant and abstract, creating by word, while in the second, God is present and, for example, models Adam out of earth and then breathes life into him, an intimate act of an intimate God.
But we have a third creation story, the Kabbalistic story of Isaac Luria, who lived in the 16th century, in Safed after the expulsion from Spain and Portugal. In this story, in the beginning there was only God and God was everything. When God decided to create the universe, he had to contract himself (tzimtzum) to make room for his creation, thus creating darkness. He filled this with a divine light, and contained this light in ten vessels. But the vessels were unable to contain the powerful divine light, and they shattered (shevirah). Most of the shards of light returned to the godhead, but the shards of the broken vessels and bits of the light scattered and became the material universe and the forces of evil. Man was created to help find and free the shards of divine light so they could return to the godhead. This is the basis of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Every time we perform a mitzvah we free another spark of divine light; when enough are freed, the messiah will arrive, heaven will be whole again, and the world will be perfect.
There is a fascinating analysis of Luria’s creation story at Tikkun magazine, from 2011, relating it to its past and to our present.
While the biblical creation story is one of bringing order out of chaos, Luria’s is one of the accidental creation of chaos, and it is our job, not God’s, to return order to the world. (In these days of a president who thrives on creating chaos, it’s good to remember that.) Yet creation in the biblical story is also brought about by breaking and separating things — heaven and earth, the waters above and the waters below, darkness from light, night from day. It’s the revelation of one of these dichotomies, good from evil, that gets Adam and Eve expelled from the perfection of Eden. When I first read James Hilton’s Lost Horizon as a teenager, I longed for Shangri-La. When I read it again as an adult, I understood why Lo-Tsen agrees to leave, even though she knows she will be old in the real world — real emotion and struggles are a necessary part of life. Adam and Eve become human only after leaving Eden and entering the world of pain, sex, work, and children.
Shabbat shalom.