20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Creation

Creation Alon Goshen-Gottstein R evelation begins with creation, and its position at the outset of the biblical narrative may be taken to indicate that all that follows-history, law, and religious experiencederives its meaning from a thought-pattern arrived at by pondering the fact and story of creation. When we speak of creation, we are not, essentially, in the realm of physics, ancient or modern. We are making a statement of religious thought, which affords answers to questions about the meaning, purpose, and direction of life. Nor do we view creation merely as the first link in a chain of historical events. It is, rather, an event whose meaning transcends the historical process. What is of salient importance is the structure of creation, which manifests itself in the historical process as in other dimensions of existence. The term creation refers not only to the result of a process, but also to the process itself. As process, creation is ever-regenerating, its outcome ever-changing. However, the relationship between creation and creator and the aspect of existence that creation demonstrates remain constant. It is to the constant, as it illuminates the meaning of all created life, that we shall address ourselves. 114 CREATION We take it almost for granted that certain attributes ascribed to Godhis existence, omnipotence, and goodness, his will and his knowledge of and involvement with each and every created being-belong within the context of a Jewish doctrine of creation. But God's unity, the most central feature of Jewish theology, is often thought irrelevant to a discussion of creation . It is precisely this tenet of the Jewish faith that we will make our point of departure, for it is this aspect of divine life that is least discernible within creation, while, regarding this tenet, creation may be said to have effected the greatest change. The Midrash teaches us that "Before the world was created, the Holy One, blessed be He, with His name alone existed" (Pd Re [ed. Friedlander]' 10). We learn from this that before the world's creation the unity of God entailed more than merely the nonexistence of other, higher powers. It meant that God was the only reality and therefore all of reality was One. The creation of a reality that could view itself as being separate from Godthough it might not ultimately be so-signaled a transformation in reality as it had been up to that point. It was no longer a unity; multiplicity had been introduced as a mode of existence. The traditional emphasis that God was alone and unaided in his work of creation further heightens the tension between the idea of the unity of the creator and that of the multiplicity of his works. Thus, if we understand God's unity as the ultimate unity of all existence, we must view creation as that process through which fragmentation and multiplicity enter a hitherto unified reality. We may illustrate this understanding of the process of creation from several traditional sources. FollOwing the rabbis' explanation of why the creation story begins with the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet (the bet of Bereshit), we may say that not only are there two worlds, but creation itself introduces duality and thus multiplicity into reality. Multiplicity is the hallmark of creation. The biblical narrative's odd way of counting the days of the creation: "one," "second," "third," and so on, highlights the distinction between unified reality, to which the idea of number does not apply, and created reality, which brings numeration and multiplicity in its wake. creation's birth in a number of stages, rather than through a single act, is not merely a teaching regarding process but a statement about the manifold nature of creation. One of the central processes through which creation comes to be, as we are taught in the first chapters of Genesis, is that of separation. A hitherto undifferentiated reality is separated into two distinct realities. The separation of light and darkness, upper and lower waters, land and sea are clear examples of such a process. This process continues, we may further suggest, CREATION 115 with plant and animal life coming into their own, and culminates with the separation of woman from man. Rabbinic speculation enlarges the category of the pairs of opposites that come into play in creation. Two polar divine modes of creation, thought and action, and two polar divine forces, justice and...