The Pivoting Point
The mystery of creation
“We live," writes Lev Shestov, “surrounded by an endless multitude of mysteries. But no matter how enigmatic may be the mysteries which surround being, what is most enigmatic and disturbing is that mystery in general exists and that we are somehow definitely and forever cut off from the sources and beginnings of life.”1
Bereshit bara Elokim: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” (King James translation). Boldly and lucidly, the originating words and acts of God are described. The narrative tells of an ordering and a goodness that shapes all the categories of creation. Smoothly, powerfully, and seamlessly, the text (Genesis 1:1-2, 4), through formal devices of sequence, repetitions of key words, and the leitmotif of “Let there be… and there was…,” produces “several theological meanings: that Elohim, alone, ‘at the beginning’ created a good ordered world; that He ‘separated’ and hierarchically ordered the primordial mass into a ‘good’ pattern; that the created world of nature is, as a result, a harmony; and that Elohim is Omnipotent and without rival.”2
The clarity of this account of “the sources and beginnings of life” seems to leave no room for the existential sense of “mystery in general” that Shestov describes…
The mystery of the beginning is based, for Rashi, on syntax… “Bereshit” is the construct form, meaning “In the beginning of God’s creation of heaven and earth.” Heaven and earth, he argues, were not created first. “You should be ashamed of yourself” if you try to argue that this is a chronological description of the order of creation, for, strangely, the water appears in the second verse with no account of its creation. So the water, it seems, is already there when the account of beginnings begins.
What emerges from Rashi’s provocative statement (“The text does not reveal anything regarding the sequential order of creation”) is a sense of the gaps, the unexplained, the need to examine and re-examine the apparently lucid text, with its account of a harmonious, coherent cosmology. There is a tension between the benevolent clarity and power of the narrative and the acknowledgement of mystery that inheres in the very first word and that develops as the implications of the beginning are realised.
Primal disintegrations
For six days, the process of creation continues, seen from the viewpoint of God, who speaks, sees, and names His work in its increasing complexity. Essentially, the original binary reality of “heaven and earth” is split into smaller binary, contrasting units: darkness and light, the lower waters and the upper waters, seas and dry land, sun and moon. The act of havdalah, “separation,” is central. Unlike the other days of creation, which are summed up by reference to their place in sequence — “a second day,” “a third day” — the first day is simply “one day”: “And there was evening and there was morning, one day.” Rashi takes this as a reference to primordial unity. God was alone, yahid ba’olamo. The concept of “firstness” would have no relevance to that day; the main business of that day was the radical transformation of reality from the encompassing oneness of God to the possibility of more-than-one.
Even the angels, in Rashi’s narrative, are not created until the second day. The angels play a complex and often adversarial role in the midrashic versions of the creation narrative; this culminates in Rashi’s classic understanding of God’s decision, “Let us make man” (1:26). “We learn of the humility of God from here. Since Man was to be in the likeness of the angels and they would be jealous of him, He consulted them (nimlakh). …He asked permission of His court.”
The role of the angels is to suggest a “many-ness” of viewpoints, a spectrum of opinions, that God has to convince, placate, ultimately to "receive permission.‘’ And what is God’s main argument in favour of creating humankind, in Rashi’s version? “He said to the angels, ‘You exist in the upper worlds after My likeness. If there is to be no one in the lower worlds after My likeness, then there will be jealousy among the works of the beginning.’” In other words, God desires a proliferation of His image in lower as well as upper worlds, a mitigation of His oneness, even, in a sense, of His greatness. God, as it were, submits (nimlakh is the passive form of the verb “to be king,” “to rule”) His greatness and seeks permission from those smaller than He.
…Despite the unwelcome resonances from the discussions and disputations that accompany creation in pagan mythologies, the Torah uses a plural verb to communicate a moral teaching: “In spite of the license given to heretics by this formulation, the text does not restrain itself from teaching the virtue of humility: the great one should consult with, request permission from the small one. For if the text had said, ‘Let Me make man,’ we should not have learned that He spoke with His angelic court, but merely with Himself.”
The text, then, according to Rashi, risks heretical interpretation, in order to make a point of vital importance for human life. The point has to do with the One, the Great One, who begins on Day One alone in the Upper Worlds and then engages in an activity that apparently compromises His Oneness and His Greatness.
From a midrashic perspective it seems that havdalah — separation, specialization, the formation of difference and opposition — is generally achieved at some sacrifice. When, for instance, the lower waters are separated from the higher waters on the second day of creation, the lower waters are described in midrashic sources3 as weeping: “We want to be in the presence of the King.” The essential act of this second day is this act of division: “He divided His works into different groups and reigned over them.”4 From now on, the notion of the sovereignty of God will depend on the differences and many-ness of His subjects. But the idea of separation and difference has a tragic resonance: gone is the primal unity of “God alone in His world.” New possibilities, new hazards, open up. The primary image of such separation, the division of the waters and their weeping expresses the yearning of the split-off parts of the cosmos for a primordial condition of unitary being.
Our personal relationship with G-d stems from G-d as Source of all things. He has, within Himself, all human characteristics. We encounter and enter into relationship with the human side of G-d - His possible persona - which formed the template of Adam Kadmon, which is a part of Him.
With division begins alienation, conflict, and yet, paradoxically, a new notion of divine sovereignty. In this new perspective, God is recognised as King only by that being who is most radically separated from Him. Man, created on the sixth day, is foreshadowed by the splittings and differentiations of matter that begin on the second day; his freedom to perceive and to act is founded on those primal disintegrations.
Nature comes into being
God’s will to divide the waters is expressed in the fiat of yehi: “God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water… And it was so” (1:6-7). The word of God effectively achieves His will: “Let there be” division, definition. Rashi quotes the Jerusalem Talmud5 on the force of this willing word of God — yehi — “Let there be…”
“Let there be”: Let the separation be strengthened. Even though the heavens had already been created on the first day, they were still liquid. They crystallised on the second day, in response to God’s rebuke: “Let there be a separation.” This is what is written, “The pillars of heaven tremble, are astounded at His rebuke” [Job, 26:11 — my translation]. All that first day, the pillars of heaven [amudei shamayim — lit., “that which the heavens stand on”] were trembling, but on the second day, they were astounded at His rebuke, like a man who is stunned and frozen in place [omed — “stands still”] under the rebuke of one who intimidates him. (Rashi, 1:6)
The Jerusalem Talmud, Rashi’s source, extends the kinetic, tactile basis of the imagery. “Rav said, ‘Let there be a separation’ — let the separation strengthen, let it crystallise, let it freeze, let it consolidate.” “To be” is represented as a sort of jelling process, as the formless liquid primary substance finds its limits in space, solidifies, assuming its proper form. Previously, the waters are described in Rashi’s proof-text from Job as “trembling” (yrofefu). Ibn Ezra traces the root to two sources, one denoting weakness, the other movement. In the primary state of unachieved being, there is a slackness, an uncontrolled motion. (See Ralbag’s comment, too: “They move and they shudder” [Job 26:11]). In midrashic language, the root, rofef, is used to describe the failure of milk to curdle — it quivers;6 the form, rifref, indicates a fluttering, vacillating mode.7 To come into real being is to be strengthened, hardened into specific form: “They stood in dryness and strength — like a man who is astounded and stands [omed] in one place” (Rashi, Job 26:11).
Finding one place to stand: this is Rashi’s definition of being. As we have seen, the midrash insists that this is not achieved without tears. Being is achieved in the cosmos by the power and terror of God’s word; “Let there be. …” A kind of fascination takes hold of the waters: necessity constrains them. They must be.
What I have called the jelling process in the creation of the heavens continues in the rest of Rashi’s account. The waters are “suspended in the air” above the expanse — they “depend on the word of the King” (Rashi,Genesis 1:7). This is the consummation of God’s making (asiyah); Rashi defines asiyah here as tikno al omdo — He fixed, completed it in its position (al omdo — lit., on its stand). This stage of creation is definitively completed only on the third day, with the movement and containment of the lower waters and the exposure of dry land. Only then, Rashi remarks, can God see “goodness”: the unfinished, that which has not achieved full being, cannot be called “good.”
The model of coming-to-be that is suggested by Rashi’s commentary here pictures a primary fluid stage, followed by the transformative thrill of God’s word. There is a firming, a finding of proper place, a new density and rigour. The effect of God’s word is constraint. We are close to the notion of Necessity, as Aristotle understood it. “Cry halt before Necessity” — Ananke stenai. Nature cannot argue with the word of God. “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.”8 Natural phenomena can only freeze into place, assume their necessary posture in space.
The belfry daydream
Kenneth Burke suggests that the six days of creation may be considered as six major classifications of reality.9 The narrative translates these classifications into terms of temporal sequence. Man comes last, not merely in temporal terms: he culminates, he dominates. These are the terms in which he is conceived by God: “Let us make man, in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on the earth” (1:26). God’s first words, when He blesses man, are: “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on the earth” (1:28). Man is to rule, to dominate all categories of created reality, even those that he cannot physically control — that is, creatures of the sea and the air, who do not share his habitat. He is to evolve strategies to overcome physical barriers and make himself master of nature.10
What does share his natural habitat — all animal life on earth — is described as crawling (romesset). This is rather an unexpected use of the term … The related term sheretz is defined by Rashi as “any living being that is not higher than the ground — like flies, ants, beetles, worms, rats, mice and all fish” (1:20). … a few lines later, he adds another factor, to define remess: "insects that are low, crawling on the ground, and look as though they are being dragged, because their movement is not clearly perceived, (1:24). There is a quality of movement that characterises the remess — sheretz, as well as a quality of height — “not higher than the earth.” This is an unwilled, unindividuated movement — these creatures move in crowds, driven by instinct. They wheel and swerve in a way that is perceived by man as irrational. The word remess is strangely used, then, to describe all animal life on earth. It is as though Man is conceived of as towering physically over all animal life.
[!aside|right]
He (the philosopher) might envision the universe in miniature, but the universe will still remain, in reality, far larger than he could ever imagine. It will not change the reality of what the universe actually is, only his experience of it.
This conception, which is inherent in the blessing of domination, is figured by an image of verticality. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher of art, writes of what he calls “belfry daydreams,” in which one watches others “running about … irrationally, like ants … the size of flies.” This is a “dream of high solitude”; the dreamer enjoys “an impression of domination at little cost… From the top of his tower, a philosopher of domination sees the universe in miniature. Everything is small because he is so high. And since he is high, he is great, the height of his station is proof of his own greatness.”11
The insistence of the Creation narrative on man as vertical (high, therefore great) comes always in a context of horizontal spread: “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule” (1:28).12 The blessing of fertility, the instinct of what Elias Canetti calls the “increase pack” (“to be more”), is first given to fish, fowl, and animal life (1:22; 8:17). To proliferate is, in a sense, the sheretz modality, as Ramban following on the Targum, translates the term (1:20).
Here is Canetti’s account of the phenomenology of the increase pack:
Characteristic of the pack is the fact that it cannot grow. It is surrounded by emptiness and there are literally no additional people who could join it. It consists of a group of men in a state of excitement whose fiercest wish is to be more… Density within the pack is always something of an illusion. Men may press closely together and enact a multitude in traditional rhythmic movements, but they are not a multitude; they are a few, and have to make up in intensity what they lack in actual numbers.13
Canetti’s reading of the pack phenomenon is informed by the despair and vulnerability of the few fevered by the desire to be more. When God blesses Adam and Eve, or commands Noah and his few survivors after the Flood, the imperative of density — “to be more” — is poignantly recognszed: “Fill the earth… abound on the earth [lit., swarm] and increase on it” (9:7). Surrounded by emptiness, man seeks the animal faculty of increase. What man is blessed-commanded to do is not simply to propagate; the process is one, in Canetti’s terms, of transformation:
#interesting Early man, roaming about in small bands through large and often empty spaces, was confronted by a preponderance of animals… Many of them existed in enormous numbers. Whether it was herds of buffaloes or springboks, shoals of fish, or swarms of locusts, bees or ants, their numbers rendered those of man insignificant.
For the progeny of man is sparse, coming singly and taking a long time to arrive. The desire to be more, for the number of people to whom one belongs to be larger, must always have been profound and urgent, and must, moreover, have been growing stronger all the time… Man’s weakness lay in the smallness of his numbers. … In the enormously long period of the time during which he lived in small groups, he, as it were, incorporated into himself, by transformations, all the animals he knew. It was through the development of transformation that he really became man; it was his specific gift and pleasure.14
Canetti goes on to discuss the rites of the Australian aborigines, whose ancestors are treated as having a dual nature, both animal and human at once. Man desired the increase of the animals, since they were connected with man: “When they increased, he also increased; the increase of the totem animal was identical with his own.” Plants, as well as animals, even insects, scorpions, lice, flies or mosquitoes can be designated as a totem: “it can only be their immense number which attracts them; in establishing a relationship with them he means to ensure their numbers for himself.”15
Canetti’s model of the increase pack and the process of “transformation” that achieves the desired animal numerousness provides us with a way of reading the connection in the Creation narrative between increase and domination. For man is told in the same breath that he is to proliferate and to rule. His motion is to be swarm-like, horizontal, attached to the earth, and to necessity, blindly following the instinct to be more, to fill the emptiness; and, equally, it is to be Godlike, concentrated, vertical, affirming an all encompassing vision of the world.16
The vertical and the horizontal
[!aside|right]
Domination is about ego and blessings [ברכות]. If everything is vacillating [הוד] between void [אין סוף] and existence, then either we imbue it with ego or bless it and accept is Divine purpose. If imbuing it with ego, it would then become antagonistic too, for there would be a conflict between Divine purpose (service) and ego, one’s individual desires/purpose, which also is responsible for the maintenance of manifest destiny.
Here is an essential paradox of the human, as God conceives, blesses, and commands His culminating creation: he is to live on the horizontal and vertical plane at once. He is to transform himself into a creature preoccupied with swarming, proliferation, incorporating the strength of the animal world. He is at the same time to rule, to conquer. Rashi’s comment here is evocative: the word for “rule,” ve-yirdu, can be read as a play on the alternative meanings of “rule” and “descent.” “If he merits, he will dominate [rodeh] the animal world, if he does not merit, he will become low yarood before them and they will dominate him” (1:26).
[!aside|right]
This has an interesting side-line, in that if he doesn’t rule over his beast, then it will dominate him!
The necessity for a kind of philosophical detachment, the solitude of higher and larger perspectives, creates an implicit tension with the imperative blessing of increase. To spread over the earth, to fill the earth, to know the urgent rhythmic passion of increase is to be invested in the immediate, the experienced, the contingent.
[!aside|right]
However, we have reached the limit of this horizontal expansion, thus the only direction left to expand is vertically.
It is in these terms that we can read God’s final statement of disappointment at the outcome of the human creature:
#interesting When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives among those that pleased them. The Lord said, “My breath shall not abide in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years.” It was then, and later, too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth — when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown. (6:1-4)
Here are the themes of giant size and increase over the face of the earth. But some essential misarticulation affects these two modalities. In the midrashic accounts, the Nephilim are giants who wear the sun around their necks,17 their heads disappear into the heavens, they command the rainfall — and, in accordance with their name, they "fall and bring the world down with them”, (Rashi, 6:4). The monstrous excess of the vertical leads to a shattering destruction.
[!aside|right]
Now this is an unexpected statement. In that the vertical represents both ascendency and descendency. One could easily become enmeshed in the lower, denser forms as in the more enlightened ones.
Many centuries later, as the Israelites roam the wilderness, they send spies to the Holy Land. The spies return with eyewitness reports of giants: “All the people that we saw in it are men of great size; we saw the Nephilim there … and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” (Numbers 13:32-33). There, too, the two modalities are disastrously polarised. The spies are filled with awe before the invulnerable, the vertical; they sense themselves as humiliated at their own grasshopper dimensions, their sheretz reality.18 This splitting-off, the incapacity to bear the tension of their own equivocal existence, leads to a real despair, an acceptance of the lowest human profile — “And so we were in their eyes” (Numbers 13:33). The spies see themselves reflected in the eyes of the fantasy giants: an intimate vision of self is corroborated at every turn.
The catastrophe of the narrative of the spies is conveyed through the imagery of “falling.” They complain of a destiny, in which any claim to vertical stature will be doomed…
The narrative of the spies is one of failure to contain a radical tension. The vertical being is assailed by the vertigo of his dual nature. His origin and ultimate destiny are in the earth, the issues of fertility, increase, and survival dominate his experience. And yet he knows himself invested with a singular Godlike power. From his vantage point, he can see immense perspectives, come to conclusions far beyond the contingencies of the moment; yet he is a participant in the driven, spawning multitudes he can observe so splendidly from his metaphysical solitude.
This is the essential dilemma of man, as God conceives of him, blesses him, and charges him with imperative of his duality. How to deal with the unthinking conformity of the increase pack, the vision of men as “bugs, spawn, as a mob”? These are Emerson’s terms, in “Self-Reliance,” which Stanley Cavell calls a “study of shame”: “How do we, as Emerson puts it, ‘come out’ of that? How do we become self-reliant? The worst thing we could do is rely on ourselves as we stand — this is simply to be slaves of our slavishness: it is what makes us spawn. We must. . . transform our conformity.”19
The problem is implicit in the blessing: we are to spawn, and we are to rise upwards. Hamlet has his tortured view of the dilemma… 20
To breed, to crawl, these are the acts of the sheretz. At one pole of failure, the midrash imagines men as grasshoppers, who compulsively “climb up and fall back down” into their jar, are incapable of learning from experience.21 To be trapped in the reality of “crawling between earth and heaven” is to be doomed to repeat irrational patterns of the pack, the rhythmic movements generated by the blind urge simply “to be more.” And, on the other hand, there is the “terror of standing upright,” which Kafka describes in one of his letters to Felice, responding to a dream of hers…22 There is a violence, even a guilt, inherent in the posture of greatness, of power. Kafka expresses the dream conviction that to lower one’s profile is to preserve innocence and, perhaps, even to see more of the sky.
Greatness and procreativeness
The paradox of the vertical and the horizontal is fleshed out in the midrashic narratives of Creation. Two things are called “great” in the Biblical text: the lights (1:16)23 and the great sea monsters (1:21)… the two concepts clearly cohere. But in both cases, the lights and the sea monsters, the midrash opens up tantalizing perspectives on the problematics of greatness.
Responding to the apparent textual contradiction — both lights are great? Only one is great? — and the defective spelling of me’orot (lights), the midrash deciphers a hidden narrative. 24 The moon knows that inherent in the idea of greatness is singularity. Two cannot be called great, since to be great is by definition to dominate, to loom over, to see a world from a unique perspective. In Rashi’s source, therefore, God tells the moon, “Diminish yourself.”25 Here is a voluntary act of self-diminishing, an acceptance of the small rather than the great role, which is compensated for by the many hosts of stars that will now accompany the moon.
Maharal, in fact, offers an arresting reading of “diminishment”: the moon becomes, not smaller, but a being capable of waning — to the point where the sun remains truly alone — that is, truly great — in the sky.26 The moon yields up her eternal and transcendent being and accepts a role of contingency, mutability, and proliferation. There is a powerful suggestion of a relation between greatness and solitude, on the one hand, and smallness and increase, on the other. The moon experiences both loss and gain.
The sea monsters, too, are great; they, too, are spelled defectively (the plural indication lacks a yod).27 (In the midrashic source, the male Leviathan is castrated to ensure that its destructive powers of procreation — or even of sexual relations — are totally neutralized).28
In this extraordinary midrash, what commands our attention once again is the theme of greatness and solitude. To have a partner, while remaining in the mode of greatness, is an existential impossibility. The world as we know it would cease to exist. Only in the world-to-come, in a different (and presumably richer) version of reality can the righteous flourish on the free play of greatness and procreativeness.
The problem of man
All this is a preamble to the problem of man. Although he is to dominate creation, Man is not called “great,” because he is, from the very outset, to be many.29 Yet there is ambiguity in the account of his origins. He was formed from the clay of dust and water, of earth and heaven, in one whole “image of God”; yet immediately, he is described as a plural being.30 The narrative later describes the removal of one of his ribs to make woman. And the midrash, in Rashi’s version, resolves the question of unity and duality in one striking image: “God created him first with two faces, and separated them” (1:27).
#interesting One of Rashi’s sources narrates a previous stage of the process, which Rashi does not quote: “At first, God intended to create two separate beings, but in the end man was created as one being.”31 God’s first thought represents an ideal reality. …there is an almost immediate return to the original plan: man is split into the two entities of God’s first intention (“male and female He created them”). The splitting-off is prefaced by a thought of God: a soliloquy — perhaps the first “God said” that has no direct effect on reality. God thinks: “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him” (2:18). Rashi comments: “So that people should not say, ‘There are two powers; God is alone in the upper worlds, and has no partner, and this one is in the lower worlds, without a partner.’”
The association of aloneness with power, greatness, is clear here. To have a ben zug, an equivalent Other, with whom one must reckon, who limits the grandeur of one’s solitude, with whom one speaks and struggles and brings offspring into the world — all this is the very definition of the not Godly, the not great. One who has a ben zug is yoked to contingency, lives on the horizontal plane, whose blessing and imperative is increase.
God is without a ben zug; angels are not fertile and do not increase — unlike men, animals, and demons (who share also the facts that they eat, drink, defecate, and die!);32 the Leviathan is deprived, for the duration of present time, of his partner; the Sabbath has no ben zug and complains as the other days of the week pair themselves off — in the end, God matches her, matchless as she is, with Israel; the tribe of Dan is described as a lonely, independent warrior — “as one of the tribes of Israel” (49:16): “like the solitary One of Israel who needs no help in war,” and his emblem is the snake, who goes alone: “All the beasts walk in pairs, while the snake travels alone.”33 “God said to Israel, All that I have created, I created in pairs: heaven and earth, the sun and the moon, Adam and Eve, this world and the next. But My glory is One and unmatched in the world.”34
In view of all this, man’s aloneness is “not good”: it lends itself to a misconception about the nature of man. What he requires is a “fitting helper.” This arresting description (lit., a help against him) draws an equally arresting comment from Ramban: it was important to realise man as two matched creatures, rather than as one androgynous being (even if he were capable of procreation), because “God saw that it was good that his helpmate should stand in front of him [kenegdo, translated here as “fitting,” has confrontational implications], so that he may see her, and separate from her, and unite with her, according to his will” (Ramban, 2:18). For Ramban, man as alone and autonomous is “not good,” because he would live a static, unchanging, and unwilled life. Man needs to live face-to-face with the Other, dancing to the choreography of his own freedom.
The splitting-off of man is, however, achieved not by the pure word of God. … Only after he has named the animals does the text insert into Adam’s consciousness the search for the Other. “And the man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to all the wild beasts; but for Adam no fitting helper was found” (2:20). Who was it who sought and could not find? The midrash fills the gap. Rashi says, “When God brought the animals to Adam, He brought each species in pairs, male and female. Adam said, They all have a ben zug, a partner. Only I have no partner. Immediately, he fell asleep.”
The powerful implication here is that God’s original intention can be consummated only by Adam’s free perception and desire. Only when Adam comes to feel the solitude of the angelic, unitary existence is he split into two separate beings. He must, in a sense, diminish himself, come to know the rightness of a more complex form of unity. That is, God sets aside His original vision, creates man alone and great, complete in himself — a plausible version of the human reality, but one that will be undermined by the restless experience of “he could not find a fitting help” (literal translation of lo matza). “Not to find” is the purpose of man’s lone creation. He knows in his pain and searching both that “For my sake the whole world was created”35 — he dreams of belfries, and of “monuments of unaging intellect” — and that #exc his humanity requires the “sensual music”36 of horizontal relationship, the fusing and parting, the changing reflections of face meeting face.
#exc Man’s greatness, therefore, his creation in the image of God, his dominating the sensual swarming landscape, locks in an inescapable tension with his participation in that world of proliferation and change, of waxing and waning. He is attached to two mutually exclusive ways of being, called in the shorthand of the midrash “the upper worlds” and “the lower worlds.”
In his creation, for the first time, the word vayyitzer is used — “He formed man from the dust of the earth” (2:7). The doubling of yod in vayyitzer suggests the surplus of possible meanings and identifications that man is endowed with. Unlike the cattle,37 which are not accountable for the choices and conflicts inherent in a paradoxical existence — man is formed both of the dust of the whole earth (the four corners of the earth), so that he will be accepted for burial in whatever part of the globe he dies, and of the dust of the sacred center, Jerusalem: “God took his dust from the place of which it is said, ‘You shall make an altar of earth for Me — I wish that he may gain atonement, and that he may be able to stand’” (Rashi, 2:7).
There is a striking pathos in God’s wish for man: “Halevai! — Would that it might be so!” The difficulty of man’s situation is focused here: the material of his body (only at the next stage, God animates him with His spirit-breath) comes both from the four corners of the earth, from all the instincts and processes of the horizontal, from the dust into which he will disappear, and from the place of unity, the sacred spot of original creation, the axis mundi, where this world intersects with the higher worlds. There is an “opposition between space that is sacred — the only real and real-ly existing space — and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it.”38 And man, in the midrashic view, is the meeting point of the two kinds of dust, of the one and the many.
The Talmud puns on the agony of the dilemma: “Woe to me, because of the One who formed me [yotzri]. Woe to me, because of my unruly desires [yitzri]!”39 In the very fibers of his being, he belongs to both dimensions at once.
Kafka expresses a similar torment of irresolubility:
He is a free and secure citizen of the world, for he is fettered to a chain which is long enough to give him the freedom of all earthly space, and only so long that nothing can drag him past the frontiers of the world. But simultaneously he is a free and secure citizen of Heaven as well, for he is also fettered by a similarly designed heavenly chain. So that if he heads, say, for the earth, his heavenly collar throttles him, and if he heads for Heaven, his earthly one does the same. And yet all the possibilities are his, and he feels it; more, he actually refuses to account for the deadlock by an error in the original fettering.40
Man is chained to incompatible universes of being; and yet within his chains he feels unaccountably that all the possibilities are his. There is no error; yet he cannot live comfortably in either heaven or earth, while he is a “free and secure citizen” of both.
The hands of God
The two sources for human dust are given, in Rashi’s version, as alternatives. But, in a source midrash, the two are aligned into one narrative: in the first hour of the sixth day of creation, God gathered dust for man; in the second hour, He moulded him in a pure place, at the very umbilicus of the world, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.41 That is, man has his origins in both kinds of space, in the dust of the Many and the One.
[!info]
dust + water + breath → spirit
Assiyah + Yetzirah + Beriah → Atzilut
But here it is the image of moulding man that is arresting. Man alone in creation is described as formed out of a clammy combination of earth and water. “A flow would well up from the ground and water the whole surface of the earth” (2:6). Rashi comments: “For the purpose of creating man, the depths released a vapour that seeded the clouds and moistened the dust, so that man was created — like this baker, who adds water to his dough and then kneads it! So here, first there was a moistening and then, ‘God formed man.’”
The audacity of the image is reinforced by another comment of Rashi: “‘And God created man in His image’: Everything else was created by an act of speech; only man was created with the hands of God, as it is said, ‘You placed Your hands upon me’” (Psalms 139:5) (1:27).
…What does it mean, to be created by the hands of God, rather than by His word — (“Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water”)? Man comes to be differently, it seems. Even before God breathes the breath of life into him, the circumstances of his physical making are radically different. It is no longer a matter of the water’s swarming spontaneously with new life (1:20), or of the earth’s “bringing forth” animal life (1:24), in response to God’s word,“‘Let it be…’”42 As we noticed before, #excthe creative fiat induces a spasm of realisation of new forms in the rest of nature. There, God’s word is all-powerful: it constrains chaotic possibilities into the desired shape and posture. In such a hegemony of the word, it would be absurd to conceive of rebellion, or even of dialogue: “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.”43
Quite different is the imagery of the potter and his clay (or the baker and his dough). For here, the midrash dares to make a statement about the Frankensteinian nature of all creation. True, the potter has total control of his material. As in the famous image in Jeremiah 18, “if the vessel he was making with clay in the potter’s hands was spoiled, he would make it into another vessel, such as the potter saw fit to make” (18:4). Like God, the potter “sees” and “makes.” But there is another truth in the relationship of potter and clay: “Just like clay in the hands of the potter, so are you in My hands, O House of Israel!”44
Here is surprise, rather than the inevitability of God’s power. In all creative work (the word la’asot, “to make,” is central in this passage), there is play between the artist and his material. The characters of the novel begin to talk back, to declare their own reality and destiny. Thomas Mann intended his Joseph cycle to be a short story: it grew into a long novel that took ten years to complete. Edward Hopper says that for him painting is about a vision, yet when he makes a painting he reluctantly surrenders the vision to what he has made.45 Erich Neumann writes of the “autonomy of the unconscious”: the artist lives within the tension created by his consciousness and the unconscious that “often breaks through with a ‘will of its own,’ which by no means coincides with the will of the artist.”46 This tension in the experience of the creative person is precisely evoked by the passage in Jeremiah, and by the midrashic image of the baker kneading his dough. For God indeed “diminishes” His solitude and His power in order to create man. He responds to man’s autonomous motions, to his “turning back,” with a “change of mind”:
#exc the spirit of re-creation which masters this earthly form loves most the pivoting point where you are no longer yourself.47
Ambiguities of independence
In the Creation narrative, God “changes His mind” about the work of His hands — and destroys the world. Just before the Flood, “the Lord regretted [va-yenahem] that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened” (6:6). The anthropomorphism here is most poignant: but it is an organic outgrowth of the imagery of the artist, who projects but cannot control this one part of his work that is made ba-yadayim — “with His hands {or “by (his) hand(s)”}. Rashi’s comment makes the connection clear. What is the meaning of va-yitatzev (translated here as “He was saddened”)? “He mourned the loss of the work of His hands.” There is a relation of the hands to the work, which is the contrary of everything abstract and detached. It is the relation of loving involvement, the mutual vulnerability to surprise and failure, the power and the risk of making {or doing}.
When Adam sins, God’s response, according to the midrash, is not verbal; rather “He laid His hand upon him and diminished him.”48 God “mourns for the loss of the work of His hands.” Rashi’s translation of va-yitatzev (6:6) is precisely related to the meanings that Rashi attributes to the word etzev (translated here as “sadness”) where it first appears, in God’s response to Eve’s sin: “I will make most severe your pangs in childbearing [itzvonekh]” (3:16). Rashi veers away from this obvious meaning of itzavon (“pain of childbearing”) and quotes the Talmud: “This refers to the pain of bringing up children.”49
One might say that the difficulty in rearing children has to do with the ambiguities of independence. The child must separate from the parent; the parent must allow the child to discover his or her own reality. Where there was one, there must be two. But this separation, though necessary, is a complex and often tormented experience. The relationship between separation and loving attachment has to be negotiated each time afresh. There is no theory that can totally guide the parent or the artist. No belfry can house this kind of experience. In the act of creation, there is perhaps inevitable sadness, as the work works itself loose from the vision.50
The original verb, vayyitzer — “And He formed [man]” (2:7) — expresses this mystery of formation, of transformation. Wherever hands are involved, wherever there are “les traces des mains,” even in the kneading of dough, there is the surprise of becoming: the viscous mixture of flour and water becomes the fragrant loaf of bread, the clay of dust and water becomes man. And it is this mystery, of how man becomes real, that is central to the midrashic vision of the narrative.
Standing upright
At this point, I would like to quote a passage from Nine Talmudic Readings, by Emmanuel Levinas. He describes his approach to those rabbinical sources in which the psychology and intentionality of God are central.
#exc My effort always consists in extricating from this theological language meanings addressing themselves to reason. . . . [This] consists, first of all, in a mistrust of everything in the texts studied that could pass for a piece of information about God’s life, for a theosophy; it consists in being preoccupied, in the face of each of these apparent news items about the beyond, with what this information can mean in and for man’s life.51
If we are to speak of God’s sadness, of His restraint in listening to and observing the freedom of man, of His frustration and sense of mourning, and, above all, if we are to unpack the imagery of God’s hands, making and unmaking, moulding and reducing man, then our effort will be toward an understanding of what this “can mean in and for man’s life.” Man knows himself created and freed from constraint. He feels himself as full of possibilities, and yet mysteriously cross-chained. He has had God’s hands upon him; they created him whole, and he struggles to free himself from their total hold.
Like the child, like the vessel, he must find a space of separateness, in order to be; but to separate from God is to cut the ground of being from under his feet. For however one understands the nature of the sin that turns Adam and Eve out of Eden, its effect is to undermine their standing in the world. The tension between the vertical and the horizontal was once successfully accommodated by Adam and Eve. They could hold their ground in the presence of God. This, essentially, is the meaning of being — kiyyum: to rise up (la-koom), to be tall (koma zekufa) in the presence of God. To be banished from the Garden is to lose a particular standing ground.
[!aside|right]
Perhaps they needed to become a part of this final separation, with which Creation was crowned. It required their banishment from the Garden, expressing the separation of the vertical and horizontal. The zenith of Creation was the formation of a being, made in G-d’s Image (and thus “androgynous”, both male and female, vertical and horizontal) that was split along the same lines that G-d seperated (though the current terminology would be “constrained”) Himself in order to create Creation.
To be banished, as Cain is later much more totally banished, is to have the earth cursed under one’s feet. Cain’s connection with the earth is disrupted.52 Ramban emphasises that restlessness is an inner quality of Cain’s being, an essential character of his “curse”: “His heart will not rest nor be quiet enough to stand in one place.” Cain’s protest focuses on this subjective torment: “Since I am to be a restless wanderer, I can not stand in one place — that is what banishment from the soil means — I have no place of rest. ‘And I must avoid Your presence’ — for I cannot stand before You to pray.” In Ramban’s reading, prayer, or sacrifice, is a profound expression of the existential stance of man-in-the-presence-of-God, able to hold ground and rise vertically, between earth and heaven.
[!aside|left]
Could it not be that once one’s connection to G-d is sundered, so would one’s connection to the earth too? And perhaps it goes in both directions, and when your connection to the earth is sundered, so is your connection to G-d! If you have been b anished from the soil (whether the soil of the earth), you would truly have no place to rest.
“stand in one place” could represent home. He has no home, for his home would be devoid of G-d’s presence - which he must avoid. Also, as with a compass, home repesents the place that you “hold ground”, and can then “rise vertically”, having a fixed “point” to return to.
This is similar to the Shamanic concept of a “safe”, or as I like to call it, “sacred”, space that one always starts from and returns to — a place called, in this world, home. This would also account for the deep longing that runs through our culture for a “home” — Eretz Yisrael.
Except that I think that in the coming cycle, the Holy Land, will consist of a people who have a home in which the Shekhinah can dwell.
In this context, the motif of Adam’s “standing” acquires great resonance in midrashic sources. One of the essential stages of his creation, which is charted over the course of the hours of the sixth day, is when God “stood him on his legs.”53 This is Adam’s first experience, after God has filled him with the breath of life — an experience of “standing on his legs”:
He looked upwards and downwards, and his stature [komato] extended from one end of the world to the other . . . and he saw all God’s creatures. He began to glorify his Creator’s name, saying, “How many are Your works, O God!” He stood on his legs and looked like one made in the image of God. The creatures saw him and were afraid, thinking that he had created them. So they all came to worship him. He said to them: “You have come to worship me. Come, you and I, let us go and put on clothing of majesty and strength and make Him King over us, who created us all.” So then Adam went by himself and was the first to make God King. And all the creatures followed him, while he said, “God reigns: He is clothed in majesty.” (Psalms 93:1)
The imagery in this passage is potent with paradox. Adam stands on his legs; and his stature (komato — as in English, the words “stature” and “stand,” are related) extends from one end of the world to the other. Because of his height, he can see both vertically and horizontally, to the full extent of empirical reality. There is, in fact, an ambiguity about the “end-to-end” image: whether it indicates a horizontal grasp of the world or an earth-heaven range.54 But clearly, Adam is depicted as possessing both powers, and the meaning of his stature is that he can see to the full extent of both planes, the vertical and the horizontal. That is, unlike Kafka’s dreamer, lying on the ground in a refusal of the erect position (the “terror of standing upright”), Adam occupies a vantage point from which he sees not only the stars, but all created beings on earth. He can see downwards as well as upwards, he is rooted in a reality which he can perceive and map.
Nothing is said to indicate that he sees the animals as minuscule, but clearly they see him as awesome in his verticality. They assume, indeed, that he is their creator. That is, man knows himself as conspicuous, self-conscious, not an indigenous part of the world of nature. There is danger and fear in the loneliness of this position, the hazard of hubris. For what the animals perceive is something truly Godlike. In standing, he is the equivalent, in the lower world, of the angels. Sardonically, Canetti writes: “We always overrate the man who stands upright… Because standing is … the antecedent of all motion, a standing man creates an impression of energy which is as yet unused.”55 The reserves of possibility signified by the standing position may be something of an illusion, Canetti suggests. We see Adam’s godlikeness, here, from the viewpoint of the adoring animals.
#exc But the authentic greatness of Adam emerges in his response. He abandons his belfry grandeur and proclaims a common identity with the animals as created beings who owe adoration to an invisible Creator. And he does this in no obsequious humility but in a paradoxical perception that “to stand in the presence of God” is precisely to achieve full “majesty and strength.” In voluntary acknowledgement, firstly of the vast gamut of created life (“How many are Your works, O God!”) and then of the ultimate coherence under God of this “pied beauty,” Adam becomes most Godlike. He makes common cause with the animals (lit., I and you, let us go put on majesty), but he, in fact, goes first and alone.
The paradox consists of Adam’s diminishing himself — surrendering a speciously Godlike role and assuming an authentic one. The paradigm for this is the enigmatic rabbinic statement: “Wherever you find the greatness of God, there you find His humility.”56 Power and humility are both implicit in this vision of Adam standing in the presence of God: “man in his wholeness wholly attending.”
This is a posture that he does not hold for long, however. It is striking that midrashic accounts of the sin that deforms his posture are so often cast in the imagery of the “incapacity to stand.” We have already noticed the wistful tone of God’s wish: Halevai — “Would that he might be created from the place of the altar and have standing.”57 Before the sin, Adam could “hear God speaking and stand on his legs … he could withstand it.”58 After the sin, he hides; the midrash imagines Adam and Eve as shrinking, essentially pretending not to be.59 In another midrash, God says, “Woe Adam! Could you not stand in your commandment for even one hour? Look at your children who can wait three years for the fruit tree to pass its forbidden stage [orlah].”60 This is a strange analogy: the capacity to wait seems to be the issue here, to hold ground, in spite of tensions of various kinds.
Another version of the same image is found in Shemot Rabbah. God reproaches the Israelites after the sin of the Golden Calf: like Adam, the people were destined to live for ever, but “when they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel!,’ death came upon them. God said, ‘You have followed the system of Adam, who did not stand the pressure of his testing for three hours…’ ‘I said, “You are gods…” But you went in the ways of Adam,’ so ‘indeed like Adam you shall die. And like one of the princes you shall fall’ (Psalms 82:6-7) — you have brought yourselves low.”61
#exc The midrash uses the imagery of the Fall, with a perfect consistency. The sin, as such, is not mentioned. Instead, what Adam, and again the Israelites, represents is a kind of spinelessness, a vapidity. A splendid being decomposes before our eyes. The word that is used in Sanhedrin 38b to describe the sin is sarakh which implies exactly this aesthetic offensiveness: it holds nuances of evaporation, loss of substance, and the offensive odour of mortification. “O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven.”62 It signifies a failure to stand in the presence of God, to maintain the posture of eternal life. “You have brought yourselves low”: man, the midrash boldly implies, does not really want full and eternal being. He chooses death, lessened being. What looks like defiance is an abandonment of a difficult posture.
In connection with this notion of flight from the demands of reality, there is an evocative sentence in the Vilna Gaon’s reading of the story of Jonah. The central enigma of that story is the act that initiates the plot: Jonah flees from the presence of God. Much ink has been spilled on the theological absurdity of such a flight. The Gaon says simply: “Everyone flees from the presence of God; no one wants to stand in His presence.”63 In this allegorical reading, Jonah is Everyman, protesting at the paradoxical demands of his condition. “To stand in the presence of God” is to resist the temptations of flight, to bear the tensions of freedom and obedience, of a position where vertical and horizontal axes meet. #exc No one, says the Gaon, chooses to be; it is normal to decompose, to evade the demands of a whole consciousness. Unlike the phenomena of nature, man cannot be shocked into being, by fear, by Necessity, by the fiat of God. His is a more complicated story. It is the story of the quest for amidah, for a solid reality on which to base his life. Adam could not hold his position long: “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”64 And in his failure to be, the whole world loses solid specification.
The suspension of being
Here we approach the heart of the matter, an important, much-quoted midrash in which the narrative of Creation is undone, as it were, by the failure of Adam to stand. At the very end of the saga of Creation, just before the Sabbath (and therefore after Adam has begun to “evaporate”), the Torah says, “And God saw all that He had made and found it very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day” (1:31). God reviews a work of art that now includes failure and death, and calls it— as never before — very good.65 But the midrash that Rashi quotes, in his commentary on the verse, gives us a sense of a world not really created at all:
“The sixth day”: the definite article [heh] is added here [compare the conclusion of each of the previous days of creation—a second day, a third day] to teach that God had made a condition with all the works of the beginning, depending on Israel’s acceptance of the Five [the numerical value of heh] Books of the Torah. Another reading: All the works of the beginning are suspended [lit., hanging and standing] until the sixth day of Sivan, which is destined for the Giving of the Torah.
Before we confront this midrash, however, the Torah text itself should provoke us to uneasiness.Why is the totality of things very good, since it now implicitly includes exile and shame, the flattening and dulling of the human body and face. " ‘And God banished him from the Garden of Eden’: his stature was diminished, his light was dimmed, his food changed, he became a restless wanderer on the earth, and death was inflicted on him and on all generations to the end of time."66 Some essential light has faded from man’s face; his range of vision is stunted. Job cries to God about the hopelessness of man’s fate: “You overpower him for ever and he perishes; You alter his visage and dispatch him” (Job 14:20). “You dispatch him” — va-tishalhehu—the same word used for Adam’s banishment from Eden—holds a terror of summary execution. The banishment of man is interwoven with his mortality; it is to be read in his face, in his body. He knows himself unable to stand where he stood before. Is this change irreversible, as Job asserts? And in what sense is this “very good”?
One suggestion is that banishment is a merciful alternative to the finality of immediate death, which was, indeed, the apparent punishment that God had decreed originally: “on the day that you eat of it, you shall die” (2:17). Instead of dying on the very day of his fall, he is punished with exile; he lives on for nine hundred and thirty years. “If it were not for Your mercy, Adam would have had no standing (amidah).”67 The simplest reading of “standing” would be “survival.” But, implicitly, both Adam and the world are in need of some Archimedean point of stability, in a situation in which disintegration threatens. Here, the Archimedean point is defined as the “mercy of exile”; in another midrashic text, it is called the “strength of the Sabbath, without which the world could not have stood.”68 The main question facing man from now on will be precisely this quest for a foundation of being, for “one thing only which is certain and indubitable.”69
Man sets off on a journey in which no form of solid assurance of reality and sanity accompanies him. In Descartes’s vision of this radical anxiety, the ultimate dread is of madness, the fear of waking from a self-deceptive dream world, of having “all of a sudden fallen into very deep waters,” where “I can neither make certain of setting my feet on the bottom, nor can I swim and so support myself on the surface.”
The instability, the tendency of the world to change, to wear out, to fall apart, will lead the descendants of Adam to beliefs and rituals whose common aim is to make the world strong and solid again. Mircea Eliade narrates many such rituals of renewal, which reenact the creation, the original encounter of God and the world, and thus “repair” or “fix” the world:
In Kimberley, the rock paintings, which are believed to have been painted by the Ancestors, are repainted in order to reactivate their creative force, as it was first manifested in mythical times, that is, at the beginning of the World… Among some Yurok tribes the strengthening of the World is accomplished by ritually rebuilding the steam cabin. . . . [The priest] climbs a mountain. There he finds a branch, which he makes into a walking stick, saying: “This world is cracked, but when I pick up and drag the stick, all the cracks will fill up and the earth will become solid again.” Going down to the river, he finds a stone, which he sets solidly in place, saying: “The earth, which has been tipped, will be straight again. People will live to be stronger.” He sits down on the stone. “When I sit on the stone… the earth will never get up and tip again.” The stone has been there since the time of the Immortals, that is since the beginning of the World.[^1.63]
[!aside|right]
In Songlines, it speaks of the Aborigine belief that we sing the world into existence.
Eliade’s notion of the continual or recurrent need to participate in the original “right” creation of the world is one response to a common existential anguish. The response described in classic talmudic literature is radically different. For the beginnings, the sources of man’s being are clear and solid (the heavens become strong, congealed, come to be) only until the point where he begins to be conscious, to name the world, himself and God.70 From this point, it is a matter of hours till he has named his reality71 in such a way that what remains is a world that is not really there, in which the whole creation story is subtly undermined.72
[!aside|right]
Children are the mortal act of creation.
The world decomposed and recomposed
In such a situation, no return to the firm splendours of origins is possible. Another, more difficult act of regeneration is required. Here, again, is Rashi’s comment on God’s final assessment of the already disintegrated world:
“The sixth day”: the definite article [heh] is added here to teach that God had made a condition with all the works of the beginning,
depending on Israel’s acceptance of the Five [the numerical value of heh] Books of the Torah. Another reading: All the works of the beginning are suspended (lit., hanging and standing) until the sixth day of Sivan, which is destined for the Giving of the Torah.(1:31)73
Rashi’s source74 reads like this: “The definite article is not necessary. Resh Lakish taught: God made a condition with the works of the Beginning—If Israel accepts the Torah, you will continue to exist; if not, I will bring you back to chaos.”
The radical effect of this talmudic passage is to undermine all the clarities, the achieved articulations, the crystalline firmness of Creation. For the question of meaning remains unresolved: “to be or not to be” is a question that is “suspended and standing” till Mount Sinai, There is a provisional quality to the reality of the world, a rofef ambivalence about meaning, which no fearful utterance of God can shock man into crystallising. The world, till Sinai, awaits its true creation; man feels the question hanging over him, nothing is solid in his consciousness until some essential point of equilibrium is discovered.
This is not simply a matter of a shotgun commitment being demanded of the people at Mount Sinai. Their standing at the mountain is an experience in extremis of the instability, the terror, and madness of the world. Here is the version of the narrative found in Pesikta Rabbati:
#exc “Earth and all its inhabitants dissolve: it is I who keeps its pillars [amudeha, standing supports] firm” (Psalms 75:4). The world was in the process of dissolving. Had Israel not stood before Mount Sinai and said, "All that God has spoken, we will faithfully do [lit., we will do and we will listen (Exodus 20:7)] the world would already have returned to chaos. And who made a foundation for the world? “It is I—anokhi— who keeps its pillars firm” —in the merit of “I—anokhi— am the Lord your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt.”75
On a first reading, it seems that what saves the world from decomposing is God and His Law, which the people obediently accept. (“It is I who gives solidity to the world, through My commandments, encoded in the opening word of the Ten Commandments, anokhi—I. . .”) But there is another possible —and compelling—reading. Here, the anokhi, which gives substance and coherence to reality, is the “I” of human beings. Rashi reads the proof text, the verse from Psalms (75:4), in just this unexpected way: #exc/judaica“‘It is I who keeps its pillars firm’—when I said, ‘We shall do and we shall listen.’” The people are responsible for the “I” that “fixes,” that congeals a dissolving reality. The world is saved by a human affirmation, a human “standing at Sinai,” which halts the process of disintegration.
[!aside|right]
And this is the greater anokhi, ‘I’, not the small ‘i’, that creates the world. It is the (Divinely implanted) desire for existence, to fill the void, the emptiness from which you emerged.
In terms of her verticality, there is the terror of returning to the void on one hand, and being extinguished - dead - battling with the constant desire for union with your very own existence.
In an even more paradoxical version of this idea, the midrash quotes provocatively: “‘But now thus said the Lord—Who created you, O Jacob, Who formed you, O Israel’: (Isaiah 43:1) God said to His world, ‘My world, My world, I shall tell you who created you, who formed you. Jacob created you, Jacob formed you —as it is said, “Who created you: Jacob. Who formed you: Israel.”’”76
[!aside|right]
This is נצח - Netzach, continually bringing it back into reality. The cycle of life.
God speaks lovingly to His world — and assigns it another creator. It is apparently human consciousness, in all its contingency, that “creates the world.” In this sense, God “becomes” the Creator of the world, only when the question of meaning has been decided by man.
The notion of “world making,” which, according to Rashi, is the chief enticement of the serpent in the Garden (‘"You shall be like God’ — Creators of worlds" [3:5]) is one that has become very familiar since the advent of cognitive psychology. Nelson Goodman’s central thesis, for example, is that “what we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world.”77
Jerome Bruner offers a succinct account of Goodman’s notion of the creation of realities, and the complex—and changing—symbol systems that allow for constant “transformation of worlds”:
These constructions have in common that they take certain premises for granted, as stipulations. What is “given” or assumed at the outset of our construction is neither bedrock reality out there, nor an a priori: it is always another constructed version of a world that we have taken as given for certain purposes… So, in effect, world making involves the transformation of worlds and world versions already made.78
This transformation is achieved when we
compose and decompose worlds, impelled by different aims in doing so… We weigh and emphasise features of previous worlds in creating new ones… We impose order, and since all is in motion, the order or reordering we impose is a way too of imposing alternate stabilities… We deform the given that we took and create caricature, the caricature itself being principled rather than entirely fanciful…79
Transformation as distortion of the given, as principled caricature: this is the core of Goodman’s concept of world making. We recall the famous midrash that describes God Himself as “creating worlds and destroying them, before He achieved an opus that gave Him satisfaction.80 The model for creativity sketched here is not remote from Goodman’s model; constructions follow each other, each a “world,” with its own givens, its stipulations,” decomposing world versions already made.
If we try to make use of this model, we can ask: what, in all seriousness, is the transformative moment of Sinai? In what sense is it true to say that Jacob creates the world, as he stands before the mountain, as he says, “We shall do and we shall listen”? Clearly, in making this resonant declaration (which is rather tidied away in the JPS translation: “We will faithfully do”), they are distorting the normal processes of cognition and action. It is common sense that first one hears, understands, and then one acts.
The Talmud, continuing from the passage we read previously about the conditional nature of God’s creation, has a heavenly voice cry out, “Who has revealed to My children this secret the angels make use of, for it is written (Psalms 103:20): ‘Bless the Lord, O His angels, mighty creatures who do His bidding, hearkening to the sound of His word’ — They do before hearing.”81
[!aside|right]
This declaration is not as an act of faith, but it is necessary to first do and then you will understand.
To distort the order of doing and hearing is a secret of the angels. As Emmanuel Levinas points out, we are not dealing with “the consciousness of children,” with an infantile concept of blind faith.82 A rational world is decomposed here; what is composed, set in its place, is a possible world that only angels (who “stand upright”) have represented until now. Levinas calls this the world of “any inspired act, even artistic, for the act only brings out the form in which it only now recognises its model, never glimpsed before. … [It indicates] a going beyond knowledge … [that] could not be the deed of an underdeveloped human nature. It is a perfectly adult effort.”83
#exc We might, in fact, call the mode of action before knowledge a kind of spiritual virtuosity. Angels do what is complex and difficult with organic ease. In order to achieve the same effect of simultaneity, in which commands are transmitted from the brain to the nervous system to the muscles so fluidly that performance seems to precede input, human beings normally have to work very hard. But there is a triumphant moment when the normal laborious procedures of will and execution are short-circuited. In that virtuoso moment, a new world is created.
This is the experience of Jacob-Israel, as he discovers in himself the anokhi, the “I” of the world maker. He meets the anokhi of the World Maker and responds with the spontaneous energy of the unitary self. In that moment, a new map of reality is drawn—strange, imposing new stabilities. The “deep structure of subjectivity,” as Levinas calls it, is acknowledged by human beings, when they encounter that same subjectivity expressed by God.
#exc It is the anokhi, the “I,” that creates a foundation for the world. In the original Creation, there is no anokhi: there is Necessity, there is the fiat that freezes the world into its forms. When God says anokhi at Sinai, however, something very different happens; a process that had begun in the enigmatic “very good,” of failure, exile, and death, reaches its culmination.
This culmination is described in Shemot Rabbah, 29:9:
#exc When God gave the Torah, no bird sang, no fowl flew, no ox bellowed, the Ophanim spread no wings, the Seraphim did not declare, “Holy, Holy, Holy…” The sea did not rage, people did not speak, but the world was in utter silence. And there came forth the Voice, “I am the Lord your God…” It is written, “The Lord spoke these words—these and no more —to your whole congregation with a mighty voice…” What is the meaning of “these and no more”? When one calls out to one’s friend, one’s voice echoes; but the Voice that came out of the mouth of God had no echo. And if this surprises you, think of Elijah, who came to Mount Carmel, gathered all the priests of Baal, and told them, “Shout louder! After all, he is a god!” [1 Kings 18:27]. What did God do? He silenced the whole world, muted upper and lower worlds, till the world was again unformed and void, as though there were no created being in the world, as it is said, “There was no sound, and none who responded or listened” [18:26]. For if anyone had spoken, they would have said, “Baal answered us.” How much greater was the silence of the world when God spoke at Sinai! Only so could God’s creatures know that there is nothing aside from Him. And then He said, “anokhi— I am the Lord your God,”
[!aside|right]
In the silence, the Voice of G-d would have been heard from one end of the earth to the other.
The extraordinary claim of this midrash is that the Torah is given when the process of decreation, the decomposition of the world, has reached its completion. In the silence of a time before Creation, before individuation and separation, none of the “stipulations,” the found constructions of previous worlds exists. The question of meaning erodes all the facades of reality.
Mircea Eliade writes of an “archaic ontology,” a “belief in an absolute reality opposed to the profane world of 'unrealities; in the last analysis, the latter does not constitute a ‘world’ properly speaking; it is the ‘unreal’ par excellence, the uncreated, the nonexistent: the void.”84 In “primitive societies,” there is a profound sense that “everything that lacks an exemplary model is ‘meaningless,’ i.e., it lacks reality… [Man] sees himself as real, i.e., as ‘truly himself,’ only, and precisely, insofar as he ceases to be so.”85
In the last analysis, [the world] does not constitute a ‘world’: the midrash, too, is concerned with “the last analysis”; but it offers a different response to the despair of a world returned to ultimate unreality. The question inherent in Creation emerges with full force. This is the question that the angels are recorded as asking in so many midrashic narratives: “Why? … Why create man? And with him, for him, the whole complex environment that is the universe?” What the Israelites experience at Sinai is the devastation, the return to “unreality,” of the world. Out of this emerges, not the primal Yehi, the first fiat, “Let there be,” but instead, this time, simply the voice of God saying, “Anokhi—I am.”
The terror of such an experience is palpable. “It has been clearly demonstrated to you that the Lord alone is God; there is none beside Him” (Deuteronomy 4:35). Rashi’s comment emphasizes the visual-mystical experience of de-realization: “When God gave the Torah, he
opened the seven firmaments, upper and lower worlds were torn apart, and they saw that He is alone; that is why it says, ‘[lit.] you were shown’” In other words, what the people overwhelmingly see is that there is nothing, nothing to stand on. “If you do not accept the Torah, I shall return the world to chaos and emptiness.”
What saves the world, indeed what in a real sense creates the world, is the capacity of the people to encounter the terror of the anokhi. “It is anokhi, it is I who keeps the pillars—amudeha [lit., standing supports] — firm” (Psalms 75:4). What is the infrastructure that gives substance to reality? One perspective emphasises the anokhi of God —the transcendent and only reality. But another—audacious and difficult—emphasizes the anokhi of human beings. It is man’s ability to meet the voice of God out of the void, and to respond with his own anokhi: “We will do, we will make the world.”
In this perspective, Israel creates the world, simply by finding a place to stand at Sinai. The giving of the Torah is, of course, idiomatically and commonly referred to as ma’amad har sinai—the standing at Sinai. #exc/judaica To be able to stand “face to face” (Deuteronomy 5:4) with the God who alone exists and whose anokhi emerges from a vast silence is to take that immensity of the anokhi immediately within oneself. Analogously, perhaps, with the effect of great poetry, “an intimate call of immensity may be heard, even more than the echo of the outside world.”86
To “make” the world is the charge that God left man with at the end of the original creation process, when “God ceased from all the work of Creation that He had done.” La’asot, translated here as “that He had done,” is actually the infinitive form, “to do”; the world is created open-ended, open to the doing, the making of man. And the word that recurs in God’s reproaches to Eve and the Serpent is precisely this verb, la’asot: “What is this you have done?.. Because you have done this…” (3:13, 14). What a disappointing act this is! Immediately, the possibility of standing in the world is reduced.87
…
The Talmud makes an extraordinary observation about the paradoxes of “standing”: “No man stands on [i.e., can rightly under-stand] the words of Torah, unless he has stumbled over them.”88 To discover firm standing ground, it is necessary to explore, to stumble, even to fall, certainly to survive the chaotic vibrations of a world that refuses to be. The gelid certainties of the fully created world are immediately undermined; only because of death and failure is man impelled to create the world anew. “Tremble in His presence, all the earth! The world stands firm; it cannot be shaken” (1 Chronicles 16:30). One might read this by tuning the strings of paradox tighter: “Tremble in His presence—so that the world may stand firm and not collapse.” For how can one stand at all, if one does not know the tremor?89
The experiment in form
To stand in the presence of God is not, then, to be static: it is a kind of dance, invisible to the naked eye. Neither rigidity nor chaos is God’s desire of man. What He desires is the human response of transformation.
Erich Neumann writes: #exc “For Satan as antithesis to the primordial living world of transformation is rigidity… but at the same time he appears as its opposite, as chaos… The smooth, undifferentiated fixity of the one is inseparable from the molluscous, undifferentiated chaos of the other… In the creative sphere, they give rise to a third term, which embraces and transcends them both, and this is form… [that] is menaced from both sides, by sclerosis [over order] and by chaotic disintegration.”90
When the first experiment in human form seems to have failed, and God contemplates the “loss of the work of His hands,” He mourns as a human artist or father would mourn. “And His heart was saddened” (Genesis 6:6). Rashi here quotes a provocative midrash, which purports to deal with the theological absurdity of the anthropomorphism:
…
[A certain] sceptic asks about God’s “disappointment,” in view of the doctrine of God’s omniscience. He uses the idiomatic expression for “foreknowledge”: “Does God see the nolad, that which is already, barely born?” Within the frame of God overseeing the vistas of space and time—a transcendent God, who, in His “high solitude,” knows what must be, as though it already were—within the frame of Necessity, what room is there for tears or for laughter, for hope or disappointment?91
“Yes, of course,” answers R. Yehoshua: that is an obvious frame within which to view God. But the question R. Yehoshua asks, instead of answering explicitly, has to do with human experience, with the irrational freedom to rejoice, to mourn, not as one at the top of a belfry, not metaphysically, or theoretically. Theoria, in Greek, suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a great distance, and favours the idea of a vertical view downward. It rises above “the plurality of appearances in the hope that, seen from the heights, an unexpected unity will become evident— a unity which is a sign that something real has been glimpsed.”92 In place of the nolad metaphor, the foreknowledge of a necessary future, that is not yet, but that can be seen from the top of the belfry as “already born,” there is the contingency of the live child, who will die.93 It is this frame, of contingency and passion, that God chooses to inhabit. Just as a human father does, God assumes the risks of the live process of creation.
However, the analogy with human fatherhood breaks down on one essential point. Unlike the father, God did not have to create the problematic, volatile being who will sadden Him. It is not by free choice that the father brings his son into the world. Why does God, in His freedom and power, choose to create this admittedly doomed creature?
…
Here, Rashi answers the question implicit in the father-son analogy. The question, again, is “Why? . . . Why create man at all, why create a problem?” He was not prevented by His foreknowledge from engaging in the whole frustrating project—“because of the righteous”—bishvil ha-tzaddikim. The price to be paid for a tzaddik — a righteous man—is creation. The hazards and contingencies of the creative act are the loam out of which true form emerges. There is no way of achieving true form without opening possibilities of all manner of travesties. For to create is precisely not entirely to control. “If I create man,” says God, in Rashi’s second source midrash,94 “wicked people will emerge from him. But if I don’t create him, how will righteous people ‘stand up’ from him?”
To consummate creation with a free-standing tzaddik—that always was the point of the enterprise. We return here to the beginning, to that so-clear and structured and “real” description of unities breaking down into smaller and increasingly specific parts. …as the Sages said, ‘God created the world for the sake of the Torah, which is called “reshit—the beginning of His way” (Proverbs 8:22) and for the sake of the righteous, who are called “reshit—the beginning of His produce”’" (Jeremiah 2:3).
On no account, Rashi declares, can the opening verse be a description of the origins of the universe.
The text does not intend to teach the order of creation… And if you say that this verse teaches that heaven and earth were created first… be ashamed of yourself! [lit., be surprised at yourself]. For the waters were already in existence, as it is written, “And the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.” Since there has not yet been any reference to the creation of the waters, they must already have been in existence before the earth and heaven were created. Clearly, then, the text does not propose to give a chronological account of creation.
Significantly, Rashi opens his great commentary on the Torah with a response to the mystery of the words. He does offer a peshat reading—a straightforward contextual reading95 —but only in second place. He draws his primary energy from the enigmatic midrashic decoding of the mystery. Bereshit, “In the beginning,” describes not the clarities of origin and cause, but the potentialities of purpose. “For the sake of the righteous” means that all is open. There is no foundation; the beginning of a pathway glimmers. (Bishvil— “for the sake of” —but lit., on the path towards). In the future, at some time, in some place, a human being may create the world. God now authors the work that will go in search of authors. What is given at the beginning challenges man to the self-transformations that will allow him, in spite of everything, to stand in the presence of God.
Will transformation. Oh be inspired for the flame
in which a Thing disappears and bursts into something else;
the spirit of re-creation which masters this earthly form
loves most the pivoting point where you are no longer
yourself.
…
He who pours himself out like a stream is acknowledged at last by Knowledge;
and she leads him enchanted through the harmonious country
that finishes often with starting, and with ending begins.96
Footnotes
Footnotes
Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem (Simon and Schuster: 1968), 75. ↩︎
Michael Fishbane, Text and Texture (Schocken: 1979), 8. ↩︎
Bereshit Rabbah 5:3. Other sources are quoted in the commentary of
Rabbenu Bahya on Leviticus 2:13. R. Hutner bases a discussion of the
problematics of human free choice on this midrash (Paḥad Yitzḥak, Rosh Hashanah 13:1). ↩︎Rosh Hashanah 31a: “The Psalm assigned to the second day of the
week is Psalm 48, beginning, 'The Lord is great and much acclaimed/
because on the second day He divided up His works and reigned over them.” ↩︎J. Berakhot 1:5. ↩︎
E.g., Va-yikra Rabbah 14:9. ↩︎
E.g., Bereshit Rabbah 20:17: “The woman in childbirth vacillates about the costs of her sexual role; she therefore is obligated to bring a ‘fluttering’ sacrifice [birds]”! ↩︎
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1015a, 32. ↩︎
Kenneth Burke, “The First Three Chapters of Genesis: Principles of Governance Stated Narratively”, in Genesis: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House: 1986), 17.10. See Ramban and Radak on 1:28. ↩︎
See Ramban and Radak on 1:28. ↩︎
#book Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press: 1969), 173. ↩︎
See 9:1-2, 6-7: “God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, ‘Be fertile and increase, and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky — everything with which the earth is astir [tirmoss] — and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand… Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; For in His image, did God make man. Be fertile, then, and increase; abound [shirtzu] on the earth and increase on it.’” The Rabbis (see Rashi, 9:6) define this as both a blessing and a commandment — the imperative of “apres le deluge.” Even the word sheretz, with its specifically reptilian quality, is now incorporated into the imperative of human fertility. But here, too, the proliferation motif is set beside the motif of man’s godlikeness. ↩︎
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (Penguin: 1973), 109. ↩︎
Ibid, 126. ↩︎
Ibid, 128-29. ↩︎
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 173. ↩︎
Bereshit Rabbah, 26:16; B. Sotah 34b. ↩︎
Ibn Ezra explains the name Nephilim as a reference to the dejection (the “fallen heart”) experienced by those who are dumbfounded at their stature. ↩︎
Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (University of Chicago Press: 1990), 47. ↩︎
“Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me… What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, IH, i, 121-29. ↩︎
Tanḥuma, Noah, 18. ↩︎
“Had you not been lying on the ground among the animals, you would have been unable to see the sky and the stars and wouldn’t have been set free. Perhaps you wouldn’t have survived the terror of standing upright. I feel much the same; it is a mutual dream you have dreamed for us both.” Quoted in Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial (Penguin: 1982), 68. ↩︎
“God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night, and the stars” [1:16]. ↩︎
. “They were created equal, but the moon was diminished, because she complained, ‘It is impossible for two kings to wear one crown’” (Rashi, 1:16). ↩︎
B. Hulin 60a. ↩︎
GurArye, 1:16. ↩︎
This is Rashi’s version of the midrashic tradition: “This is the Leviathan and its mate. God created them male and female, and killed the female and salted it away for the righteous in the world to come. For if they had been fertile and increased, the world could not have survived in their presence” (1:21). ↩︎
B. Baba Batra 74b. See also Gur Arye on 1:21. ↩︎
“Be fertile and increase . . .” [1:28]. ↩︎
“And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (1:27). See, too, 5:1-2. ↩︎
B. Ketubot 8a. See also B. Berakhot 61a and B. Eruvin 18b. ↩︎
B. Ḥagiga 16a. ↩︎
Bereshit Rabbah, 99:12. ↩︎
Devarim Rabbah 2:22. ↩︎
B. Sanhedrin 37a. ↩︎
W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium.” ↩︎
which “do not stand to be judged” (Rashi, 2:7). ↩︎
#book Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trusk (Harvest: 1959), 20. ↩︎
B. Berakhot 61a. ↩︎
Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (Schocken: 1975), 31. ↩︎
Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, chap. 11. ↩︎
See Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, 11, note 38. (Radal). ↩︎
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1015a, 32. ↩︎
“Then the word of the Lord came to me: O House of Israel, can I not deal with you like this potter?“ says the Lord. “Just like clay in the hands of the potter, so are you in My hands, O House of Israel! At one moment I may decree that a nation or a kingdom shall be uprooted and pulled down and destroyed; but if that nation against which I made the decree turns back from its wickedness, I change My mind [venihamti] concerning the punishment I planned to bring on it. At another moment I may decree that a nation or a kingdom shall be built and planted; but if it does what is displeasing to Me and does not obey Me, then I change My mind [venihamti] concerning the good I planned to bestow upon it. (Jeremiah 18:5-10) ↩︎
New Yorker, 17 December 1990, 48. ↩︎
Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious (Princeton University Press: 1973), 193. ↩︎
#poem Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Touchstone: 1986), 95. ↩︎
B. Sanhedrin 38b. ↩︎
B. Eruvin 100b. ↩︎
The word etzev occurs again in this early part of the biblical narrative, when Adam is punished: “Cursed be the ground because of you; by toil [beitzavon] shall you eat of it” (3:17). Rashi’s comment stresses the unpredictable, wilful nature of the earth’s response to man’s curse. Man will be compelled by necessity to accept the “thorns and thistles” that the earth will offer him after he has invested his best resources in it. This doom is reflected again later, when Noah is born and there is new hope for “relief from our work and for the toil [itz’von] of our hands, out of the very soil which the Lord placed under a curse” (5:29). There, again, Rashi reiterates his theme of itzavon as the frustration of the worker who sows wheat and reaps thorns and thistles. There, itzavon is clearly associated with the “hands-on” involvement and risks that are confronted by creativity. ↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Indiana University Press: 1990), 14. ↩︎
“You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth” (4:14). ↩︎
Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, 11. There is a number of different versions of the timetable of the sixth day — see, for instance, B. Sanhedrin 38b. ↩︎
B. Sanhedrin 38b. ↩︎
Canetti, Crowds and Power, 451. ↩︎
B. Megilla 31a. ↩︎
J. Nazir 7:2. ↩︎
Ba-midbar Rabbah 11. ↩︎
Bereshit Rabbah 19:16. ↩︎
Ibid., 21:9. ↩︎
Shemot Rabbah 32:1. ↩︎
Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, iii, 36. ↩︎
Perush HaGra, Jonah, 1:3. ↩︎
#poem Yeats, “The Second Coming.” ↩︎
See Bereshit Rabbah 9:5: “In R. Meir’s text of the Torah, they found it written: ‘Behold it was very good’ —behold, death was good.” ↩︎
Midrash Ha-Gadol, 3:23. ↩︎
Tanhuma, Massei, 11. ↩︎
Midrash Ha-Gadol, 3:24. ↩︎
Rene Descartes, Second Meditation. ↩︎
See Bereshit Rabbah 17:5 for an account of man’s “wisdom” in naming not only the animals but himself and God too. ↩︎
The pivotal role of language is stressed by Rashi. God asks, redundantly, “Where are you?” only in order that Adam’s version of his experience should not be inhibited by fear. God’s desire is to “enter into words with him.” Adam’s response is inadequate to the occasion. ↩︎
See the complex image of the cradle, in which man sleeps before Creation (Bereshit Rabhah 2:3). The earth-nurse watches the cradle with apprehension (toha u-boha) the sleeping infant is contained, at peace, in this primary reality. But a secondary reality is already implicit: the sleeping child will awake to his full powers and destroy both himself and the world. ↩︎
Another version of Rashi: On the sixth of Sivan, when Israel received the Torah, all the works of beginning were strengthened, and it was as if the world was created then. ↩︎
B. Shabbat 88a. ↩︎
Pesikta Rabbati, 21 (100a). ↩︎
Va-yikra Rabbah 36:4. I have slightly changed the play on words here, to make it accessible in English. ↩︎
#book Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Harvard University Press: 1986), 95. ↩︎
Ibid., 97. ↩︎
Ibid., 102-3. Bruner here cites the famous “map,” popularized by the physiologist Lord Adrian in his The Basis of Sensation, “depicting the monkey with each part of the body enlarged to correspond to its density of sensory innervation—its lips and tongue in this caricature grossly larger than its trunk and torso.” ↩︎
Bereshit Rabbah 3:9. ↩︎
B. Shabbat 88a. ↩︎
#book Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 45. ↩︎
Ibid., 42. ↩︎
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Harper and Row: 1969), 92. ↩︎
Ibid., 34. ↩︎
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 198. ↩︎
The angels are of course the paradigms of “standing” beings. Their substantiality is not physical, but rather a matter of specific, unambiguous identity and role. ↩︎
B. Gittin 43a. ↩︎
See PaḤad Yitzhak, Rosh Hashanah, 7:10. ↩︎
Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious, 162-63, 196. ↩︎
Shestov quotes Spinoza as representative of the “Athenian” conception of a reality entirely constrained by Necessity: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intellegere—“not to laugh, not lament, not to curse, but to understand” (Athens and Jerusalem, 195). ↩︎
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press: 1989), 96. ↩︎
The skeptic asks: “Does God see the nolad— that which is born…?” R. Yehoshua answers: “Nolad? Was there born to you a son?” His retort brings the “philosopher” down to earth, to the existential knowledge of fathers of mortal children. It is here, and not in the sublime certainties of metaphysical knowledge, that human understanding of God begins. ↩︎
The source for the ending is Bereshit Rabbah 8:9. ↩︎
Bereshit is the construct form of the noun. So, “In the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth. . . .” Note: Or, “in the state of beginning, the creation of heaven and earth took place.” ↩︎
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, second part, 12. ↩︎