The Beginning of Why: Genesis

The Beginning of Why

D’var Torah for Parashat B’reisheet

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Recently I read an article that said that the real Mt. Sinai has been discovered.  Some pretty famous names are attached to this story, so it must be true.  And yet, to me it’s almost as absurd as the repeated attempts to discover remains of Noah’s Ark.  Anyone engaged in this kind of prowling for the truth of the Torah is, in my opinion, naïve at best. 

The Torah is no more meant to be read as a history of the origin of the cosmos and humanity than War And Peace is as a history of the Napoleonic Wars. 

Both works attempt to explain something almost incomprehensible, to theorize about forces much larger than any individual or collective stories can possibly encompass.  Yet neither can do more than to provide a theoretic framework, a reweaving of events in such a way that the inexplicable can be understood, limited to the narrow scope of the human mind.

To begin with, no scientific explanation of the universe could have existed before the invention of the telescope, and in the 500 or so years since then, we’ve still only covered a scant part of the ways and whys of this world—let alone the rest of the universe.

So how, then, are we to understand the Torah?  What are we to do with the words, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,” with which Genesis famously begins?  Are they nothing more than fiction, output of feverish, overwrought brains trying to encapsulate infinity? 

The truth is, the words with which B’reisheet (“In the beginning,” Genesis 1:1-6:8, this week’s Torah portion) opens, leave more questions open than it even begins to answer.  What happened before the beginning?  What was there?  How did God “get to be God” to begin with?  Did someone give God birth, gave God His own beginning?  And if so, how far back does that go?  Do the “begets” that the King James translation is so fond of extend to God’s generations as well as to humans?  And so on and so forth.

The truth of the Torah, however, is not in facts that have never been unearthed and that never will be.  Some of its stories may be based on events that did take place.  Still, the Torah’s truth isn’t in the veracity of the stories, but rather in the words themselves, in the multitudes of messages, in the lessons that the words convey.

“In the beginning” isn’t scientific proof.  It’s a revolutionary way of thinking about the world.  It’s logical rather than irrational, purposeful rather than chaotic.  It’s different from any other explanation of Creation that had ever existed prior to Genesis in that it conceives of a God that has a loving, compassionate, parent-like character.  It isn’t that God can’t be cruel or destructive.  God can be anything.  The Torah, however, teaches us that this God is good, that this God chooses to be good, and, moreover, that “good” is more than subjective opinion.  It has definite and fixed parameters.

Unlike the Egyptian deities, half animal, half human action figures on some ridiculous board game; unlike the Mesopotamian deities who were so vain and wily that they saw the destruction of all humanity as fitting punishment for people being too noisy (!); unlike the Greek gods, for whom human beings were a distraction from their own jealousies and vanities and, at best, became playthings for the gods in their spare and bored times; unlike any other theological model that existed since the dawn of humanity, the God that the Torah teaches is a positive force for good. 

It’s a vast canvas that the Torah paints its stories and lessons on.  There’s Creation to begin with, a story that, the more we know and understand, the more we realize even comes close to what really happened.  The order in which things happen, their purpose, their place in the universe and the world—these all have reason and logic.  All they lack is scientific proof. 

But—again—this is not the Torah’s purpose.  That purpose is not to give us the specifics of how God created the world, but rather why.  Why did God create Adam and Eve?  What did the world look like to them when they first opened their eyes?  And what went wrong?

Is it the snake’s fault that Eve ate of the fruit that God created and placed as the centerpiece in the Garden of Eden, and additionally made extra appetizing in every sense?  Is Adam such a weak creature that he couldn’t control the enticing fruit his wife held in her hand?  And if so, are these the ancestors we would claim as our progenitors?

No!  Almost immediately human beings realize that they have immense power in their hands—we have knowledge and awareness.  And, too, that we can give life and we can kill!

It is this knowledge, this truth, that we open our eyes to every morning when we open the newspaper or listen to the news.  No need for scientific proof there.  It’s in print, stamped in red upon our green earth.

It isn’t that humanity doesn’t try, even in its earliest generations.  It’s just that people can’t figure out how to use the marvelous tools they’ve been given.  And to give them credit, it doesn’t take them more than ten generations—ten from Adam to Noah—for humanity to realize that it needs help.

B’reisheet (Genesis) and the rest of the Torah lead us on a path of self-knowledge that is ultimately liberating and empowering.  Its truth is not in an accumulated wealth of numbers and figures, however.  Its truth is in the success of those who follow its teaching, and that’s proof enough for me.

© 2013 by Boaz D. Heilman