“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Instead of focusing on the nuances and ideas behind this verse, Sefer Breishit is often taught in a very rote, analytical manner, by teaching Meforshim topically. I have become increasingly frustrated by the lack of intellectuality and honesty in this approach. Although irked by this mainstream approach to the sefer, I am mostly frustrated by the lack of creativity employed when studying a book about creation. God created man in his image, thus making man a creator. In Rav Soloveitchik’s essay Halackhic Man he writes:
Repentance, according to the Halackhic view, is an act of creation—self creation . . . A person is creative; he was endowed with the power to create at his very inception. When he finds himself in a situation of sin, he takes advantage of his creative capacity, returns to God, and becomes a creator and self-fashioner. Man through repentance, creates himself, his own “I.”
Man, as an artist, has a high calling to create a masterpiece. He, like God, must create new man. Perhaps this is why God’s statement of “Naaseh adam” is in plural. God may have been talking to the angels like the Midrash writes in its attempt to denounce the idea that God forbid there are multiple gods. And yet, God may have also been speaking to the man he was about to create. “Let us make man,” He said to the world he had just created, addressing man who would soon walk in His ways. In a way then, God was speaking to multiple other gods, to the race of humankind. We are all godly, and believing in God by definition means believing and caring for other human beings and their endowed pieces of godliness. Together, we have the ability to continue to recreate, to constantly evaluate, and to achieve the ideal status of the divine, to strive to imitate God.
And so I thought to myself, isn’t that what Genesis is all about? Recreation? Retelling? Re-understanding? Or perhaps even rebellion, or the renewing of war and revolt? Breishit is filled with unresolved conflict both in its differing perspectives and in its existential ideas it attempts to capture. Different approaches to this conflict have been offered throughout the years, the most famous being the approach of the biblical critiques and the approach of Rav Soloveitchik. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks takes an entirely different approach: that the accounts in Breishit 1 and 2 are not contradictory, but complimentary. The first perek is written from God’s perspective, the second perspective from Adam’s. According to Sacks, Man cannot live in existential conflict. He must place aside sacred time, such as the Aseret Yimai Teshuvah, to be conflicted. He cannot live in war; he must search for a resolution between himself and God. In order to do this, I believe that man must create. Through creating a physical manifestation of the conflict he feels, man’s emotions can become complimentary as opposed to conflicting.
The last time I learned Sefer Breishit had been as a second grader. We had opened up our brand new chumashim for the first time and chanted Breishit barah elokim et hashamaim v’et haaretz. V’ha’aretz… And the world was disorganized and formless, and darkness floated on the face of the deep. I still remember our translation of pasuk bet to this day. But when I committed those English and Hebrew words to memory so many years ago, I gave them little thought. I didn’t consider what it meant that darkness floated on the face of the deep. I couldn’t picture “disorganized and formless.” I still can’t. But now, I find that I must try.
In order to make Breishit relevant to my life, I find that I must recreate the story of Breishit. In order to remember part of my history, in fact, the very beginning of my history, I need to retell it. I don’t think any cataclysmic beginning or ending can ever be remembered without being retold. The Holocaust is constantly portrayed in the same light. The same images are used, the same stories told. Soon, if we’re not careful, we will forget, because we will have no need to try to remember. We will have no need to use our intellectual capacities to discern between what was and what now is. I think Breishit is the same way. When darkness is on the face of the deep and we are constantly in search of the affirmation of God that all is “Tov,” we must retell Breishit in a way applicable to us. Where did I come from? Who am I? Where, or what, is my Garden of Eden?
I thought about modern retellings of Breishit. Milton’s Paradise Lost and Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Durer’s Adam and Eve. R. Crumb’s graphic novel, The Book of Genesis. They all seemed to offer me a more creative understanding about the meaning behind Genesis. Although all “fictional retellings,” to me they spoke truth. I was unsure if the story of Breishit in the Torah was “fiction;” to call it non-fiction also did not do it justice. To call it Truth seemed to leave no room for interpretation. I settled on “retelling” without the adjectives.
What was the Truth about creation? How did the world come into existence? Did believing in Evolution mean not believing in God? Darwin’s idea that humans became more and more advanced as time elapsed seemed to echo part of Genesis. Eyes were originally optic nerves coated in pigment that continued to evolve as time went on into a stage of perfection. In the Origin of Species, Darwin compares the eye to a telescope, continuing to be built by man into more and more perfect stages. However, assuming that man’s telescope is comparable to God’s eye assumes that the Creator operates in the same intellectual manner that man does. Ultimately, Darwin concludes that eyes are superior to telescopes just like the works of the Creator are superior to the works of man. Telescopes are our feeble attempt at imitating our creator, at attempting to create an external eye to help us view the world through God’s lens.
The moment when the eyes of Adam and Eve are opened and they “see” or understand for the first time that they are naked is almost evolutionary in nature. Although Rambam disagrees that this is the first time they are scientifically able to see; after all, the verb used is “Yada” as opposed to “Raah.” However, for me it became irrelevant whether or not this was scientific sight or true knowledge; to me, the two ideas were synonymous. Even in paradise, man was evolving, changing and sinning. Life was gradual, evolutionary, and filled with turning points in which through seeing clearly, I began to understand, and through understanding, I felt I could finally see.
The turning point, after eating from the tree of knowledge, happened for me sometime in between the first time I had learned Breishit and now. At some point along the way, I had taken a bite from that tree and gotten a glimpse of what it meant to be a creator, what it meant to be naked, bare, humble, and created from dust.
But at the same time, I had been endowed with the power to create. And now, God was searching for me. His voice was walking through the garden, and He was calling “Where are you?” My back was to God, but I turned towards Him and called, “Where are you?” Where were you during the Holocaust? Where were you during creation? Why was your spirit only reflected on the face of the water? Where is your essence?
The answer I heard was “Here. With me.” God was not in the fire or even the still small voice. He was somewhere inside of me, beseeching me to retell and recreate the story of my own existence. Beseeching me to recreate myself. To repent. To repeat. To redo. All of life was a cycle, and as I was banished from the Garden of Eden into a world where evil did exist, I knew I would one day return. Like God, I found the need to separate and make decisions based on what had happened to me and what would continue to happen. The first name of God used in Breishit is Elokim, God’s name of judgment. Breishit opens with havdalah, a separation between day and night, between earth and heavens. I became a dayyan, attempting to discern between good and evil, Adam I and Adam II, who I once was, and who I was striving to become. And I began to write the first three words to my own story, “In the beginning.” In the beginning, I created. The rest was, and will continue to be history.