Genesis as Hope

The Creation Story is a Response to Nihilism

“The earth being chaos and void (tohu vavohu), with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water…” (Genesis 1:2)

“And God said to Noaĥ, The end of all flesh is come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence (Hamas) through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.” (Genesis 6:13)

“Chaos and void” teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, sought to revert the world to chaos and void, as it was in the beginning before Creation (Genesis 1:1–2), on account of Jehoiakim, who did evil in the eyes of God. Once He observed the people of his generation, His mind was settled. Likewise, the Holy One, Blessed be He, sought to revert the world to chaos and void, on account of the generation of Zedekiah, but once He observed Zedekiah, His mind was settled.” (Arakhin 17a)

Chaos and void (tohu vabohu): This phrase appears two times. Here, and the other one is (Jeremiah 4:23) “I have seen the earth and behold, it is chaos and void.” [This] teaches that the Holy One, blessed be He, foresaw the destruction of the Temple when He created the world, [and] that it would be in the year tohu (the letters that are equal to the number, 411); since, behold the first Temple stood for 410 years and was destroyed in the 411th year. And the second Temple stood the numerical equivalent of [the word,] hayita (420), and this is [why it states] “vehaarets haita” (“and the earth was;” which is the phrase that precedes tohu in this verse). And afterwards, [it is written], “darkness,” a hint to the exiles. And so is it expounded in Bereishit Rabbah 2:4. Another explanation: “and the earth was chaos and void” has a numerical equivalent (gematria) of ‘two thousand years without Torah.’ (Baal Ha Turim)

The Torah presents the Creation of the world in poetic language that is at once pulpy and abstract, vivid and opaque, tangible and ethereal. Chaos and void—what are these? For philosophers, these are abstractions, but for the ancients, across cultures, chaos and void were characters, personalities, demigods. The Torah as a whole rejects paganism and thus subdues the idea that Chaos or Void are actual deities, but nonetheless their metaphysical residue remains; we get the sense that these forces are not nothing. Genesis doesn’t begin with order, but with murkiness.

Creation is an act of clean-up, an act of collaboration with and shaping of wild and waste. When we think about Creation not as a historical event, but as a structure of existence, we see that to make anything is also at the same to struggle against turbulence (too muchness) and vacancy (absence). Ordering involves pairing down and bringing forth, a constant balancing act. Chaos and void need to be overcome, or put in their place, but they also provide the fodder and motivation and counterbalance for Creation itself. There is no better catalyst for a clean room than a messy one.

In the Talmud (Arakhin), “chaos and void” suggest moral depravity, cultural rot, and general purposelessness—God sees chaos and void in the world and seeks to respond in kind by returning it to chaos and void. Cosmic entropy and human entropy mirror one another. But God withholds God’s rigorous judgment because God sees that the general tendency towards horror is balanced by righteousness. The world exists not because it is without evil, but because individual righteousness outweighs the negative average. God plays a game of outliers—and the greatness of a single leader offsets the awfulness of his tribe. While the text imagines the leader as king, we can think about the leader more figuratively—in any society there are pockets of righteousness even the tendency is to judge the cultural trends and ignore the individual. Creation is sparing. It is the withholding of wrath. It is the maintenance of hope. To create one must behold the world in all its violence, cruelty, and horror and not be deterred.

The Baal HaTurim extends the point: Chaos and void refer to the time of Exile, to thousands of years without Torah, to terrible times. God knows Jewish history and chooses to go ahead, anyways. God, to put it provocatively, foresees the Destruction of the Temple, foresees the wanton destruction of Jewish life in Mainz, Iberia, Kremenetz, Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Supernova, and decides to choose the Jewish people anyways, to create a world, anyways. God says “Let there be light”—referring to the goodness of the world, the goodness of the Jewish people, the goodness of humanity—when it chooses righteousness over barbarism. God says “Let there be ‘a light unto the nations’” (Isaiah 42:6) and there was a light unto the nations. The first day.

Next week, in parashat Noach, we see that God seeks to destroy the world entirely because of the principle of Hamas, which we should translate as sadism. Hamas is not justified violence, not just war, not self-defense, but cold-blooded murder. Hamas is not guerilla tactics to support a Revolutionary cause, but nihilism. Hamas is not freedom for anything, but pure negation. Hamas, both the ancient word and the current manifestation, combine the principle of world-hatred and the principle of Jew-hatred into one. God sees this force at work and is brought to such tears that God nearly destroys the world. God nearly capitulates. God sees human beings cheering at torture and God regrets Creation. Darkness hovers over the face of the deep, Hamas marauds with brazen self-satisfaction, but God makes a commitment to save the world.

In a few chapters, Adam and Eve will be created, then Exiled from the Garden, but the tragedy has already begun in just the first few verses of the Torah. Creation is God saying yes in the face of inevitable tragedy.

For as trying as human evil is, God is filled with love and pride and connection to all who choose to create rather than destroy. While the angels consider heaven to be a shiva house, greeting the King with condolences (“I’m sorry for your loss”), God responds, “Woe unto me, and woe unto you, if I hadn’t created the world.”

According to Midrashic tradition, God studies Torah and creates the world while meditating on its letters. God goes through multiple rounds of trial and error, as it were, with thousands of worlds getting destroyed and remade in the process. The chaos and void may describe the palimpsest or archive of God’s failed efforts. What made those other worlds different than ours? Why, according to legend, is our world the world that survives thousands of trash bins? I suggest that it is in this world that God discovers partnership. God realizes God is not alone. God discovers humanity. God discovers the Jewish people. The image of God learning Torah is a lonely one—where is God’s chevruta (study buddy)? The tonic for God’s ailment, so to speak, is not another chiddush, another insight, but another other with whom to share it.

What saves the world and creates the world, then, is connection. If brutality is solipsism compassion is its antidote. To say “Let there be light” is to say “Let us share it. Let us illuminate this harsh world together.”

Shabbat Shalom. Am Yisrael Chai.

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh