When God began to create (bara) heaven and earth…(Genesis 1:1)
And God created (vayivra) humankind in the divine image,
creating it in the image of God—
creating them male and female…(Genesis 1:27)And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy—having ceased on it from all the work of creation that God had done (asher bara). (Genesis 2:3)
God formed (vayitzer) the Human from the soil’s humus, blowing into his nostrils the breath of life: the Human became a living being. God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the Human who had been fashioned (asher yatzar). (Genesis 2:7-8)
The Torah uses two distinct words for the primal action of creation—bara and yatzar, often translated as “create” and “form.” (The generic asah, to do or make, stands even lower on the “creation stack.”) Medieval commentators argue that the former refers to ex-nihilo (zero to one) creation, while the latter refers to mere tweaking (one to two creation). First, God makes something; then, God tinkers. First an artist conceives of an idea, then the artist fills in the details and engages in a struggle with the constraints set by the canvas and the materials. In this taxonomy, briah is chronologically prior (first in time) ontologically prior (first in being) and teleologically prior (first in aim); yetzira is an afterthought, an ancillary flourish, or else a derivative of briah. The word bereishit contains the same letters—bet, resh, aleph—as bara. Bara begins; yetzira continues. God is distinguished by briah—only God can create in the deep sense. All other beings imitate God and work with a given reality. Their creation is the creation of shaping, not chiddush (innovation). Thus, confirms Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new (ayn chadash) under the sun” (1:9).
Bara connotes what Aristotle calls a “prime mover.” It speaks to the existential question, “Why is there something and not ‘nothing?” It also connotes what game theorists call “first-mover advantage.” My argument, though, is that the world is created for the sake of beings who are themselves creators in the sense of formers. God sets up the world in such a way that the second mover can create more value than the apparently first. God sets up the world in such a way that yetzira, not briah, is the force that keeps the world dynamic, meaningful, and value-generating. Read in this light, Ecclesiastes is not saying “Don’t try to invent or innovate,” but “understand that the key to invention is sampling.” We create by sampling, anthologizing, gathering, collecting. We make new worlds by constellating in new ways things that already exist. What is difficult is not to making something new, but to get the timing and presentation right—to be perfectly of the moment.
God creates the generic human using bara, but the human being that names and creates, that seeks partnership, that errs and hides, is formed. Adam 1, to use the language of Soloveitchik, is whole. Adam 2 is lonely and full of potency and drama. Adam 1 rules, finding his place in the status hierarchy; Adam 2 seeks and longs. The Midrash makes the point that the word vayitzer—to form—refers to the inclination or will of the human being, which has the ability to choose good or bad (yetzer hatov/yetzer hara). There is no briah hatov / briah hara because ex-nihilo creation stands before and beyond good and evil, faces no decision. The only decision it faces is whether to create at all, and this is a decision that answers itself, is manifest already in the act of creation. No matter if the angels advise against world-making, the world is here, it’s made. “Things merely are” (Wallace Stevens).
From an ethical perspective, the reason God assumes the role of ex-nihilo creator is to remove the possibility of any human claiming that honorific. Monotheism as the negation of idolatry means that only God can produce a chiddush in the fundamental sense. When we speak of chiddush in the vernacular, we don’t mean a real novelty, but the novelty of yetzira—taking something that exists and giving it new form, new life. Chiddush, for us = commentary. Our lives are annotations on briah, divine creation. Our acts of making are Talmud to God’s Scripture, as it were. Some of our acts connect to the divine directly and obviously, others only by a thread. But all of them form the body of Creation. Briah and Yetzira correspond to Written and Oral Torah, respectively. On the one hand, the Written Torah is first and supreme in its authority. On the other hand, it is only on the basis of Oral Torah that Written Torah can be interpreted. God’s world needs a human world; the human world needs a divine one.
Warren Buffett calls compound interest the eighth wonder of the world. But what actually contributes to compounding? Reinvestment. A great company is one that has 40+ years over which it can reinvest in its business. Now imagine a world in which reinvestment, i.e., learning and improvement, has thousands of years to compound? That is yetzira. Compounding is not a chiddush; quite the opposite—and yet within the category of the non-innovative, lurk the possibility of unforetold breakthroughs. God made a very good world in the first week—but the engine of this very good was a being formed for the purpose of compounding the goodness and beauty of God’s creation.
The motif of the second mover is recurrent throughout the Torah: Adam 2 and Adam 1, Eve and Adam, Cain and Abel, Abel and Seth, Abraham and Terach, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, Joseph and his Brothers, Judah and Joseph. Moses is younger than Aaron and Miriam. David is the second king. Solomon, who builds the Temple David cannot, is the third. In a world where the second mover has the advantage, there is no end to second movers. The third takes advantage of the second. This is what we call progress. Ibn Ezra never owned a Talmud; today thousands can scroll through it on their phones. The modern age is a second mover relative to the ancient world. And future ages will take advantage of our inventions. No matter how cheerful one is, one cannot be cheerful enough in the long run, assuming compounding (learning and error-correcting) runs its course. That’s a big assumption and one that God doubts along the way. But it’s also the reason our sages say that teshuva (self-transformation) was created before the world was created. The human world was not created to be, but to become.
Th God who creates via bara is Elohim, but the God who creates via yetzira is Hashem (The Tetragrammaton). The former is a God of rules, the second of exceptions and emendations. The first is a God who operates from first principles. The second is a God who bets on second movers, a God who loves learners and learning. Elohim is an expert. Hashem is a life-long learner.
A world of second movers is one constantly subject to change, disruption, vulnerability. Those on top are only so for a period, and likewise those on bottom. A world of second movers is one where the aim is not to discover a pure idea nobody else knows, but to transmit an opaque idea in way that is more clear and resonant than the one who gave it to you. We all have opportunities to be carriers of the traditions we receive.
The Talmud’s discussion of the laws of Shabbat begins with a discussion of carrying, a counterintuitive example of worked, as compared to other more tangible forms, like kindling a fire or tying a permanent knot. But carrying is the consummate form of creation for second movers. We don’t invent the burden, but move it. This, too, is creation.
Every year we read the Torah and find new things in it. That beginning is the beginning contained within the second time. It is the creative grandeur of the Created being, the originating power of the derivative. Harold Bloom well captures this in his notion that later poets can retroactively influence their influencers, not in the literal sense, but in a phenomenological sense. We are the late-comers and yet the human has always been late-born. We are the result of creative reinvestment. Let us hope that we can continue the world’s underrated creative unfolding.
Shabbat Shalom. Chag Sukkot Sameach.
Zohar Atkins
Great post