Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים — In the beginning when God created — From a purely human perspective, the act of creation ought to be seen as an act of self-giving on the part of the Creator; Creation exists solely because of God’s unconditional love (ἀγάπη = agápē). This divine love makes a space (kένωσις = a kenosis or “self-emptying”[1]) so that there may be room for the Other—namely, Creation. At the deepest metaphysical level imaginable, we surprisingly discover that God is also a relational Being; by creating the universe, God reveals He has a personal stake in the existence of Creation.[2]

God merely contemplates Creation as a possibility, and effortlessly, it comes into being. Unlike the creator of Plato’s universe, who struggles mightily with the recalcitrant chaotic matter as he attempts to model it in the image of the ethereal Forms[3], the God of Israel creates chaotic matter with ease and grace. Unlike the pagan gods of antiquity—who themselves were the by-products of the primal chaos—God’s reality transcends the boundaries of the temporal and spatial universe. His ontology and existence are totally independent of Creation. God is, in the most literal sense, wholly Other than Creation.

Sometimes misunderstandings occur when foreign concepts and terminology are grafted onto the text from other ancient texts or mythologies that have no bearing whatsoever on a given verse (see notes on Gen. 1:2). For all of its elegant simplicity, the biblical writer does not appear to be concerned with such theological conjectures or speculations. Yet, in the opening verse the biblical narrator makes a straight-forward theological claim—God created everything[4] and this is why we find the use of a merism[5] appearing in the opening passage.[6] Why begin the first book of the Torah with such a revolutionary introduction? Philosopher Susan Handelman explains:

With the deceptively simple words “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” the Hebrew Bible begins. In fact, however, this statement was (long before Derrida) a supreme challenge to the entire classical tradition of Western metaphysics: to assert that matter was not eternal, that the world had a temporal origin, that substance came into being through divine fiat, indeed through divine speech (“And God said: ‘Let there be . . . ‘”) threatened the foundations of Greek ontology.[7]

The Judaic creation story certainly has other broad implications that are no less challenging to classical Greek thought. If creation has an ultimate purpose and direction a τέλος (telos=“completion” or “consummation”), then we, as God’s creation, cannot self-consciously live our lives as if we lack ultimate meaning and spiritual direction. In a God-centered existence, there is responsibility and accountability that each of us—by virtue of being made in the likeness of our Creator—must give. Briefly stated, the entire cosmic order is (1) grounded in the will of the Divine, (2) established since the beginning of time, (3) founded in the ethical order that governs human existence.