Torah is the Record of the Relationship between G-d and Man
Torah is the Record of the Relationship between G-d and Man

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” These words have been so ingrained into Western consciousness that for most people they have been rendered irrelevant and without content. They have become a cliché that is spoken with casual abandon.  In truth, they are the most radical and revolutionary set of words ever to have been imprinted upon human consciousness.  They assume a concept of reality unheard of in human history.

Ancient man did not conceive of an absolute dichotomy or separation between existence and non-existence.   By definition, that which existed had to be eternal and could in no way evolve from a state of non-existence.  Man realized that things do come to an end and may cease functioning in the same manner in which they had done in the past, but this was always viewed as a process of transformation, i.e. changing from one state of existence to another form.

(Although there were certain suggestive fragments of the Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides which imply that he did formulate this separation between existence and non-existence, the whole thrust of his argument is that once the conclusion is reached that “Being is,” i.e. that the world does exist, this precludes the possibility of ever meaningfully contemplating non-existence.)

Thus, to thinkers who believed in the primacy of the four elements (water, fire, air and earth), these elements were always combining, transforming and transmuting one into the other. They never came into existence or ceased to exist.  Even Plato, who had developed a description of creation, assumes the necessity of a primordial matter or material from which the divine being, which he called the demiurge, concocted the universe. There is no sense of nothingness or concept of a beginning.

A related issue to this dichotomy is the concept of time.  If there is a beginning, did time exist before that beginning? Is it possible to conceive of a moment in time when time did not exist?  Even the very utterance seems nonsensical.  Is time an ontological reality or merely an aspect of the mind in the definition of motion?  Can time exist independently of space or matter?  These are the questions that the first statement in the book of Bereshit forces the mind to contemplate.

The goal of such contemplation is to focus the mind on the struggle to comprehend God.  In the process of this struggle, the people of Israel presented to the world a fundamental truth:  that all reality flows from God, but God remains unknowable.

That truth has become the foundation of Western Thought.  Eventually it led to the proposition of the existence of two types of reality, God and the World.  Even if we maintain that the beginning of the world implies a prior non-existence which established a doctrine known as creatio ex nihilo, that could only apply to the physical universe and all that is contained within it (including items not normally thought of as physical, like thoughts, emotions, passions or dreams).  It cannot apply to the existence of God.  One cannot fathom a “time” when God did not exist.

Maimonides elucidated this distinction. He postulated two forms or conceptions of time, sequential and identical or coincidental.  Matter and all of creation is subject to sequential time which must be delineated into past, present and future.  It is thus subject to the measurement of motion and is indeed an aspect of matter itself.

God however, exists in identical time i.e. where past, present and future coincide and are identical.  In that sense, God is infinite, without beginning or end or possible of any measure.  Maimonides ultimately uses this formulation to avoid the problems associated with reconciling human freedom and God’s omniscience (as I discussed previously in my paper on the possibility of Tshuva). (I also discussed some of the problems this theory of two time frames causes such as how does God break through from his time frame into ours for the purpose of revelation to man. Although Maimonides recognized this paradox, he stressed that God was totally separate from the world and from man and was unknowable to man and therefore man could not posit any attribute which defined God.)

Nevertheless, although we may not understand how the world was created, the Torah included the story of creation in order to encourage us to contemplate God and to establish the building blocks for our understanding of the universe.  The story of Bereshit imparts the following fundamental truths in the Jewish outlook of the world:

1  Existence or being is better than non-being.  This is based on the assumption that the act of creation was an act of goodness and that God created the world out of infinite goodness, rather than as a natural occurrence.  That is why the Torah emphasizes that when God viewed the world he created He saw that, “it was good” and ultimately, “very good.”

2. The universe that God created is ordered and structured, and was created in a way that the human mind can grasp the world’s order and improve upon it.  This established the basis for all scientific and cultural advances which humanity has made through the ages.

3. There is a moral hierarchy in the relationship between living and non-living beings and between human beings and all other forms of life.  Man was a special creation of God who was created in God’s own “image.”  According to Maimonides, that meant that man is the only thinking being created in the world.

4.The process of human thought ultimately leads to the acquisition of moral knowledge.

5. Man has the freedom to choose between good and evil.

6. All of the above ultimately lead back to the knowledge of God.

The Torah is the record of the relationship between God and man as a result of the acquisition of moral knowledge.  This is the ultimate purpose of why the Torah begins with the story of Bereshit; to instruct us how to know and reach out to God the Creator.