It has always fascinated me how the
Torah looks at the creation of the world. Of course it is a primitive
story; the bible has no concept of evolution or prehistoric time. One
of the great problems of the text is the entire issue of time; not
just the length of a day, but how the entire concept of time is
derived. Jewish time begins with creation. The current Jewish year is
calculated by scholars who try to derive the date of creation by
working back through the centuries and through the Torah to discover
how long ago the world was created. We know of course that the almost
5800 years of the Jewish calendar does not include prehistoric time
that includes the rise of life in the oceans, the rise of plant life
and then animal life on the land, the age of reptiles/dinosaurs and
the early ages of mammals. The calendar really only figures the
historical time of civilization in the Middle East. As
with the historical accounts of all peoples and civilizations, the
“authors” of the Torah see themselves as the center of the
universe. To look for something here beyond what was known in the
“civilized” world of ancient Mesopotamia, is to go beyond the
boundaries of what the Torah is about.
Another issue is the idea that God
created the world (something) from nothing. The opening lines of the
Torah tell us that there was “tehome” called “the deep”
and apparently water. There also seems to be some kind of atmosphere
where God's spirit can “hover” in the wind. It seems to be a dark
chaotic ball of water that is first illuminated and then split in
half. Where the upper and lower parts meet, God introduces a bubble
of air and in that bubble will the world be created. The first three
days mirror the second three days. The first three days set the scene
for what will be created on the final three days. The creation of
human beings is thus the pinnacle of creation, the last and greatest
of God's creative acts.
It is also a point of some discussion
about how human beings were created. The text of chapter one
indicates that there was just one person created and that one
individual was both male and female. I am not sure if this was one
body with two sets of genitalia or if one side was male and the other
side female. I know that there is a different story about this
creation in the next chapter but I will wait until we get there to
address that concern.
More importantly for Judaism, the
human, whatever the gender, is created in the “image” of God.
This is a real issue because Judaism believes that God has no image.
This means that if we want to “see” God, we need to really “see”
our fellow human beings. No matter how many different faces, colors,
styles and genders, every single human being has this “image” of
God and therefore all human life is holy.
Notice also that humanity is instructed
to eat only a vegetarian diet. Permission to eat animals will come
much later in our text. Humanity is also given a job to do. Human
beings are to populate the world and serve as stewards for all the
other animals, helping them live their lives and keeping them in
their divine place in the world that God has created.
Finally, we note that the seventh day
is not part of the creation story, but the opening lines of chapter
two. I want to teach from the very start that the Torah, as passed
down through the generations from one Jewish community to another,
never had any chapters at all. The only divisions were the parshiot,
the list of weekly readings for synagogue use every week. The
chapters were introduced by Christian scholars in the middle ages and
the Jewish community eventually adopted this chapter/verse
configuration in order to be able to talk to Christians about the
text. If you look at where the Shabbat aliyot break up the
text, you see the first reading does include the verses on Shabbat as
part of the creation story.
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