Genesis Cycle 6 Bereshith

Bereshith

It’s not about us. We think it is. We would love everything to be about us. 

Let’s say this again. Nothing happens.  Nothing even budges or gets created or gets anywhere without God. The whole human story, the many myths, the many religions, those who believe or who don’t believe, those who heal, those who hurt, those who need structure, those who prefer freedom, those who bleed, those who live, those who die, those who crawl, those who grow, those who see the sun, those who hate the light; none of it exists without God. 

This is a very difficult concept to embrace in our gut.  Let’s put it this way. It’s easy to agree with our inner voice, to read this and say yes of course. Yes of course we are all here because of God.  The astounding miracle of it though gets lost in the continuing cycle of Torah and creation. We get used to the miracle and in that way diffuse it, turn it into a non-miracle, simply a fact of addition.

So we yearn to re-find that same miracle. We play God. We pretend to be the catalyst to jump-start all beginnings.  We fast, we listen to music all night, we make love all night, we reach for other lovers, we find new interests, find new houses to buy, new jobs, new places to live, new drugs, new restaurants, new drinks, new rivers to raft, new yoga positions, new clothes to buy, new cars to crash. We move faster, talk fast, talk with airs, identify through a humanity that is always trying to usurp God’s omniscience for a brief respite from this skin-to-skin frustration.

Is there a way around this?  Is there a way to let go of our human desperation and therefore give creation back to the astounding authorship of God? 

In Babylonian Talmud 9a we read that King Ptolemy found 72 elders and placed them each in a separate room. He then asked them to translate the first line in Torah:

Bereshith barah elohim et ha'shamayim v’et ha’aretz.

What they all came up with was this:

God created in the beginning the heaven and the earth.  Why not In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth? They didn’t want anyone to think that Bereshith was the subject along with Elohim.  In other words it wasn’t the beginning that did the creation. It wasn’t the vast void of space. It wasn’t our human imagination of what a beginning might be like that actually did the creation. It was that powerful seed (or arguably seeds) of intent within the space. It was God.

God.  Ah. But What is God?

Avicenna, the mystic, says that God is when essence and existence coincide. Buber points out that the word God has been so misused but whatever man’s delusion (He is) the true Thou of his life that can’t be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others. Campbell says that God is a metaphor for all which transcends all levels of intellectual thought.

And who is man? Charles Darwin says this: Man, wonderful man, must collapse into nature’s cauldron. He is no deity. He is no exception.

So what would we as humans be without that essence and existence, without that true Thou within us? We also would be a beginning, a vast void, collapsed into nature’s cauldron. We would also be directionless, formless, a beginning in stasis, a beginning that can’t get beyond a beginning. We would depend only on human ego and even use ego to support belief in God. We would fill the world with violence and war, unnecessary dichotomies, unnecessary schisms, fear, doubt and manipulation. We would stop ourselves from really existing in the true image of yes, God. We would be as we are not soon but now.

In this stuck world of a million possible beginnings maybe a way to really move on (soon), to get beyond a beginning in stasis is simply to follow God’s example: To let go. To let the power roll. To organize it within boundaries and to bless it but to stop claiming it. Or at least to claim very little of it. 

 Yes we can analyze the hundreds of teachings on this first line of Bereshith. We can study the glow of each letter. This of course will help. There are 72 teachings and maybe even more. In terms of our lives though, the way to move forward isn’t bought at a car lot or faked to friends or to self.

In fact, it’s measured simply by the control we are willing to hand over to the divine metaphor.  There, in that action, we find Peace.