Once again we are pleased to present Prof. Dr. Eli Lasch and his views on the Torah/Bible.
The first part of the record of the third day is incomprehensible for the modern man.
During that day, the process of separation and differentiation comes to an end. Here God separated between water and dry land. After the end of this process, the Bible uses again the formula “And God saw that it was good”. Now there was order at the most basic level. As we will see during the following days, nothing was created ex nihilo anymore. The focus changes and the main theme was to ensure that everything was in its right place. Why was this necessary? The answer is self-evident: So that life could appear, because life needs order. If we go one step further, we can even see all of this as a preparation for the appearance of man.
Here we meet a basic difference between the biblical view of the world and that of modern science. The latter one insists that man is unimportant for the continued existence of our universe. The Bible on the other hand claims that everything in the world was created only for the sake of man. That man is not an incidental by-product of evolution, but the most important part of it – its aim.
“And God said: Let the Earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind whose seed is in itself, upon the Earth: and it was so. And the Earth brought it forth… “The Earth followed exactly the instructions given. While during the first two days God Himself created everything, here He only gave instructions: The water should collect at one place and the Earth should bring forth certain plants. In both cases, there wasn’t created anything new, but something which was already contained in the first vision became reality: Earth and the carrier of life. Now, life itself takes form.
The first phase, the phase of impregnation, is over; the “head in the house” takes on a living form. Elohim, the principle of creation, didn’t create the plants, the first life-form, out of “Nothing”; but it calls on the Earth to bring forth the flora and to realize this way its inherent potential. What we already saw in the first sentence of the record of creation is clarified here: You, Heaven, male, and You, Earth, female. It’s the female pole that gives life a form. That’s its task, that’s the reason it was created. Or could it be that life is simply the female pole or part of God? It should be added that on the third day duality came into being as well: dry earth, continents and oceans, grass and trees.
Here it becomes obvious that life didn’t develop by chance as a part of an evolutionary process; it is rather a form of consciousness, a consciousness that wanted to take form. In order to express it in the language of the kabbalah: The unconscious/conscious Nothing woke up and turned into Kether, the conscious/unconscious Nothing. Thereupon, the Divine Wisdom began to create that which was essential for Its liberation from the sphere of the potential: the form-giving principle – life. Not the principle of creation, Elohim, for Elohim still belongs to the sphere of pure Divinity before its realization, neither Wisdom, Chokhma, but the forming principle born out of the biblical “house”, also called Binah, and the next step called Da’ath, a virtual sephirah. Let us remind ourselves here that after Adam had eaten from the fruit of Da’ath, he used this sephirah to create a man in his own image.Let us pause here for a moment and ask ourselves: What is the meaning of the term “life” at all?
There is probably nothing that has been studied so intensely as life. But seeing the enormous pile of information existing ABOUT life, it is astounding that we still haven’t come to an agreement what we have been studying all along! Up to this day, there doesn’t exist any definition of life accepted by all! There is a physiological explication, a metabolic, a bio-chemical and even a genetic one, but all of them only define certain aspects of life, not life as such. Beyond that, there is also a religious and/or mystical explication which mentions a life after death – a contradiction in terms. Basically, our position toward life is similar to our position toward the Divine. Very interesting is the antagonism between modern physics and the term “life”. While physics is dominated by the idea of increasing entropy (see above), the development of life shows an increase of order and differentiation.
The question asked often nowadays, is the following: What came first into being, the universe or life? Did life originate by chance from a “primordial soup”, as claimed by modern science, or did the aspect of God we want to call here “the principle of life” create our universe in order to manifest itself as life? (“And God spoke …) Would there actually be a world without us, without man? Again, the Torah shows us a world-view directly opposed to our actual one, but as coherent as ours, if not even more coherent.
As mentioned already, the Kabbalah and the Indian Vedas claim that God created many worlds before creating ours and that He had to destroy them all, due to the lack of inner balance. What is supposed to have been missing in these worlds were Grace (the expression of the limitless Divine Love), Chesed and therefore also Rakhamim (compassion), designated in the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah as Tipheret (see annex 1). Why do I write “therefore”? Because during a meditation I once received the following message: “The gates of grace are closed.” The antecedent worlds were made only out of Din, the principles of law and hard structuring, from consonants without vowels, from building blocks without feelings. This way, the balance was disturbed. But there is a second, deeper meaning: The root of the word Rakhamim is r-kh-m, also read Rekhem, the Hebrew word for womb. Compassion, the precondition for the future.
And to make this interpretation clear without ambiguity, these three letters read backwards add up to the word Makhar, the Hebrew word for “tomorrow”! In other words, the Kabbalah tells us here. Only compassion ensures the following day. Again, it is modern science that gives us the proof for the correctness of this view, but here we leave the realm of physics and go over to that of biology.
Today we know that living beings need balance in order to exist and that one of the most important functions of every living being is homeostasis, the keeping of inner balance.
According to the Kabbalah, the word , the Tetragramaton, can be seen also as a scale held in balance by a hand can also be read as
but with energy that needs a container to be useful.
