II.4 Love and Creation
There exists also another way to describe the process of creation.
Both the hermetic and the kabbalistic philosophies claim that everything in our world has a masculine and a feminine pole. From this point of view, the head which is the carrier of information is the masculine pole, while the house, the container, which receives and envelops it, is the feminine one.
Isn’t that exactly what happens during conception, whether of a plant, a fish, a bird, a mammal or a human being? If we look closely, we see that in all these the process starts with the penetration of the head of the spermatozoon, the male pole, which contains nothing but information into the ovum, the female. The fertilized ovum then starts to develop, and so the whole organism comes into being.
According to my spiritual teachers, this was the way the universe came into being. They insisted that the universe was the result of a sexual union or pairing. This would fit in very well with the above mentioned interpretation of the word Breshit. This would fit also with the saying of Hermes Trismegistos[i]: “like above so below”, in the microcosm as in the macrocosm. To quote the kabbalah: „The saving of one human being is similar to the saving of the whole world and everything it contains.” To remain at this metaphor: The creation of one human being is similar to the creation of an entire world.
The Kabbalah even goes one step further and mentions time and again what it calls “the pairing of the upper spheres”. Could it be that it was the pairing of these spheres which brought about our world? That before the creation respectively the Big Bang, there existed in the divinity a male and a female aspect, and it was their merging that caused our world to come into being – another way to show that Breshit really means conception.[ii]
Pairing – that sounds very animalistic. Where did love which plays such a major role in all my revelation disappear to? In the introduction to this book, I have written that the love of God is the strongest energy in existence. We know today that an enormous amount of energy was released (or came into being) during the Big Bang. Maybe that was nothing but the infinite love of God. One day, I was shown that the Hebrew word for love, ????, really means the divine alphabet – aleph – he – bet – he and we know that the letter he is a designation of God.
In order to complete the story: Why does the Hebrew name of the Pentateuch, Tor(a)h start with the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the tav, and finishes with the letter he? From the end to the beginning. If we look at this from a numerological point of view, we realize that the letter he is identical with the complete word Elohim, the principle of creation. Breshit symbolizes conception, but it has to be followed by pregnancy. It is thus not a coincidence that the meaning of the word torah, read from the end to the beginning is harot, meaning … pregnancy. Here we have another example of one of the many codifications of the Torah, this time in the form of a mirror image.
II.4a The Will – the first to be created
Let us move one step forwards or maybe backwards. We have seen that creation equals the process of birth, and we know from experience that many young parents consider their newborn a miracle. As we mankind have not been present at the birth of the universe, we tend to take it for granted and don’t recognize it as the miracle it really is. We explore the how and the what, but not the why and wherefore; neither do we wonder, why we and the universe exist at all. Is there a purpose and what could that be? We tend to forget that before anything else, the creator had to have the Will to create something. Could it be that the Will was the first to be created? If we looked at it this way, we could understand much better the process of creation in its totality.
“At that moment,” to quote Stephen Hawking, “we would know the mind of God. “[iii] Let us go back for a moment and repeat the above in a slightly different way: Before the event we call “At the Beginning” or the Big Bang, the only thing which existed was mystery, the Oneness, the Nothing which contained everything – the intelligent infinity called En Sof by the Kabbalists, for us incomprehensible. This is identical with what Laszlo and other physicists call the quantum vacuum or the “informed universe”[iv] Out of this infinity, out of this mystery, originated the Will, the conscious divine Will to create a world in order to recognize itself. This was the female aspect of God, which existed before the creation as we know it took place. The information, the masculine aspect of God[v] which also existed before the creation and which was intrinsically tied to the En Sof, conjoined with the newly created Divine Will like a seed with an ovum. This process is what the Torah designates as Breshit. Breshit then brought forth the creative principle Elohim – or was Elohim even born of Breshit? Let us now return to the Zohar: Elohim took the form of Adam Kadmon (primordial man): the form in which God, the creator, entered the creation. This form consisted of the structure of the Sephirot (see annex I). The creator thus originated from the fusion of the male and female principles. This explains the sentence in Genesis, chapter I: “And God created man (ha-adam) in His own image, in the likeness and in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them[vi]. After the peak of the creation had been achieved and the process thus ended, the two aspects of God separated again.
If we now look at the respective Hebrew word, we see that if we read the word for “will” – ratzon from the end to the beginning we get the word notzar which means “to be created”. And Love? It is the same love which parents feel for their offspring and which exists also in the animal world. This is expressed in the Torah[vii] and by the prophets.[viii] As we shall see in a later chapter, there is a major difference between the biblical story of the creation of animals and that of man.
Back to creation. After Elohim, the principle of creation had come into being, the Torah continues with the words: “… the Heaven and the Earth”. As we have seen before, during the act of creation, a process called by us the Big Bang, the whole of the universe is supposed to have appeared out of nothing but squeezed into what the Ramban calls “a mustard seed”. This idea however preceded Nachmanides. A thousand years before, Jewish scholars claimed that the whole of creation was contained in the very first sentence of the Torah. This is the reason, why the Hebrew word for “heaven” or “sky” is preceded by the word “et” (aleph-tav). The first and the last letters of the alphabet. Here we go again from Oneness to duality: Heaven and Earth. If we now go back to the Kabbalah, we find that the word shamajim, usually translated as “heaven”, has a totally different meaning, when read from the end to the beginning and vocalized differently. What we get is a word made out of the consonants mem – jod – mem – shin which means “to come into being” or “to become real”. Where does this process take place? On earth, ha’aretz. For the first time, we find here the association of two basic principles which keep our universe going: the process and the matrix, the place where things happen. The connection between the process of creation and that which has been created is something which appears in the Torah time and again.
But why is the word shamajim written in Plural and ha’aretz in Singular?
According to the kabbalah, there are many heavens, one higher than the other, but only one earth ( ha’aretz). In this chapter we are dealing with the lowest shamajim or heaven, which is also called rakiah ha’shamajim.[ix]
Let us now look at another possible version of this sentence. As we have seen previously, the kabbalists maintain that the Torah was given in scripta continua. Moses looked and God dictated and this way the form we know was written down. If we now recombine the letters of the sentence and cut it in a different way, we get a totally different meaning:
Inside the head, God will create himself time and time again(ba-rosch-jitbara-elohim). In this version, the head is the creative organism in which new ideas and thus new forms of creation appear repeatedly.
You (masculine) are Heaven and You (female) are the Earth.[x]According to this version, the creative principle, also called Elohim, is still active and renews itself constantly. Furthermore, shamajim in this form will constantly send impulses of information to the earth. The male part is constantly inseminating the female one.
Consequently, creation is continuing- up to the present day. The Torah gives us here an encrypted hint that this is indeed, what is happing. This would fit in well with the newest physical theories which claim that everything that exists depends on the vibration of so-called “strings”.[xi] Before the insights of modern science, physicists believed that they were in the possession of an exact knowledge of the “fabric of the cosmos”, of matter and its laws. Nowadays, they admit that all our knowledge is only apparent and based on models. According to the new theories, even the sub-atomic particles, the so-called building-stones of matter, are not stable, but built out of “vibrating strings”. Brian Green compares these strings with those on a violin or cello. “A cello string can vibrate in many different ways, and we hear each pattern as a different musical note. In this way, one cello string can produce a range of different sounds. In the string theory, the strings behave similarly; they too can vibrate in different patterns. However, instead of yielding different musical tones, the different vibrational patterns correspond to different kinds of particles. “[xii]
This takes us back to the theory of the programmer. Let us now reformulate the statement and ask ourselves: Who is the musician playing on these strings? And aren’t these “notes” the impulses mentioned previously? Is this the way the universe came into being?
Everything was ready for creation to move forward.
And the earth was „tohu vabohu …”
The masoretic[xiii] interpretation of this expression is “complete chaos” – a big mess – and this is the way it is used in the colloquial language. Using scientific language, one would talk of a total entropy. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this corresponds to the expected final state of our universe and not to its beginning. In other words: The Torah claims here that the creation of our universe involved the abolishment of the accepted physical laws: It began in chaos and ended in order.
As the second law of thermodynamics is valid for the whole of the universe, it too was created by God. Why should HE suddenly act in opposition to HIS own laws while creating the universe or introduce new laws after its completion? Did HE really need it? Or could it be that we have misunderstood again what the Torah tries to tell us
Nachmanides too was not satisfied with this interpretation. He was probably the first one to ask, why should everything be created in chaos? And he lived in the 13th century and never heard about the second law of thermodynamics. Neither does it fit our metaphor of the fertilized ovum. Though it doesn’t look that way, the discoveries of Burr have shown clearly that everything in the ovum is well-organized. [xiv]
According to Nachmanides, the first word tohu means that the building stones of creation were not yet named, because they were as yet unformed. A name implies the existence of a form, and everything which existed at that point in time was nothing but dispositions, inherent potential. And the form which the primordial matter takes is called bohu, which means, “is in it”. To continue with Nachmanides:
„ … there existed only the primordial matter which was smaller than a grain of mustard.”[xv]
Nachmanides refers to Isaiah, who speaks of a “line of tohu” as a delineating line[xvi] the builder uses in order to outline his plan before putting down the form he wants to erect.
Nowadays we would call it the creation of a blueprint. At the same text passage, Nachmanides talks about “bohu-stones”. These stones are matter from which the building is erected. According to this concept, bohu means: that which contains everything, the basic matter. Again in Isaiah, one finds the term for “nothing” – efes directly in front of the word tohu (efes tohu). Nachmanides sees in this connection the proof that tohu and bohu are created out of “nothing”; this is the way it is written also in the famous Sefer Hajetzirah[xvii] In all the further stages of creation, there is no more creation ex nihilo, but only one out of the other.
“And Darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
Much has been written about this sentence, but only Nachmanides and, later on, modern astrophysics have enabled us to understand it.
The first word we have to deal with is „darkness”/khoshekh. Khoshekh is usually understood as darkness, as the absence of light. In a certain way, this explanation seems to be self-evident: The light doesn’t yet exist, because it hasn’t yet been created. According to this view, darkness was not created, but existed even before creation took place – an aspect of the “nothing”. And lo there appeared Isaiah and proclaimed in the name of God: “I make (jotzer) the light and create (boreh) the darkness”.[xviii] According to Isaiah, it is thus not the light, but the darkness which was created first.[xix] Create? Make? Isaiah doesn’t speak about the past, but about the present; implying thus that this process is continuing up to the present day. The Zohar too writes that the first to be created was something like a dark flame, not black, not red, not green, having no color at all. Only after this flame has become mass and started to expand, it took on glowing lights.[xx]
Here we meet again with modern astrophysics: All that existed after the Big Bang was an agglomeration of energy, so dense that no light could be perceived (the creation of darkness …) Only after expansion took place, did light and colors come into existence. This is identical with what modern physics calls a Black Hole – a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing can escape after having fallen past the event horizon. The name comes from the fact that even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light) is unable to escape, rendering the interior invisible. This, according to the Zohar, is the origin of khoshekh. Here we must realize that the Zohar was published 700 years ago, but according to tradition, it was written 1200 years before, at the beginning of the Common Era. This was also the time when Nechunya used a mystical tradition in order to calculate the age of the universe. The Zohar too is basically nothing but a mystical exegesis of the Pentateuch. There is only one difference: according to modern physics, a Black Hole is the result of the collapse of a star; the final stage occurring after the death of a star. The Torah, on the other hand, speaks of a beginning. Really? Let us remember the kabbalistic theory of the worlds God has destroyed before creating ours. Could it be that those had been changed into Black Holes out of which a new universe has come into being. This is very similar to the view expressed by Ervin Laszló[xxi] in his new book in which he talks about a metaverse.
What did the scholars of that time know? What is it that we have forgotten?
The next part of the sentence is “al p’nei tehom”, translated as “upon the face of the deep”. The word “tehom” appears several times in the Torah and is always used as a description of unlimited deepness. Here we see the confrontation between that which was created – the darkness – and the endless nothing. And all of it happening before the beginning of creation. But was the Nothing really “no-thing”?
We are given a hint by the word “al p’nei / upon the face of”. Did the deepness have a face, a form? Or is this special deepness identical with the face of God? Is this the explanation of the sentence: “And HE said: Thou canst not see my face: for there shall be no man see me and live[xxii]”
This fits well with the idea mentioned above that the Creator entered His creation as Adam Kadmon (the primordial man) and Adam Kadmon had a face which was mirrored in the water, the primary matter. The mirror image materialized the essence of God. This mirror image would thus be the blue print of creation: the creation, an image of God. This gives man a totally different position from the one accepted today.
The second half of this sentence “and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” is thus a repetition of the first half. A blueprint is something immaterial, but at the same time gives form. That would fit in well again with the second part of this sentence: “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Water is used here as a symbol of the as yet unformed primordial matter containing everything. We now know that it is water which is a necessary component and gives form to all living beings. The best example being the substance of a human being 70% of which consist of water.
Prof. Dr. Eli Lasch
[i] Hermes Trismegistos, the Egyptian sage who is considered as the founding father of the hermetic philosophy
[ii] That would explain why the mystical tradition of Judaism is called Kabbalah meaning conception
[iii] Hawking, S., A Brief History of Time, p. 191
[iv] Laszlo, op. cit.
[v] In Hebrew , the words for „male” and „memory” (information) are identical – “zachar”.
[vi] Genesis1, 27
[vii] Deuteronomy 10, 15 und 23, 6
[viii] Malachi, 1, 6
[ix] Genesis1, 14
[xi] Green, B., The Fabric of the Cosmos, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2004
[xii] Green, B. op.cit., p. 346
[xiii] the classical Hebrew version – from the word masoret, meaning “tradition”
[xiv] Burr was a professor of anatomy at the conservative American university Yale. See:„Blueprint for Immortality. The Electric Patterns of Life”, Neville Spearman Publishers, UK 1972
[xv] Nachmanides, op.cit.
[xvi] Isaiah 34, 11
[xvii] The Book of Creation, a basic text of the Kabbalah
[xviii] Isaiah, 45,7
[xix] The Hebrew verb „bara”, to create, means always to create something ex nihilo – „jazar” , on the other hand, means to use existing material.
[xx] Scholem, G., Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung. Ein Kapitel aus dem kabbalistischen Buch Sohar, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, 1971, p. 49 (German)
[xxi] Laszló, E., op. cit.
[xxii] Exodus 33, 20
