shaping the universe by Phillip Ratner
The First Story of Genesis – World of Creation Version of Bereshit
About the Creation as Divine Utterance
It is plainly stated in the Book of Genesis that all the Creation of the six days was performed through divine utterances whose number is ten:
1. “Let there be light” – “And God saw… that it was good”.
2. “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide waters from water”.
3. “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear” – “And God saw that it was good”.
4. “Let the earth bring forth grass, herb yielding seed, and fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth”.
5. “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth” – “And God saw that it was good”
6. “Let the waters swarm abundantly with moving creatures that have life, and let birds fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven” – “And God saw that it was good”.
7. “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after its kind” – “And God saw… that it was good”.
8. “Let us make Mankind in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth”.
9. “Be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it”.
10. “Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, on which there is the fruit yielding seed; to you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food”.
It is not written “And God saw… that it was good”, neither about the separation of the upper and lower waters on the second day, nor about the making of humankind on the sixth. It is only in the comprehensive context that it is written: “And God saw everything that He had made (with humanity inside the wholeness of Nature) and, behold, it was very good”. The decision whether the creation of humans was a good idea depends upon the actions and decisions of humanity, as we shall see in the second part, concerning the issue of “The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”.
Of these primordial utterances, the first seven are “sayings about”, of an objective command (“I-It” relationship in the language of Buber, or “meta-language” in cybernetic parlance), whereas the last three are “sayings to” with an address towards self and other (an “I-Thou” relationship), in an air of consultation.
The idea of Creation through speech and divine utterance returns also in later sources. “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth” (Psalm 33:6), and “For ever, O Lord, Thy word stands fast in the heavens” (Psalm 119:89).[6]
There are those who assume that at the basis of the belief in One God there must be Creation out of nothing, and that that Creation must have occurred on a specific moment. In our times – those who believe so can seek a validation for the Biblical cosmology in the modern cosmological theory of “The Big Bang”.[7] But Maimonides, for example, who leaned to the opinions of Aristotle about the preexistence of the universe, claimed that there is no religious significance to the difference between a unique creation and ongoing continuing creation.
The “Alte Rebbe”, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the chabad (Chabad) teachings, taught, based on the above noted verse (“For ever, O Lord, Thy word stands fast in the heavens” which is in the present tense), that the whole of creation is recurring every infinitesimal period, through these ten divine utterances that keep standing there recreating the world for ever. Moreover, the letters of these utterances – according to this conception – are the raw material of all and every manifestation and these letters turn about in all their permutations and combinations to create everything, much like human speech comprising the sum of letter permutations.[8]
Our analysis of the first creation story in Parashat Bereshit will therefore relate to the structures of letters and words, in the assumption that coded in them are the primordial patterns that serve all the processes of creation and of restitution-Tiqqun. We shall examine the letters and words as if they were kind of mathematical formulae of instructions for building viable patterns.
In spite of the clear count of ten utterances, the sage Rabbi Yohanan said (Bavli, Rosh haShanah 32a): “Bereshit Ma’amar nami” (the word “Bereshit” is also an utterance). We can understand from this saying that the letters of the first word and the words of the first sentence of Genesis comprise a hidden “utterance” in which are encoded the principles of the Creation.
(This is akin to the formula on which is based the fractal geometry of the Mandelbrot Group. This is an extremely short formula: Z2 => Z-a; relating to the conditions of existence and stability of all the “offspring” derivations of every reference point in two, or three, dimensional space, which multiply by their own values and lose a fixed quantity during their “generation”. Through continuing iterations, the formula creates rich complexity – in fact infinite – of complex “landscapes”, in which stability is maintained in spite of the many reproductions – or it disappears).
