This is a regular feature on IsraelSeen by Dr. Yitzkak Hayut-Man. An innovator, futurist, visionary and Bible scholar. I have the utmost respect for the man I consider a friend. He is among the few that is courageous enough to allow the “open source” of the Torah-Bible to be presented in new and interesting ways for our greater understanding. Enjoy.
By Dr. Yitzhak Hayut-Man
The Worlds and Chronicles of the Genesis Versions
Chapters 42 and 43 in Isaiah form Haftarah (portion from the prophets read after the Parashah – weekly portion of the Torah read in the synagogues on Sabbath) for the Parashah of Bereshit (Genesis 1:1-6:8), and not without reason. These two chapters deal with creation, chapter 42 with the creation of heaven and earth and chapter 43 with the formation of Jacob and Israel. As we shall see in the conclusion, the overall movement of the Book of Genesis is between these two creation stories.
Verse 7 in chapter 43 has drawn the attention of the Mequbalim (“Kabbalists”, from Qabbalah, literally “reception” or “acceptance”). “All that is called by My name and for My honor, I have created it, formed it even made it”. The Qabbalah deduce from this that Creation was accomplished through different levels and different processes: Creation-Bri’ah, Formation-Ye?irah and Making-?ssiyah. Moreover, the Kabbalah relates different worlds in which these processes take place: the World of Bri’ah, the World of Ye?irah and the world of ?ssiyah, with each one separate from the Creator, who surrounds them all and vitalizes them. These “worlds” pertain to the different levels of Being in the human psyche called “Neshamah”, “Ru’a?” and “Nefesh” which will be clarified in the following. It should be understood that these worlds operate with entirely different time scales.
If we thus return to the description of the Creation in Bereshit Raba (see above), according to which the Creator looked at the Torah as a chart or blueprint of a plan and created the world, it is certainly possible to conceive of a situation in which the plans were prepared for millions of years, were kept in “drawers” and were executed in a different time span, be it longer or shorter.
For even the production of contemporary humans demands as if “six days of creation”, but is really the fruit of plans of millions of years. A human being, who wants to produce something, needs an adequate cognitive scheme. But the cognitive scheme which enables the design is a consequence of the development of the cognitive apparatus – namely the human brain of the designer – through a chemical and biological processes of millions of years, and of cultural developments of thousands of years, which are the basis for the current design which one is about to draw.
But it is quite possible that all the discussion above is not valid or just not necessary if we regard also time itself as a created concept that was produced by a certain process. For if Time was created at a certain stage, we cannot ask about the time that passed before Time was created. At most, we could try to check when was time created?
The researcher gave us a clue to the process, in that they have divided the life of humankind to history and to pre-history. “History” means “story” (likewise “histoire” in French, “Geschichte” in German and so on), namely – the time since humans learned to tell their story, since they learned to attribute meaning to human existence. This means that “history” is a cultural invention, which requires the existence of several preconditions, the primary of which is memory. Not just the passing memory of a person, but the collective cultural memory, a memory which requires means of recording. The hunters-gatherers did not yet need evidences, and hardly left such behind them. Humankind still needed to discover wheat, develop agriculture, to have permanent settlements, to build cities and to acquire writing.
And here we find that the transition to agriculture – the beginning of the cultivation of wheat – has started in our region, quite likely in the Land of Israel itself, about six thousand years ago (Not coincidentally do Jewish traditions claim that “the fruit of the Tree of Life” was wheat, as we shall discuss in the next chapter). Also the oldest script known to science is from the fourth millennium BCE, namely about six thousand years old.
Let us return then to our Biblical sources according to which the Creation – or more likely, “the expulsion from the Garden of ?den” – happened about 5,770 years ago, and we can find that this date corresponds with the creation of the human world – namely the creation of Remembered Time. According to this view, Remembered Time was indeed formulated about six thousand years ago, and there formed a higher dimensional world of space and time, in which humans navigate. It was about six thousand years ago when there sprouted the germs of the questions about good and evil and of the meaning of human life on earth. And the trees, the Trees of Knowledge, which grew from these germs, are growing till our own generation, and the need for an answer is becoming ever more pressing and even desperate.
More that it is a historical narrative – the Biblical story is the story of this reverberating question, and of its possible answer. This is the first question, which God presents to Adam, when calling him “Where are you?” (3:9).
Let us thus clarify for ourselves where are we in the works of the Creation.
According to the traditional concept, according to which (Psalm 90:2) “for a thousand years are onto Thee like one day that passes..”, or as it was formulated in the New Testament (2 Peter 3:8) “one day is like a thousand years in the eyes of God, and a thousand years like one day” – we are still within the process of the Six Days of Genesis.
We can find further traditional support for this parallel – between each Day of Creation and a thousand years – in the exegesis of rabbi Moshe the Darshan of Narbonne, whom Rashi often quotes. In his Midrash called Bereshit Rabati he attributes the building of the two temples – which were built and destroyed during the fourth millennium of the Hebrew calendar – to the fourth day of Creation, in which the luminaries were created: “And God made the two great lights (1:16) – these were the First and the Second Temple, which were greater than the Tabernacle… “And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day” – the building of the Temples and their destruction were in the fourth millennium”. In the Qabbalah (which appeared in Israel at the beginning of the sixth millennium) this historical account, according to which we are now in the sixth millennium, is widely accepted.
Therefore, living as we do in the sixth millennium of the Hebrew calendar, we are now at the sixth day of Creation – the “Day” of “the Creation of Adam”. This is the time of “Let us make Mankind” (Gen. 1:26) – na’?se Adam – and actually the time when we all “Let us become Adam” – Ne’?se Adam.[5]
And since we are now at the stage of the Creation of Adam – the unified humankind – we must consider the case of the Trees of Knowledge and of Life, and the punishment which they may entail – not as a past event, but as a real contemporary threat. In the following we shall discuss this very momentous possibility.
But we shall discuss not just this possibility, but also to what is implied by the Talmudic saying “the world exists for six thousand years and for one destroyed…” (tractate Rosh haShanah page 38), namely to the traditions that envision the Times of the Messiah and the End of Days to the end of the six thousand years. Or alternatively, to the tradition which envisions the end of the six thousand years as the transition from ?lam haZeh (this World) to ?lam haBa (the World to Come) – which is a world of different, and finer, human and spiritual attributes.
An ancient Kabbalah book, Sefer haTemunah (Book of the Picture) elaborates on the discussion of the alternative worlds. Continuing from the clue of the Midrash that God “creates worlds and destroys them” (Bereshit Raba 3:9) – or according to another version “first it came in (the Creator’s) thought to create the world with the attribute of Judgment (Midat haDin), and (then) He saw that the world cannot endure and He preceded with the attribute of Mercy (Midat haRa?amim) and joined it with the attribute of Judgment (Bereshit Raba 12:15) – the Sefer haTemunah develops a system of “Sabbaticals” (Shemitot): cycles of worlds which exist for seven thousand years and then are replaced by other worlds.[6]
The Qabbalah accepted – in its doctrine of the Sephirot (ten Divine attributes) – this division to seven thousand years cycles as a basic construct, and drew a parallel between “the six Sephirot of construction” (?esed, Gevurah, Tif’eret, Netsa?, Hod and Yesod) to the six days of creation, and the seventh millennium, which parallels the Sephirah of Malkhut and the Shabbat (Sabbath) to “the Sabbath of the worlds”. But there are many discussions in Qabbalah texts concerning the number of Shemitot that preceded the creation of our world. The more common version (which is more expected from a dramatist’s perspective) is that we are on the threshold of the seventh world, which is made like its predecessors from cycles of seven thousand years, thus this version estimates the age of the world by forty-two thousand years.
But the Qabbalah holds still greater surprises for these times: Rabbi Yi??ak of Acre, a contemporary of Moses de Leon at the 13th century, has developed calculations which present the age of the universe much like the latest astronomical estimates.
In his book O?ar ha?ayim which was discovered only recently,[7] Rabbi Yi??ak builds a Kabbalistic calculation according to the sentence we brought before “… for a thousand years are in Thine eyes like a day….”. Thus 42,000 years, which were already agreed by his predecessors in the Kabbalah (six cycles of seven thousand years) X 1000 (since we are considering the years of the Creator) X 365 days in each such divine year = 15,330,000,000 of our years – that is, a bit over 15 billion, which accords with current scientific calculations regarding the time of “the Big Bang” (for example, Steven Hawkins, in his book “A Short History of Time” dates the age of the universe between ten and twenty billion years).
So here is, thus, “a scientific fig leaf” for those who shy away from the Torah for being obsolete, or irrelevant, by comparison with modern scientific theories.
However we, in the course of the chapters of this treatise, shall prefer to hold on to the accepted Jewish account, which is used for the Hebrew calendar, and which asserts that almost some six thousand years ago there happened something which is worth commemorating, and which is expected to last for six thousand years, namely: which we are approaching the acme – or alternatively the end – of. As the Talmudic source (Bavly, Sanhedrin 97a) “for six thousand years the world exist…. two thousand years of Tohu (chaos, or bafflement), two thousand years Torah, and two thousand years the Days of the Messiah”. We are thus at the close of the “Days of the Messiah”. There have already been many Midrashim and explanations about this, and the most detailed and profound is of the GRA – “The Ga’on of Vilna”.[8] The innovation of our new Midrash is that it also considers contemporary technological developments (like the Internet) to which past commentators did not relate.
