B'reshit: Creation for Today Davina Moss On the occasion of her parent's 30th Wedding Anniversary 2 October 2010

As you heard, the beginning of this week’s Parasha describes the creation of the world. This is followed by detailed discussion of the creation of man, and then of the geography of Eden. After this comes the story of the temptation of Eve and the dispelling from Eden, the story of Cain and Abel and finally, a long list of descendants, setting us up for a new timeframe next week.

When I read this week’s Parasha, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I know it so well, I’ve been taught a thousand times, and yet it baffles me, somewhat. It’s written in such a formulaic, almost dull way. I can’t help but think, is this how I would write the story of creation?

How would I attempt to define the chaotic mess that forms the world we live in? It is almost impossible to confine the magnitude of nature into words. Poets through the ages have struggled with the concept – words are so small and the world is so great.

In his Auguries of Innocence, William Blake famously writes

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

It seems a natural instinct to attempt to gain some perspective on the world, to attempt to control it and understand it, and describe it with words or simple ideas. The sheer number of poems attempting to reflect nature’s majesty, to do justice to the gifts we see around us, pay tribute to this absolute human need to define our world. Blake tries to ascribe simple imagery to the expanse, poets like T S Eliot or Manley Hopkins try to accurately recreate the sounds of nature, Emily Dickinson likens the whole lot to art – the ultimate creative force. And yet it seems impossible for writers to get a handle on the world, where it appeared from and how it came to be.

For those who wrote the Bereshit passage, a different path has been chosen. A highly methodical list, in which each level of complexity can only exist because of the one before. There’s a telltale verse which says that Adam and Eve named all the other creatures, gave them the labels which they would ever after be known by. The whole way the story of creation is written, chunked up into types, seems to suggest the beginnings of taxonomy: the biological study of categories and the relationships between things. It seems to be a human instinct to organise – the divide, to order, to arrange and to relate. This seems to reflect this historical period in which we think these passages were written: the sense of a newly formed community attempting to implement systems and understand the world around them.

Writing a creation story to start a holy scripture, it may seem more logical to say that God created everything in one big go, with no need to rest – this surely suggests God’s awesome power and impressive strength. And yet this story has been written in a set order, with small chunks completed each day, which suggests our wish to understand how the complex, highly detailed world around us could have come into being. The Biblical telling of the creation of the world examines how the most complex can only exist after the most simple: there are no humans without simpler animals, and no simpler animals without plants, no plants without earth and no earth without light.

If we read this story symbolically, it could represent not only the creation of a physical world, but of the emotional relationships we form with others. These begin when we turn on the light – when we acknowledge each other and the world around us. After that, God separates the waters and creates the firmament, just as we in our lives search for purpose, for reason – for the dry land between the chaos. And from there we grow our relationships – some more simple, like the plants of the land: our working relationships, for example, or our acquaintances. Some more complex, like the birds and fish and beasts: our support networks, our friends. And some yet more complicated, like humans: our loved ones. If Eve really was made from the ribs of Adam, so too are our closest relationships products not only of the other person but more of ourselves.

Just as in the Torah, the world is created in several stages, on several levels, so too should we look at the different levels of relationships that we have. Genesis reminds us that we must always be aware of different scales – of the universe, of the planet, of the country, of our community, of our families and of ourselves.

And yet there’s more to the story of Creation than merely a physical world. I had trouble finding something to say today. I had trouble finding something new and original and different to say about this Parasha. Because everybody knows it – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, other, everyone knows In the beginning, and the order of the seven days, and the resting, and Let there be light. Creation is part of the bedrock of our religious knowledge: we may be unable to name who begat Isaiah, but we know, or we think we know, where the Torah tells us we came from.

We all know that there are symbolic readings of this passage, that there are meanings and ideas that we can ascribe to our own lives in its words; we know that the formation of our world can reflect our interpersonal relationships, and our development as people. But for us today, it can feel like there is little left to connect us to a retelling of Creation which has been both widely scientifically discredited and is also written in this very simplistic, straightforward manner. As Jews today, we are acutely aware that the world is not always ordered as we would wish, and the chaos can be destructive.

There’s more to the placing of this story at the beginning of the scripture than merely because the beginning is a very good place to start. It reminds us that we must always look back. That we must always be aware of what we came from, and how we’re connected to it, and it encourages us to see the necessity of considering our origins, our own personal Creation story, in everything we do. Creation isn’t merely about the formation of a geological, zoological, populated land. And Creation, as we perhaps see from the various telling of this story in the bible, is not just one story. Each one of us has our own origin story, and as Jews our origins and where we came from are constant reminders of the struggles we have had to form a Jewish world. Thirty years on, the story of the creation of my family still astounds me: my parents met through the death of a mutual friend, and through this tragedy fell in love and formed our family, just as the grain of grit in the oyster shell eventually forms the pearl in pearl wedding.

We live in a highly scientific world, filled with information – a Creation story today doesn’t need to try and understand the literal world. So I think if I were going to write a creation story for Jews today, it would be on this sort of theme. That out of troubles, and tragedies, and problems can come love and hope. Because looking at my family, and at the Jewish community in general, I find that the traditional creation story doesn’t really fit. We don’t work in a tidy, ordered, structured way. The Jewish community hasn’t been slowly built bigger and bigger – it’s fluctuated, and grown, and been forced to shrink and bounced back and forth, and come out stronger than ever. A Creation story for Jews today is more likely to be an out-of-ashes story, a story of forming a community out of hardship, and of binding together in times of need, just as my parents did all those years ago, just as my family have done this past year, just as they’ve done for thirty years. Since time in memoriam, we have been trying to do justice to our world – today we don’t need a Creation story with accurate categories or a strict order, we need a story of triumph to match the world we find ourselves in.