Create Like God
Rosh HaShanah Morning 5781
Saturday, September 19, 2020
Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York
by Rabbi Jonathan Freirich

Creation started by getting out of the way.
The Creation story before the one we read in Genesis starts with an idea from Maimonides, the famous Jewish Medieval scholar. The Infinite, the fundamental idea of God, by being endless started out as everything, everywhere, and always. In order to create something that was not God, since all of creation in which we live is clearly not God, or at least, it is God plus everything else, God had to shrink.

Before God could create, God had to make room.

The Hebrew for this term is tzimtzum - self-reduction.

And we know all about the need to self-reduce.

Parenting is like this. We want to protect our kids, control everything and we cannot.

We should not.

For anyone to grow we need space. Kids need to explore on their own, find their own way, make their own mistakes, and sometimes encounter difficulties that we might have helped them avoid. This is one of the main ways we allow them to grow and mature.

The same goes for anything we plant. Plants need care and sunlight and water and they also need us to leave them alone. We can over-trim them, over-water them, over-fertilize them. Figuring out the right type of attention to give to something is a key aspect of encouraging its growth. Leaving us alone to figure things out, whether we are a tree or a person, really makes a difference.

The Zohar describes it this way: God shrunk into an infinitely tiny point, and from that point, poured divine energy back into the empty space that God had left filling the universe with a new creation, one that had stuff, and in the stuff could be found parts of God.

Turns out that process wasn’t so easy.

Creation started with getting out of the way, and creation started with an accident.

Let’s read the creation story in Genesis closely:

When God began creating the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters - God said: Let there be light! And there was light. God saw the light: that it was good… (Genesis 1:1-3)

Later, after two days of creation, the Torah continues:

God said: Let there be lights in the dome of the heavens, to separate the day from the night… (Genesis 1:14)

And then we hear all the details of the creation of the sun and the moon and the stars.

So, what happened to the light from Day One?

We see this question as an opportunity to tell a story behind the story. This is when we create midrash, and imagine answers to questions in the text. The text asks us to ask questions and develop our own interpretations..

We can answer the question, “What happened to the Light of the First Day of Creation?” by retelling the story of creation from God’s perspective.

Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, a Jewish scholar of the Bible and teacher at Pardes in Jerusalem, observed that all motivation comes from needing something - we notice something is missing and we work to fill the absence. From this perspective, Jewish mystics suggested that God began to create because God did not want to be alone. God was lonely and wanted to fix it. Later in Genesis, God expressed this sentiment by sympathizing with Adam’s loneliness. God says: “It is not good for the human to be alone, I will make him a helper corresponding to him” (Genesis 2:18). We’ll return to that.

When God starts sending divine power into the world, the first creation of light, and it is the light of God’s unfiltered raw creative essence. God forced all that power into spaces, newly created vessels that were no longer made of God. These vessels couldn’t contain God’s energy, and they shattered, spreading shards containing the bits of the essence of God throughout the universe.

This is the potential accident at the beginning of creation.

However, this is no tragedy at the beginning of time. This is how, through the act of self-reducing, and then re-entering the new creation in the stuff that God created, God becomes present in all of Creation as slivers, sparks of that original light, remnants that we uncover when we create, when we work together for a higher purpose, when we participate in repair of the universe. This story is the source of the term, tikkun olam, “repairing the universe”. Our task of repair is existential. When we recognize the spark of God in anything else we partner in the building of a better universe. When we offer a blessing we recognize the Godliness in that moment. When we connect with other people and learn and work together, we realize the Godliness in each of us that makes us all together greater than the sum of our parts.

This “shattering of the vessels” explanation gives us a story about what happened to the original light and why God needed to create smaller sources of light, the sun, moon, and stars, later in the creation story.

A Late Medieval mystic, Menachem Azaria of Fano explained this need for things to break in order to create, in this way: “Just as the seed cannot grow to perfection as long as it maintains its original form, growth coming only through [the breaking of its shell]. So [creation] could not become whole as long as [it] maintained [its] original form, but only by shattering.”

What makes a seed grow is that it breaks open. The breaking of the seed’s shell is the beginning of the growth of the plant. This allows a root to emerge from the seed into the soil and stretch towards the sun. An intact seed, one that never breaks open, will never grow.

Our universe, like a successful seed, broke, and thus grew. Something needed to break open, in order for creation to happen and our world to emerge.

This mystical version says we are created in the divine image because everything is from God. Everything is filled with the shards of God. God creates through contributing a small bit to all things. And God doesn’t control everything. This is one model of creation.

God creates by getting out of the way.

God creates by shrinking and even by shattering.

And like the rest of us, God struggled as a first time parent.

It started out so well. On the Sixth Day of Creation, God creates humanity, “So God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God did God create it, male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27)

God gives the humans all the fruits and vegetables to eat, God sees all that God made is very good, end of the Sixth Day, then Shabbat, then, in Genesis, Chapter 2, God formed the human, placed them, only now it is “him”, in the Garden of Eden, along with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. Tells the new human that he can’t eat from these two trees, brings all the animals to the human to name, none of which are suitable helper-partners for the human, and then God puts the human to sleep and creates a woman from his side.

What happened to the first humans? Why do we have these two stories? One story could be before the other, one could be a separate story all together. We have lots of questions and explanations. And, more questions. After the serpent and the fruit of the trees and leaving Eden, and Cain and Abel and murder, then Cain goes out and meets other people who weren’t mentioned before! Where did those people come from?

With all of these questions, let’s focus on just one, why did God take these newly formed people, children really, and put them in the room with the things that they were not allowed to eat? Think about it. No parent would say to their children - “Stay in this room on your own, and don’t eat from the beautiful and tasty looking things in the middle of the room. Everything else that you can eat from in here is alright, just not those beautiful, tasty-looking, special things. Leave those alone.” This would never work. And it didn’t.

Not only that, then God got upset with all the people and animals on the planet a few chapters later and wiped them all out out except for Noah and his family.

As a parent, we might call that the “nuclear option”, and it doesn’t really serve to teach good behavior any better than kicking the kids out of the garden when the parent left them there with the forbidden goodies.

God struggled to learn.

Creation happens when we get out of the way and let it happen.

Creation happens when things break and the brokenness turns into something new.

And even God doesn’t get it right on the first try.

Today we chant: Ha-Yom Ha-rat Olam. “Today the world is born anew.” Or, “Today is the birthday of the world.”

With all the mishaps in creation though, why are we celebrating? It seems like not much of a birthday.

Medieval Jewish scholars like Saadia Gaon and Maimonides argue that we should interpret the Torah figuratively if and when the stories don’t match up with observations and scientific proof. Both these mainstream Jewish thinkers from over eight hundred years ago held that belief in the truth of the Bible does not require a denial of science, what they called reason or logic, when the two seem to conflict.

So if these passages in Genesis are not about actual creation, then what are they about?

We are called to be holy because God is holy - that is at the heart of the holiness code in Leviticus which we read on Yom Kippur. I believe that we are called upon to learn from God’s model too.

We learn from God that there is a spark of all creation to which we are connected in everyone and everything. When we see ourselves as interconnected we foster greater growth and cultivate relationships that provide for mutual learning and evolution between individuals and communities. We have to make space for it all to happen. Creation is a cooperative process and we can’t do it all by ourselves and we need to make room for our partners.

We learn from God that brokenness, like the cracking open of a seed, may be the beginning of a creation. An accident is only a difficulty if it doesn’t serve as the beginning of something new.

And we learn from God that we always have more to learn as creators, as parents, as partners in the creation of something bigger and better.

We celebrate the birthday of the world to remind us that we are co-creators - the world’s birthday is a reminder for all of us to continue to follow God’s model and bring new and better things into being.

Wishing all of us a Good Year, a Shanah Tovah of creativity and humility, partnership and experimentation, bold starts and reimagining the courses we’ve chosen when we strayed.

May 5781 be better because we make it better, together.