Bereshit:
Creation
The transition from
paganism to belief in a God “who is incorporeal and has no bodily form” was
more revolutionary than the transition from classical to modern physics. God cannot be defined in terms of human
reality, and therefore He stands above science, which describes the laws that
govern reality. According to this
approach, there cannot be a contradiction between science and belief in God,
for science only describes physical reality, and therefore cannot describe
God….If we define the laws of science as expressing the “will of God,” there
can be no contradiction between science and religion.
Moshe Kaveh
(Contemporary)
The parsha of Bereshit was not given to impart to us information on the
world and all in it, but was directed at the historical future, in order to
provide the basis for the right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, as
opposed to the claim by the other nations of the world: “You are a nation of
brigands, for you stole the land…” The
answer to this is, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” – no human
group owns the land...
Yeshayahu Leibowitz
(20th Century)
What then is the reason
that (this parsha) begins with the creation?...The answer is that the process
of creation is a deep mystery not to be understood from the verses, and it
cannot truly be known except through the tradition going back to Moses our
teacher who received it from the mouth of the Almighty, and those who know it
are obligated to conceal it…Why then was it written? The Torah recounted the whole subject of
creation…the Garden of Eden…the expulsion…the flood…and only the righteous were
saved; and how the sin of their descendents caused them to be scattered… (to
teach) it is proper that when a people continues to sin it should lose its
place and another people should come to inherit the land, for such has been the
rule of God in the world from the beginning.
Nachmanides (13th
Century)
The author of the Midrash
(on creation) did not want foolish people to think that what we know as a
time-frame was indispensable for the development of the physical universe from
its inception to its completion. We must
not be allowed to think that God required six days to accomplish what He
did….the idea conveyed is that God created these six days simultaneously with
creating heaven and earth.
Moshe Alshich
(16th Century)
Readers of the Torah were
never bothered by the simpleton’s question, which is often shared by the
so-called “scientific mind”: Of all the
commentaries, which is the “true” or “real” one? They knew, as keen students of hermeneutics
and modern literary criticism know, that what differentiates great literature
from its lesser counterpart is that the former can be interpreted on many
levels, all equally “true” and “real.”
And what is true of great literature is certainly true of the word of
God, embodied in Torah. The rabbis liken
it to a letter from a loved one who as gone on along journey. In our longing for the absent beloved, how
many times do we read and re-read that letter; how much meaning do we read into
it, and how many different interpretations of every word come to our minds?
Pinchas Peli (20th
Century)
Some would have it that
there is a level of Torah that does not manifest itself in the
commandments. It is beyond the mitzvot. Others
would contend that even the most esoteric levels of Torah are nevertheless
outwardly manifest in the commandments.
To their thinking, there is no level of Torah that is not somehow
intertwined with the commandments. It
seems this is the crux of the famous controversy whether the mitzvot will continue to be in force in the future…The
Talmudic sages who foresaw a future without commandments, held that there is
indeed a level of Torah so sublime that it finds no expression in commandments.
Abraham Isaac Kook (20th
Century