Oct 29/05 - Shabbat Bereshit: Genesis is More Than Chronology

Commentary by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles

In our own age, and for the last several hundred years, learned men and women have argued about the meaning of the Creation story. Are these tales of a seven-day unfolding of the cosmos meant as the Biblical rendition of history, the record of how Creation actually happened? Or are the opening chapters of Bereshit (Genesis) intended to teach something other than history?

The question is of more than merely academic relevance. Several court cases around the United States seek to gain equal time in the classroom to teach "Creationism," the Biblical account of the origin of life and the cosmos. Proponents of Creationism maintain that the narrative in the Bible is divinely inspired in a literal way. They therefore read of the marvels in the Torah in a fundamentalist light—insisting that to accept the divinity of the Torah means to accept it as a historical record that is literally true. Their approach offers the comfort of certainty, the clarity of simplicity. It also, however, reduces Judaism's most sacred book to the status of an ancient newspaper—relating all the news that's fit to print.

There is another, equally religious way of understanding the Torah and of perceiving its sanctity. Rather than reading the Torah simply as a chronicle of ancient events, a listing of facts (what was created on which day), we can understand the Torah as Judaism's founding statement about the meaning of human, and specifically, Jewish life and community.

While perhaps less successful in compelling acceptance of biblical "facts," the strength of this view is that it does recognize the concerns and priorities of the Torah as primarily religious and spiritual. The Torah doesn't focus on lists of events so much as on what life and history reveal about the Creator of the universe and our brit (covenant) with God.

The Torah tells us how to live, not merely how others have lived. No less an authority than Rashi, (11th Century France), the pre-eminent medieval commentator on the Bible and the Talmud, took such a stand on the story of Creation. Rashi insists that the only way to understand biblical Creation is midrashically (according to rabbinic interpretation). A superficial, historical reading of Creation would miss the point of the story. Such a literal approach to the Biblical tale is, in Rashi's words, "astonishing." Instead, he encourages us to admit that "Scripture does not teach us everything about the order of the earlier or the later acts of Creation."

The narrator of the Torah is not interested in recounting facts. What captures the Torah's attention and what remains significant is not facts in themselves, but what those facts mean for our lives and our communities.

To paraphrase Albert Einstein, imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination, the ability to connect facts into meaningful patterns, the willingness to transform an "is" into an "ought," has characterized our traditions at their best. Jewish traditions, starting with the Creation story, provide a way of reading the world not simply as a random collection of phenomena, but as a coherent message of morality, holiness and hope. Out of that vision of meaning and coherence, a society committed to establishing God's sovereignty, one which can implement God's love, becomes possible. The task awaits; the reading is possible.

Shabbat Shalom.