Voluntary Chaos
When God started creating, He chose to abdicate control. Genesis 1:1 Skip Moen paraphrase
When – “Bereshit, ‘in the beginning,’ describes not the clarities of origin and cause, but the potentialities of purpose.”[1] So writes Avivah Zornberg, reflecting on Rashi’s comment on creation. Potentialities demand alternatives. Things might not work out as we expect, and the same can be said for God’s creation. This fundamental logic is ignored when theologians posit the transcendental God resting alone on high. Ignoring this logic forces both God and Man into doctrinal straitjackets.
“Within the frame of God overseeing the vistas of space and time—a transcendent God, who, in His ‘high solitude,’ knows what must be, as though it already were—within the frame of Necessity, what room is there for tears or for laughter, for hope or disappointment?”[2]
The Bible has a different perspective.
“Robert Alter writes of ‘the most characteristic moments of biblical narrative’: ‘The world is seen as offering all sorts of access to human understanding, but there is also no absolute fit between the nature of reality and the human mind. The biblical tale is fashioned in ways that repeatedly remind us of that ontological discrepancy.’”[3]
“Theoria, in Greek, suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a great distance, and favors the idea of a vertical view downward . . . In place of the nolad metaphor [foreknowledge], the foreknowledge of a necessary future, that is not yet, but that can be seen from the top of a belfry as ‘already born,’ there is the contingency of the live child, who will die. It is this frame, of contingency and passion, that God chooses to inhabit. Just as a human father does, God assumes the risks of the live process of creation.”[4]
Zornberg concludes: “The price to be paid for a tzaddik—a righteous man—is creation. . . For to create is precisely not entirely to control.”[5]
The implications spring upon us like a cosmic earthquake. “What is given at the beginning challenges man to the self-transformations that will allow him, in spite of everything, to stand in the presence of God.”[6]
“In spite of everything”—that is, in spite of all the things that don’t work out as expected; all the potentialities that were accidents waiting to happen. “In spite of everything” in your life and mine that pushed us away from His purposes. “In spite of everything” that happened when we listened to the yetzer ha’ra and fell from the transcendental path. In other words, when we lived as created agents. The Bible is the story of “in spite of everything.” It’s not the great God [Zeus] looking down from lofty Heaven [Olympus] judging pedestrian mortals [sinners]. No, it’s the God who realized what might happen and created anyway, ready to live with the consequences—just like us!
Topical Index: beginning, potentialities, creation, transcendent, b’rēʾšît, Genesis 1:1
[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 36.
[2] Ibid., p. 34.
[3] Ibid., p. 378.
[4] Ibid., p. 34.
[5] Ibid., p. 35.
[6] Ibid., p. 36.
Yes!… “not the clarities of origin and cause, but the potentialities of purpose…” In the genesis creation account we are told six times that God beholds what he has made and calls it good. And in reviewing His creation, it is on the sixth day (that is, creation’s completion) that He pronounces (or ‘judges’) it very good. Even so, the climax of the narrative occurs only on the seventh day, the Sabbath, when the blessing and sanctity of the Sabbath- the seventh day- serves to crown God’s work of creation with holiness, (a word used only with reference to the Sabbath [whereas the work of creation is pronounced good]).
As explained by Messianic Jewish Theologian, Mark Kinzer, “The world, untarnished by any evil, was very good. But it was not yet holy. It was chol—profane, secular.” In Genesis 2, the Sabbath is “not an institution but a hope,” a sign that points toward creation’s eschatological telos—holiness (kedukshah). Before human sin and death even enter the narrative, the good/holy construct is already in place. The Genesis creation account sets the narrative in motion, pointing the way toward the intended sanctification of God’s good creation. 1
Thus, the intrigue of contingency exists and lies with the free-will agency of the human beings God has formed, into whom He breathed his own breath of life.
[1] Mark Kinzer, “Beginning with the End: The Place of Eschatology in the Messianic Jewish Canonical Narrative,” in Israel’s Messiah and the People of God, 95.