The Beginning of the End

Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” Genesis 1:6  NASB

Separate – “In the act of creation, there is perhaps inevitable sadness, as the work works itself loose from the vision.”[1]  The Egyptians believed in unity, that is, the absolute unity of existence.  Eventually everything will return to the chaos from which it sprang.  The primordial sea of chaos, the complete extinction of diversity, was the final end.  Modern science isn’t so far removed from its ancient ancestors.  We’ve just replaced the primordial sea with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: heat death.  In the end, the universe reverses its direction.  It collapses into Singularity.  Nothing else exists.

Perhaps when we read Zornberg’s existential grief over God’s act of creation we need to keep the Egyptians and the astrophysics in mind.  Something tragic is happening, even in a world that doesn’t end in chaos or heat.  The once peaceful order of God alone has been shattered—forever—with a creative act that inevitably brings division.  In fact, that is the real flaw in creation—separation.  A world apart from its Creator.  Angst on both sides.

Zornberg comments:

“The essential act of this second day is this act of division: ‘He divided His works into different groups and reigned over them.’  From now on, the notion of the sovereignty of God will depend on the differences and many-ness of His subjects.  But the idea of separation and difference has a tragic resonance gone is the primal unity of ‘God alone in His world.’  New possibilities, new hazards, open up.  The primary image of such separation, the division of the waters and their weeping expresses the yearning of the split-off of the cosmos for a primordial condition of unitary being.  With division begins alienation, conflict, and yet, paradoxically, a new notion of divine sovereignty.  In this new perspective, God is recognized as King only by that being who is most radically separated from Him.”[2]

You and I feel it every day of our lives.  We are essentially alone.  There is a private, inner world that can never really be shared with anyone else because no two people have the same journey, the same history, the same existential reality.  We might find, if we’re lucky, someone to share some part of this odyssey with us, but it will always and inevitably be only a part.  Even with God, who knows us more thoroughly than any human being ever can, we are still separate.  In Christian and Jewish circles, there is no nirvana, no absorption into the primal nothingness, no extinction of identity.  Creation—even our creation—is the beginning of the end, the introduction of lĕbado, aloneness.  God acknowledges this reality when He says, “It is not good for man to be lĕbado,” and He doesn’t mean “without a wife.”  Alone is an ontological fact of existence.  Once God creates, once there is something other than Him, lĕbado becomes a reality.

The only real problem of humanity is how to live with this.  The only solution offered in the Bible is reunion with the Creator, even if it is not absorption.  The ontological emptiness of living demands a spiritual answer, and tears shed that such a solution is even necessary.

Topical Index: lĕbado, alone, creation, separate, Genesis 1:6

[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 20.

[2] Ibid., pp. 5-6.