“Why didn’t an all-powerful G-d create the world all at once? Why did God go to so much trouble when a snap of the fingers could have brought the world into existence?” That was the question asked by a student in my Florence Melton Adult Mini-School class recently. One student suggested that it teaches us to make an effort to work systematically to better our world. Another said that the created world is a complex place, and we should appreciate all its dimensions.
As the lesson proceeded, we saw the repeated formula for God’s creation of the world--commanding a part of creation into existence, separating elements out of the chaos, naming what was created, and evaluating it. The text describes an intentional, systematic process—and it was good. It contrasts with other existing creation stories--like the Babylonian epic that portray the beginning of the world from spoils of a battle between a female dragon and Marduk, the strongest of the gods. In battle, Marduk uses the four winds to blow Tiamat apart, half of her creating the sky, the other half-- the earth.
What I have thought about since the class, however, has led me to something I will ask my students to respond to when we meet this week. More than the material world is created by God in the first chapter of Genesis. God also creates time, seven “days.” The first day’s light--whose source is something other than the sun-- not only enables us to perceive creation but also allows us to mark the passage of time from one day to the next—light to darkness to light again. As a creation of God, time--like the created world--is ours to master and tend.
The material world and time become inseparable. As modern cosmologists have proven, each requires the other to exist. Later, God will bless the seventh day accentuating its holiness, and later still, we are able to continue creation by living moments of holiness in time.
In The Sabbath: It’s Meaning for Modern Man,Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year. “
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