Bereshith: Beginnings

Bereshith: Beginnings

The Genesis, as it is described in this week's parsha is the archetype of anti-science.  The educational enemy of science is called "Creationism. "As technology moves forward, reading Genesis becomes stranger as it begins to make more sense. Let's skip the first sentence, for now, and go to: And E said 'Let there be light.'  Now, almost any person can say the same words... and there will be light ( per Alexa, Google, etc).  The power to say something and have it happen has descended from the Divine to the mundane. Does that reduce the impact of the text?  Does it help us understand what happened here?  

The first thing the text tells us is: there was a beginning. It removes the idea of an eternal world  that always was and always will be. There was a before;   there was a beginning ; there is a now; there will be an end. 

The scientific idea that the universe has a beginning has had its ups and downs.  It is less than 100 years from  since Hubble concluded that the universe is expanding, based upon the red shift ( a Doppler effect on light: A source of light that is moving away from the observer causes the waves of light  to appear a little longer.  Red is the longest visible wavelength) . If the universe is expanding, it must have been more compact yesterday than it is today, and much more compact  long ago.  Taking this idea of expansion back as far as it can go, there may have been a time when the universe was maximally  compact, before the expansion began.  That means that there was ( at least a relative)  beginning. 

But what was before the beginning?  Chazal say that the story bgins with a ב፣ 

a letter that looks like a parenthesis, a delimiter, One cannot go further back.  An attempt  to go further back  leads to the right  sided border of the letter, into the the letter itself, a place of utter darkness and no sense of direction.  Going with the words leads to Heaven and Earth and Light.  

The story of the powerful E creating the world lends itself to the science-fiction of a techno-deity, a being so much more advanced than humans ( especially pre-electrical humans) that it is natural to consider that being divine. It is not the power of Gd , nor Gd's ownership of the world  that generates my, modern ,allegiance.  It is the direction that Torah provides in our efforts improve the world, and the cooperation in the effort that earns my faith.