We’re so familiar with the first lines of the Torah that we take for granted how revolutionary they were in their historical context, and how subtly they can influence our thinking today.  Before we can get to those two questions, though, we also have to acknowledge that we’re not sure what the lines even mean.  

 The precise meaning of ‘bereshit bara elohim et hashamayim v’et ha-aretz’ has long been debated among commentators and scholars.  “In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” is the usual English rendering.  But as Rashi points out, reishit ordinarily has an object – for example, reishit chochmah, the beginning of wisdom.  So what is the “of” here – in the beginning of what?  Rashi wants us to translate the line “In the Beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, the universe was formless and void,” a primordial chaos subsequently ordered by the Creator.  This is the translation that Everett Fox chose in his recent translation of the Torah, and it has support in Bereshit Rabba, which goes even further, and suggests “t the beginning of God’s creation of heaven and earth, when the earth was without form and void and there was darkness on the face of the deep, God said, ‘Let there be light.’” So great is the uncertainty that the Ramban takes the confusion as an example of how we really can’t understand the Torah absent the rabbinic tradition, an apt topic with which to begin his commentary.

 These disputes are not entirely idle.  The most revolutionary aspect of the first line of the Torah is how the world begins with God’s creating.  No primordial battle, no “before-time,” no autoerotic self-generation of the cosmos, and no pre-existing matter.  Of course, there are hints of all of these both in the Torah itself and in later elaborations. _Tehom_ sounds a bit like Tiamat; the Leviathan myth echoes Near Eastern tales of God slaying the primordial serpent; and the Kabbalah uses erotically charged language to describe how the Ein Sof is “delighting in Itself” prior to emanation.  (The Zohar, by the way, completely retranslates the first line of Bereshit into “With Wisdom [chochmah], the Infinite created in Elohim [binah] ‘et’ [the other Sefirot, aleph to taf, and the Immanent Shechinah],” totally revisioning what the story is about.)  And where does the “water” come from?  (Rashi goes out of his way to point out that the Torah isn’t organized chronologically, etc.)  So it’s not entirely unambiguous.  But at least on the pshat level, Bereshit enacts a theogonic revolution: there is nothing prior to God.

 Staying with Rashi for a moment: it’s notable that Rashi begins his commentary by asking why this story is here at all.  Why tell us about creation?  This is a shocking statement.  Today we take for granted that one of the things “religion” is supposed to do is explain how the world came to be – and then we undergo crises of faith when it fails to do so adequately.  For Rashi, religion – or at least Torah Judaism – has no business explaining cosmology.  He quotes the tanna Rabbi Yitzhak’s objection that really it should begin with the first commandment given to Israel, and justifies the existence of the creation story in nationalistic terms: see, the whole world is God’s, so it’s okay that he gave the Land of Israel to us.

 As unsatisfying as Rashi’s answer is, I find his question somewhat reassuring.  I notice that during these months of Bereshit-reading, my perspective on what the Torah is really about, from a 30,000 foot perspective, gets confused.  The mythology of this week’s parsha, the fantastic details of next week’s, the rapidity with which the dysfunction of the patriarchs unfolds – it is almost like a whirlwind.  I remember once, in college, a Bible-as-literature teacher tried to convince us that the overarching theme of Genesis was incest.  Viewed without any context, it was hard to rebut – there is clearly a problematization of origin, beginning in this week’s parsha with the notorious “Cain’s wife” episode – who is she, where did she come from, why is she not named... questions our traditional commentators answer by acknowledging that, yes, she had to have been Cain’s sister, and so that is why she is not named and why her birth is not even mentioned.

 
 But Bereshit is not “about” incest.  It is about beginnings, and is first and foremost setting the stage for the overwhelming majority of the Torah text, which is about the covenant between Israel and God, how it starts, where it goes wrong, and what to do about it now.  In that very, very broad context, reading the first line of Bereshit as about _ordering_ makes a lot of sense.  Sociologist Mary Douglas has suggested that the mysterious rules of kashrut are best understood in parallel to the Genesis narrative.  What’s forbidden are creatures which don’t seem to fit the order of the universe, as reflected in Genesis 1:25-28.  The “fish of the sea” have fins and scales and swim around.  The “behema,” which my handy Tanach translates as “cattle,” have split hooves, chew their cud, etc.  Creatures which diverge from these general rules – a lobster’s in the water, but not swimming – are confusing, and thus off-limits.  The key to this reading is the word “l’minah,” of its kind, which occurs in verses 21, 24, and 25.  It’s not that things not “of their kind” are bad in some way; it’s that the human project of stewardship (verses 26 and 28) is about reading order into chaos, “btzalmeinu kidmuteinu,” in the Divine image.

 Likewise, and more significantly, in ethical behavior, in the way we see our world as manifesting the Divine, and in how we are to construct a “mishkan” (tabernacle) not only out of various cloths and metals but also out of mitzvot.

 All this in the first line of the parsha.  Really, it’s all in the first letter.   Rabbis have long been intrigued by why the Torah starts with a Bet instead of an Aleph.  Surely, starting at square one should be starting with the first letter – the alpha of alpha-and-omega.  There are many creative answers to this question – the Baal Haturim suggests that it’s because Bet is the first letter of bracha (blessing), whereas Aleph is the first letter of arur (curse).  But I want to develop a different answer, which can tie these seemingly disparate threads of beginning-talk together.

 An answer from Pardes’s Yosef Leibowitz is that the Bet refers to the twofold nature of creation as shamayim and aretz.  This reading draws on what has been suggested above, that the project of existing in the image of God is one of ordering chaos.  There is a tendency to see our creation narrative, with the Garden of Eden and the rest, as similar to aboriginal stories of the “before-time”: at first there was this strange, primordial, perfect world, and then something came along to destroy it. Yosef’s reading, though, differs.  The shamayim, that which is perfect and infinite, is created right alongside the aretz, that which seems imperfect and finite.  The Jewish project is not to reject one in favor of the other, but rather to bring them together.  Sex, food, business, art, war, economics – none of these are purely earthly, or purely good or evil.  All are sites for a process of sanctification in which we see order in chaos.  Sometimes this principle is attractive to us today – everyone likes holy sex – and sometimes it is frightening; hopefully no one likes holy war.  But whatever our interpretation and modification of the general principle, it is embodied in the duality with which the world is created, right from the first letter of the Torah.

 Ours is neither a monastic tradition nor a materialistic one.  The Jewish ideal is not to reject the aretz and live in a world of shamayim; we are meant to get our hands dirty and fight the greed and violence that is so much a part of our contemporary milieu.  At the same time, the Jewish ideal is not to get so lost in our involvement with the material world (either from a egocentric or altruistic perspective) that we forget that ultimately, everything is shamayim, altz ist gott, in the words of the Hasidim.  

 The “answer” here is not a waffley, watered-down Aristotelian “mean” of each.  To wrestle with God (when you know that God will win, since only God is wrestling Godself) means to approach each moment with a full embrace of it, in its limits, in its concrete reality, and also with a mochin d’gadlut (expanded mind) that sees it as the perfect revelation of God, here, now. So, eyes open, measuring-stick in hand, knowledge that nothing can be reduced to measurement in mind.  God created the world; there is nothing that God didn’t create; and since God surrounds and fills all of creation, there is nothing that isn’t God.  Consider our national symbol: one triangle pointing upward, toward the transcendent sky-father, the world of perfection, pure spirit, and the One; another triangle pointing downward, toward the immanent earth-mother, the dirty, grimy, organic, beautiful world of bodies and work to be done.  Do we reject one in favor of the other?  Not if we read carefully the first letter of the Torah.