Starting Over Again with God

Parshat Bereishit:

Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Director of Spiritual Development, Maharat

Advanced Kollel: Executive Ordination Track Class of 2018

Here we are, on the cusp of Cheshvan, back again at the beginning of the Torah. After so many chagim, which transported us spiritually to so many different places, now the hard work really begins. Without all of the high drama of the high holidays, in the quiet, the humdrum rhythms of everyday life, we must now find a way to live the life we dreamt of on Rosh Hashanah; to become that person we committed to becoming on Yom Kippur; and to connect to that God whose embracing presence we sensed on Sukkot and throughout the season. The task is large and daunting and so very full of promise.

How are we to proceed? Our tradition offers us both rituals and readings to help us along. We begin our laborious efforts at self-creation with the story of world-creation. And we begin our renewed spiritual strivings after God with the story of God’s earliest strivings with humankind. "Breishit barah Elokim" (Genesis 1:1). The opening of the Torah is a continuation of the themes of the chagim and an invitation to integrate them and to execute them in our lives.

In that spirit, let us focus on the spiritual messaging of the earliest chapters of the Torah. Who is the God of Breishit and what would it mean to be in relationship with that God? How does God introduce Godself to us? And what are the implications of that introduction for our spiritual lives?

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik famously identified two different religious personas, Adam 1 and Adam 2, in the opening chapters of Breishit. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has suggested, a bit less famously and a bit more radically, the presence of God 1 and God 2 in these chapters as well. Allow me to explain.

Genesis 1 begins:

The first lesson of our Torah, the very first thing that we learn about God, is not the oneness of God, but the profound otherness of God. God is not of the world, not subjected to laws of world. God is utterly transcendent, beyond time, beyond space. And yet, nevertheless, this God chose to transcend His transcendence through an act of creation. Demonstrating the grandeur of divine power, God speaks the world into being. First comes light, then rakia/sky, then land and seas, then plants. Then: “Va’yar Elokim ki tov” (1:12). God sees that all of this is good. The radically other, uniquely powerful God interestingly affirms that He is also beneficent.

The pinnacle of this creative act, indeed its realization as “very good,” “tov meod,” comes at the end of chapter 1 with the introduction of the human being.

Hartman argues that God creates human beings in God's own image, to replace God, as it were. God sets up proxies in the world and endows them with tremendous power—to fill the world, master it, rule over it—​so that God can return to being God ​in His infinite transcendence. God creates the world, loves it, imbues it with value, puts us in charge of its maintenance and then exits the scene, so to speak. “Shabbat is God’s goodbye party,” he says.

End of story 1. End of God 1. Creation is a singular act, not an ongoing part of a relationship. It ends with God’s blessing but without God’s continued involvement. The act of creation is critical, but it seems that God leaves history just after entering it. God 1 remains completely self-sufficient and utterly transcendent.

Genesis 2 reverses God 1. Here we find a God not of transcendence, but of immanence.

God 2 is not a God who powerfully speaks a world into existence, but is rather a compassionate God who plants a garden and dreams of a green fellowship. Human beings are not created to be God’s proxies, but to be God's partners in tilling and tending, growing and nurturing the land. And God similarly wants to nurture us, to be in relationship with us. Indeed, the language of mitzvah is introduced here, in the garden, as a means to maintain human-divine contact—"Va’yitzav Hashem Elokim al ha’adam lemor, mikol etz ha’gan echol tochel…" (2:16). God 2 yearns to stay involved in human lives and asks only for loyalty in return. This is a God who is vulnerable, needy, open to care and to caring.

And so unlike the God 1 of Breishit 1 who leaves the world, God 2 enmeshes Himself in human relationship and human history in perpetuity. The story in the garden ends with human failure, divine punishment, and then, so poignantly and paradoxically, a reaffirmation of God 2’s care:

Despite sin, God shields Adam and Chava, as if to say, “No matter what, I still have you covered.

The rest of the Torah follows in a similar vein. God 2, the God of relationship, is the primary force, seeking out relationship, demanding loyalty, and maintaining involvement. The God of detachment, God 1, hovers in the background and surfaces mostly through the occasional human experience of divine absence or awareness of divine power. (Tehillim showcases that most clearly.)

It is beyond our scope for now, but it is worth stating that it is in rabbinic literature that we find a real reckoning with the reality of God 1. Chazal very much existed in a world of divine detachment, but they desperately yearned for divine engagement. Their work—which is very much ours as well—was to find a way to live again with God 2 in a world of God 1.

We began by considering Breishit as a post-chagim call to action, as a way to live into the commitments and aspirations we set for ourselves just a few days and weeks ago. It seems to me that in opening with such a rich, wide, and varied picture of who God is, where God lives, so to speak, and how we might relate to God in time and over time, the Torah is offering us a theological gift and maybe also a spiritual method. It is granting us permission to experience God in multiple, even conflicting ways: in the world and beyond the world, transcendent and immanent, primarily powerful and primarily nurturing, once-creative and always-creative, in history and not in history. And it is also granting us permission to experience ourselves relative to God in multiple, conflicting ways: as agents and subjects, proxies and partners, sinners and beloveds, naked before God, and clothed by God. The story of Breishit, the beginning of our beginnings, invites us to meet God again, that singular being who is at once God 1 and God 2, and there to make space for a relationship that is complex, changing, sometimes dizzying, sometimes electrifying. It encourages us to accent different spiritual modes as our lives demand; to live at different spiritual pitches as the music of our respective realities changes.

This message of spiritual inconsistency is not an easy one, but I believe it can be an enlivening one as find our way into a new year of paradoxes and possibilities.