Bereshit - Primordial Chaos

“Everything must have a beginning...
…and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.”
— Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein, 1831

This is the translation of JPS, KJV. The ancient Greek LXX translation of tohu and bohu appears as ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος (Gen. 1:2 BGT), which can be translated as “invisible and unformed” (NETS) or “unworked and indistinguishable.” John W. Wevers, Septuaginta: Genesis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974), 75. Other such renderings include: “waste and void” (ASV), “formless void” (NRSV), “formless and empty” (NIV), “formless and desolate” (GNB), “welter and waste” (Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses [New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004]), and “shapeless and formless” (Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed: A New View into the Five Books of Moses [New York: HarperCollins, 2003], 33); “Confusion and Chaos” (Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introductions, Commentary, and Notes, [New York: Schocken Books, 1995], 11-13); “topsy-turvy” or “hodge-podge” (Jack M. Sasson, “The Genesis of Time,” TheTorah [2019]).

-From https://www.thetorah.com/article/creating-order-from-tohu-and-bohu by Prof. James A. Diamond

Creating Order from Tohu and Bohu by Prof. James A. Diamond

Although the biblical account resembles Plato’s view of creation, by presenting creation as God’s thoughtful reaction to preexistent chaos, the biblical account of the origin of the ordered universe reflects the process of thought that Aristotle described as the journey the mind takes when it seriously reflects and questions existence. Perplexity is the catalyst for God’s creative impulses, who feels prompted to shape creation into something orderly, defined, planned, and imbued with wisdom. YHWH, thus, lives up to the reputation the Psalter later credited Him with: כֻּלָּם בְּחָכְמָה עָשִׂיתָ, “You have made everything with wisdom (chokhma)” (Ps 104:24).

Bereishit — by Raymond Simonson from Limmud on One Leg 2013

Kabbalists however suggest that far from being depressing, tohu vabohu contains the sense of nothing, but the potential for everything. Similarly, Rav Moshe Feinstein (leading 20th Century New York based Orthodox rabbi) picked up on Rashi's (11th century commentator) interpretation of tohu as coming from the root tamah meaning to wonder or be amazed/ astonished. These commentators explain that that we should all be awed by the sheer untapped potential that already exists within the universe. It is not the total absence of anything and the complete desolation that causes the wonder, amazement and disbelief, rather it’s the stark contrast between that and the potential that is unleashed during the act of creation.

The Sacred Gap, Parshat Haazinu by Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Like the hovering of the eagle's wings that signal a closeness-with-distance, so the earth was born out of the smallest gap between upper and lower waters "nogeah v'aino nogeah," touching yet not touching. The waters of the sky above and the waters of the oceans below sat (and sit) precariously close to each other, almost touching, almost flooding the whole world. (This frightful awareness was enough to drive Ben Zoma mad.) But 'almost' is the key. It was the tiny crack between them that enabled the universe to come into being. It was their delicate separation--eino nogeah--that was their protective holding. It seems that the cosmic order, the antidote to tohu va'vohu, depends on this very precious balance between touching and not touching.

At the end of Moshe's life and at the end of the Torah, we are called back into consciousness of this sacred reality that birthed us. Parshat Haazinu tells us that the force that holds up the world is also the force that holds us up, touching and not touching, fluttering just close enough for us to feel the presence of our Source but staying just far enough away to enable us to stand. Placed here at this auspicious moment at the end of Moshe's life, we are no doubt meant to internalize and broaden the message. The world is sustained and we are sustained when we can both come extraordinarily close—to God and to other people—and also step back to make room for the agency of another. It is an exquisitely subtle line, indeed one that threatens the stability of the whole world. As such, it is a life sustaining one. We must learn to care fiercely without crushing those we love. We must learn to hover just close enough not to hurt those beneath our wings. And we must learn to fly, where we can, so that we might carry others.

On Sacrifices and Life: Wholeness Dismembered but Re-membered by Prof. Rabbi Wendy Zierler

If one thinks about the creation of the world as described in Genesis 1, this notion becomes clearer. When God creates the world we live in now, God begins with the world as it was before, a tohu vavohu (תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ), an undifferentiated mass. And then, there is light, followed by a series of distinctions between light and dark, evening and morning, upper and lower waters, heaven and earth, land and sea, male and female. And so it is that the temimut, or undifferentiated wholeness of the primordial world is systematically dismembered, and gives way to a new wholeness, the created world.

This process of dismembering a whole to create another is mirrored in human experience as well. Since the beginning of time, human knowledge, devotion, and life have been a continual process and effort of dismembering and subsequent re-membering, i.e., reassembling the sundered pieces into new experiential and cognitive wholes. The experience goes all the way back to the womb, where we are one with our mothers, differentiated from them at birth, and begin the process of growth that reconstitutes each of us a unique whole.

Human life, knowledge, and devotion may begin in wholeness, but almost immediately, this wholeness gives way to differentiation and a splitting off into constituent parts. Although there is pain in this, there is also hope, as each dismemberment leads to a new re-membering.

This is our human lot: to reach for wholeness in the face of inevitable sundering and loss, to think and analyze, and re-member our way into a new, reconstituted sense of second naivete, as literary critical Paul Ricoeur describes it, or, in the language of this parashah, a form of reinterpreted, re-membered temimut. We may not know the precise words for it, but we re-member the images and declare the longing for wholeness and togetherness nevertheless.

Nothing can be made from nothing—once we see that's so,
Already we are on the way to what we want to know.

-Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1st C. BCE