Psalms and Lamentations: The Preposterous Beginning

Rodger Kamenetz

HADEISH yameinu c'kedem. Renew our days as in the past.

When Jews return the Torah to the Ark, they recite this prayer. It's sung especially at the beginning of a new year, with great yearning, as we turn and return, renewing or hoping to renew ourselves, our connections to one another in family and community, our connection to the divine and to the Torah. All of this is what is new in the New Year. It is why we return each year.

This past New Year the words had even greater intensity, as Rosh Hashanah fell just one week after the attacks on September 11.

It's a paradox, isn't it? Or more precisely, a contradiction. To renew as in the past. That in order to renew, we go back. It's the contradiction of returning to the beginning, of starting afresh. How do we return to a beginning? How do we renew days that are past?

As human beings we live in space and time. True, we don't really understand space and time, yet we live in their framework. Most of us still live in the space of Newton, a sort of infinite box extending in all directions. When our physicists tell us that no, space is curved, we nod but we don't know in our bones what these physicists mean.

Our notions of time are rigid. You can't change the past, we say. You can't predict the future. So perhaps, a Freudian would say, we take special comfort in imagining, as the opening portion of Genesis does, a definite beginning to time. "The beginning," we say. "In the beginning...."

At the simple level, in the Reform movement of Judaism, Jews read this story at the beginning of the new year, because Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world, the anniversary date of creation. But at a deeper level, the story of creation puts us in touch with a different order of time, one in which we can in fact resolve the paradox of renewing our days as of old, the paradox of the impossible return to the beginning, of beginning when beginning has already begun.

The Hebrew word for repentance is tshuvah, which means to return. The greatest time of tshuvah is at the beginning of the new year. At such a time, we need to feel that we can renew, refresh, start again. After the emotional and material devastation of September 11, 2001, we need to feel that there can be a fresh start: we look for signs of hope and renewal. But then every year, when we are ill, depressed, heartsick, or stuck in our lives, then the promise that there can be a new dawn, a new day, a new world, shines for us with great allure.

But the biblical text is not as definitive as we think. In fact, most Jews and Christians, who hold this text dear, have mistranslated the first verse of the Torah. Rashi, Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, the most careful and meticulous reader of Torah, points out in his deep and sober commentary that the Hebrew, Bereishit bara elohim et hashamayim vet haaretz, cannot mean, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." In particular, "In the beginning" is a mistranslation of bereishit. This is shocking. We get the first word wrong. And if we can't even get the first word or first sentence of the Torah right, then what are we doing with the rest of it? We ought to be humble and see how far we are from reading the Bible wisely.

Rashi demonstates, through comparative Hebrew grammar, that the first sentence is not even a sentence, that properly, we should be reading it as, "When God was beginning to create the heavens and earth...." That is, as a subordinate clause. He argues that the Torah does not intend an exact account of the exact order of the events of creation, but rather intends to tell us some of the events that happened at the beginning. Some but not all. For instance, we read of the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters, but we don't hear until later of waters being created. We read about darkness, but nowhere do we hear of darkness being created. The text of creation is not a recipe of creation, nor a history. In a sense, it is not about an event in the past. Creation is still ongoing. God is still just beginning to create the heavens and earth. All of humanity lives in the subordinate clause of an incomplete sentence. Our job in our lives is to complete that sentence, the best we can. In that way, we are part of the story in the Torah, we are continuing the work of creation. It is noteworthy that every material thing that is created is designated as tov or good, but only the Sabbath, in the realm of time, is designated as kodesh, holy. That is why on the Sabbath when Jews recite the text of the seventh day of creation as part of the blessing known as kiddush, we quote from Genesis 2:3. "God blessed the seventh day and He declared it to be holy, for it was on this day that God ceased from all the work that He had been creating [so that it would continue] to function." God rests from creation, but the reverberations are in our doing and making.

This is something we need to understand, the ongoingness of creation. The account in Genesis is not a history of an event in the past, but at a deeper level, it is a teaching about how we renew time, and by renewing time, how we renew ourselves, our communities, our families.

The answer is, that in order to renew our days, we must enter a meditation where there is neither time nor space, neither before nor after. We must, in short, put our faith in the preposterous.

The word preposterous comes from Latin and means pre plus post, before plus after. It means something which comes after, that pretends to come before. Hadeish yameinu c'kedem, renew our days as in the past. The idea of renewing ourselves by returning to the beginning is literally preposterous.

Neither the rabbinic sages nor the medieval commentators were afraid, as we are today, of the preposterous. Rashi states as one of his interpretive principles that there is no before or after in the Torah. He happily quotes events in Chronicles or Esther to prove points about Genesis or Exodus, because in the divine mind, there is no pre or post, no before or after: all is present. Divine time, unlike human time, is preposterous. There is no before or after in eternity.

I'm saying nothing new, and that's quite appropriate. This goes back to the third century, the opening of the great Midrash Rabbah, attributed to the sage Oshaiah. In his commentary on our verse, he writes that the b' in bereishit can be interpreted either as "in" or "with." He interprets it as "with," and reads the sentence, "With Beginning, God created the heaven and earth...."

With Beginning. What is Beginning? Oshaiah cites another verse, quite preposterously, from Proverbs 8:22, namely, "The Lord made me as the beginning of his way." Beginning is wisdom. Therefore, the first sentence reads, "With wisdom, God created the heavens and earth."

And what is wisdom? The Torah itself. In other words, the Torah is a blueprint of wisdom, and God consulted this blueprint in creating our world. Moreover the first sentence in Genesis is the Torah saying that to us, saying, "With me, God created the heaven and earth...."

See how preposterous this is! The very text does not come after creation, but existed before what it describes. Not as ink and parchment, but as wisdom. In wisdom is our real beginning, not this material world we see—not the pettiness and narrow-mindedness of our confused lives, the shortsightedness of our materialism, the self-centeredness of our practical concerns, the blindness of our desires for revenge, our hatreds, our calculations—no, these truly come after, even if they are most present to us at times, and dominate and take over our consciousness in the present.

Another midrash tells us that the Torah begins with the b' of bereishit, the letter beit which is also the number two. We, as humans, live in the world of beit, of twoness, of duality, the world described in the account of creation: a world of light and darkness, night and day, a firmament above and a firmament below, male and female, good and evil, before and after, space and time.

But wisdom precedes them all, and that is why if we are to heal the divisions in our minds and souls, it is to wisdom we must turn.

When we are struck a blow in life—the death of a loved one, the loss of an opportunity—then how much we yearn for the preposterous, yearn to return to the moment just before that loss, in order to make time new again. How much more so, then, after losing thousands of human beings, after losing our security and confidence, all of us are yearning for the preposterous. In our imagination, all of us would dearly love to roll back in time to before the morning of September 11 and the tragedy that unfolded that day.

We cannot do it in the world of twoness—the world of before and after. We cannot move out of this situation by staying in our ordinary framework of thought. We can only do it by moving toward wisdom. In wisdom—not in the calculations of mere reason—can we find a new beginning, the one we are yearning for right now.

Wisdom teaches that lashing out in violence will only produce more violence. Wisdom teaches that hatred produces hatred, that only groundless love can be the answer to groundless hatred. We must search for wisdom that declares itself in our books of wisdom, including the Torah, but not only the Torah. That wisdom, which is at the source of creation—of all creativity—is our true resource. It cannot be found in literal-mindedness. To a literal eye the wisdom is hidden, the book of Genesis is a fairy tale, and not a very good one. Wisdom is timeless. In wisdom there is no before or after. Only when we seek wisdom can we renew ourselves. Call this preposterous if you like, but it is also true.

Rodger Kamenetz is the author of the prose volumes The Jew in the Lotus, Stalking Elijah, and Terra Infirma, and of the poetry collections The Missing Jew, Nympholepsy, and Stuck .

Visit Rodger Kamenetz as Image Artist of the Month for March '04

Issue #32• Fall 2001