Creation and Creativity

Breisheet Sermon 5785, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This Shabbat Breisheet celebrates creation, describing as the Torah does the origin of the universe.  It is a fantastic portion, and one that has fascinated readers—which is nearly everyone in Western Civilization—since the Torah was itself created.  But the truth is, trying to understand or even fathom the origin of the universe has been a human obsession long before Judaism emerged, in fact, more or less forever.  It is one of the enduring human preoccupations. 

The essence of the issue is that we really do want to know where we come from, where everything comes from, because if we can comprehend that perhaps we can grasp the meaning of our existence.  In discovering our origin, we may find our true purpose.  And so we probe the origins of everything, and seek to understand how we came to be here, and how the world and the entirety of the cosmos were created.

But understanding creation is a complicated matter.  After all, we weren’t there when it all happened, so everything we deduce about creation is based on our ability to understand what already exists and, well, work backwards from there.  Whether we are scientists or theologians or just plain folks, we look around, see what exists now, and make educated or even uneducated guesses about how it came to be.

One of the prevailing theories of the origin of the universe is called the Big Bang Theory—the physics theory, not the TV show—and while that name was originally given derisively by those who disagreed with its premises, it has become perhaps the most persuasive of all the ideas of how things began.  The key concept in the Big Bang Theory is that it all existence started from a singularity, one moment of origin—you know, creation.  There was a great explosion of energy into a void, the Big Bang itself, and with that emanation of photons or particles or some combination of light energy matter began.  Everything that followed was the result of that initial moment of creative energy expansion, an explosion that resulted in all existence eventually coming into being.

It’s a beautiful theory; my friend Danny Matt’s book God and the Big Bang poetically evokes the physics in a mystical setting that harmonized it with Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.  After all, in Genesis the first thing that God creates is light, or, which is pretty much what the initial burst of explosive energy in the Big Bang Theory must have been.  Photons, which are both particle and wave and maybe bosons, too, are light energy, and very likely the original source of everything in the universe.

OK, so the Big Bang Theory explains a good deal about how our universe came into being.  And it fits with our own Genesis description of creation quite nicely.  But naturally, as soon as the theory was articulated, one of the first questions that people asked was, “OK, there was a Big Bang, great moment of singularity, an initial point of beginning.  But what happened before that?”

In other words, what existed before the beginning? 

This is not an empty question, or just a ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ kind of irritating klutzkasheh that is asked by precociously annoying students.  It is genuinely difficult question to answer, and it matters.  If everything began with one incredibly powerful process, who or why or what initiated that process?  It doesn’t seem likely that it was all just chance, does it?  So what existed before existence?

Judaism, which begins its own creation epic with this profound first chapter of Genesis, sees God creating everything at the beginning in one moment of singularity as well.  You know, Breisheet bara Elohim, at the beginning God created, or when God began to create the heavens and the earth.  It says that God existed before the universe, was the origin of the entirety of everything we know and conceive of.  As the Adon Olam hymn at the end of Shabbat morning services says, “Hu hayah v’Hu hoveh v’Hu yihyeh”, God is, was and will be, forever, always.  God pre-existed Creation and will exist long after we are all gone.

Still, that doesn’t exactly explain how, or most importantly for us, why creation took place.  Why did God decide to create at all?

There are some beautiful Jewish midrashim about what motivated God to create human beings.  God wanted to see if a being in God’s own image could learn to choose to be good.  God was, perhaps, lonely and sought the company of thinking, reasoning, caring beings.  God saw that the universe as created was indeed good but needed beings who could appreciate its goodness.  And so on.

But why did God choose to create at all?  If God is perfect and complete, what motivated God to make this work of creation, this phenomenal universe of extraordinary beauty?

Many brilliant minds have tried to understand this motivation to create, God’s initial desire to make the universe.  Thomas Carlyle kind of gave up when he said, “Creation is great, and cannot be understood.”  George Bernard Shaw said that “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”  

Perhaps the best way to seek to understand the divine will to create is to follow a pattern that we have used in trying to comprehend the universe in general, that same ability to look at what exists now and extrapolate where it all came from.  Maybe the way to grasp why God creates is to explore why we choose to create.

In other words, if we want to know why God created the universe, and us, we need to examine just why we create and are, essentially, creative beings.

When I was in Jr. High School long ago, they showed us a movie called, “Why Man Creates”; today it would be called “Why We Create,” in gender-neutral format.  It explored the various reasons people choose to create artistically, why we seek to discover more about our world, why increased knowledge and understanding motivate us to probe as far as we can into every aspect of existence.  In a variety of formats, this clever film explored the motivations people have for seeking to express themselves creatively.  So many years later I can still remember it well.  Why do we write, or compose music, or paint, or sculpt, or dance, or act, or bake, or cook, or design, or build, or seek to uncover the secrets of the natural world?  Why do we often see these creative impulses as the most important aspects of our own personas, our essential qualities?

Perhaps the secret, if there is one that we can discover, lies here in Genesis.  At its heart, creation is a unique aspect of human existence.  And in that creativity, we most closely imitate God, and God’s original moments of creativity here in Breisheet.

At the end of the first creation narrative in Chapter One of Genesis we are told that God saw all God had created, and it was all very good, tov me’od.  When we open our minds and hearts to the process of creation that we have been given the opportunity to fulfill, we, too, have the capacity to create what is good indeed: beautiful and elevating and even inspirational.

On this Shabbat Breisheet, may we each seek to emulate God through our own creativity, in the areas of our lives in which we are gifted, and so renew within ourselves the spark with which all creation began.