{"id":69137,"date":"2020-01-26T12:14:46","date_gmt":"2020-01-26T10:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=69137"},"modified":"2023-08-23T17:39:25","modified_gmt":"2023-08-23T14:39:25","slug":"the-great-undoing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/the-great-undoing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Undoing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The creation of the world is a central theme in Jewish theology. For some thinkers, like Maimonides, it provides a universal basis on which to construct a religious philosophy; unlike the fundamentally particular and historical relationship between God and Israel, a theology of creation has the ability to speak to all people, emphasizing that beyond our differences we are rooted in the same reality. At the same time, creation can seem an almost impossibly distant concept: we are given to imagine a flash of light in the unfathomably far-off past, out of which the welter of our world somehow emerges. What \u2018preceded\u2019 the creation? What could it mean to create \u2018out of nothing\u2019? Questions like these make us dizzy, and seem to consign the act of creation to an unfathomable mystery.<\/span><\/p>\n

But there are also moments in the Bible which hint at another way of thinking about creation \u2014 one which is very close to us indeed, and which proceeds less metaphysically than socially. In this chapter, Jeremiah confronts a society on the verge of collapse: invasion, destruction, death and suffering are just around the corner, and the prophet is wrought with pain at the prospect of \u201cthe blare of horns, alarms of war.\u201d Intriguingly, he continues by stating: \u201cI look at the earth, it is unformed and void; at the skies, and their light is gone.\u201d The phrase \u201cunformed and void\u201d (<\/span>tohu va-vohu<\/span><\/i>) is exceedingly rare, and cannot be understood except as a reference to Genesis 1, which states that as God began the act of creation, the earth was \u201cunformed and void, with darkness over the face of the deep.\u201d Jeremiah seems to be saying that the destruction Israel is to experience is an un-doing of God\u2019s creation: a return to the state of darkness and chaos which prevailed \u2018before\u2019 the world existed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Clearly, Jeremiah did not mean that the death of Israelite people and the destruction of their towns was somehow tantamount to the structure of reality being untwined. Rather, his reference to Genesis is evidence that for some in ancient Israel, the concept of creation was much less a matter of an all-at-once production of something from nothing, and more a matter of establishing order in the midst of chaos. Seen this way, God\u2019s act of creation loses its distance \u2014 and its permanence. Instead, creation is revealed as something rather precarious, a process in need of constant reinforcement, and which could be undone at any moment. In this paradigm, we ourselves are participants, if junior ones, in the ongoing creative act \u2014 each contribution we make to maintaining the peaceful stability of the world staves off, for a moment longer, the dark forces of chaos which would undo the work of God.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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