Bereishit: The world still becoming

The Torah begins not with law or lineage but with wonder. “Bereishit bara Elohim.” It’s usually translated as, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Past tense. A past event. A completed act.

But scholars, including the always curious Rashi, suggested that the passage be translated instead into the present tense. Thus, “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void.” There is a universe (so to speak) between the two translations, whether you are a Hebrew grammar nerd (like me) or not. The first states a finished product; the second, an unfolding story. The ink still drying, creation not yet done.

Maybe that’s the point of the parasha. It’s not history. It’s an invitation. If creation is still happening, then we are not only its witnesses but its partners. The great 20th-century thinker and theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called this way of understanding the world around us — and its connection to God “radical amazement” — the capacity to stand in awe before the ongoing miracle of existence.

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For years we lived not far from the Lake Michigan shore — most recently (for the few years before moving to Pittsburgh), on a bluff only a few hundred feet from the crash of waves. The wind would kick up and, even indoors with the windows closed, we could hear it. I could hear it. Calling me to come out and experience the spectacle of nature. Of God’s creation in action. And I would, going down to the shore, camera in hand.

Pittsburgh has no magnificent shoreline (three beautiful rivers, but no huge body of water), but it does have the hills. And as the colors begin to change and I trek up the big, twisty hill between the parkway and Frick Park every day, I can’t help but take in the trees, the colors, the natural beauty. God’s paintbrush in seasonal action. (Of course while paying careful attention to the switchbacks and the cliff!)

To see the world as continually being created is to meet it each morning with the wide-eyed wonder of a child who has never stopped being surprised by light, by breath, by being. By the unexpected appearance of the Aurora Borealis in the night sky. The anticipation of the solar eclipse last April. A family of deer (annoying as they can be in our gardens) pausing in a clearing alongside the road.

Heschel taught that faith begins not in certainty but in awe. “Radical amazement” captures the essence of what Bereishit calls us to feel: that sense of standing at the edge of something vast and luminous, astonished not only that the world exists, but that we do.

When we are children, that sense of amazement comes naturally. Every leaf, every shadow, every snowflake is a marvel. A child can watch an ant for 10 minutes, completely absorbed. But as adults, the world dulls around us. We move through it on autopilot, rarely pausing to notice. Heschel warned that “as civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines.” Yet Bereishit invites us to reclaim that childlike capacity to be awed — to see the world, once again, as if for the first time.

We savor a cup of sweet kiddush wine (or juice) and treasure Shabbat: Zicharon l’ma’asei Bereishit — a remembrance of creation.

In our daily liturgy we recite Asher Yatzar, thanking God “who formed the human body with wisdom” — marveling at the miraculous fact that all our openings and closings function as they should. It is a prayer of radical amazement — gratitude not for grand miracles but for the ordinariness of living, for a body that works. Moments later, we thank God for the creating light (and dark) — and the daily cycle of time in Yotzeir Or.

And then in Ma Rabu Ma’asecha Adonai, we echo the psalmist’s astonishment at the natural world: oceans teeming with life, trees swaying in wind, skies that change color with the setting sun. (“How manifold are Your works, O God.”)

Together, these morning blessings remind us that creation is not confined to the past tense. We wake up each day into a world that is still being created — and we, too, are renewed.

We are not spectators but participants in that ongoing Bereishit. Every act of kindness, every spark of creativity, every time we repair rather than destroy — we mirror the Divine act of bringing order from chaos, light from darkness.

As the Torah scroll begins again this week, perhaps we, too, can begin again. To look at the world as a child might: with eyes wide open, curious and astonished. To whisper Ma Rabu not only in synagogue, but while watching the rain fall or listening to a bird sing. To see in every human face the miracle Asher Yatzar celebrates.

The world is still becoming. So are we. Bereishit is not a memory — it’s an invitation to wonder. PJC

Cantor Barbara Barnett is a Jewish educator and cantor living in Pittsburgh. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.