Rabbi 360

Having celebrated the completion of another Torah reading cycle this past week, we once again go back to the beginning.

And the beginning of the Torah is literally the beginning—the story of the creation of the world. A familiar story: God takes what is formless and void and fashions a workable world through the creation of light, earth, sea, sky, animals, birds, insects, and finally humans.

As I often say when teaching this text, we should not be reading the Torah as a science book; it is not meant to teach us about the actual origins of the world. Rather, it is an ethical text in the form of an origin story, meant to teach us about how we are to be in the world.

The story has a familiar cadence. God speaks something into being, and looks upon it and pronounces it “good.” Just from this simple repetition we learn about two ethical approaches to the world: words and language have power so we should use them cautiously, and we are to try to see the good in all things even when its goodness may not be apparent.

It is also in the passage about the creation of humans that we find what I consider to be one of the most important ethics of Judaism: “And God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God—” (Genesis 1:27) Meaning, we are all created in the image of God and so therefore everyone is worthy of respect, love, and compassion.

And there is an additional ethic found in the language of the Creation story that is particularly relevant right now.

“In the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth…” begins Genesis. The work of creation is making order out of chaos by giving form to the formless. The description of Creation includes a series of these opposites: in addition to heaven and earth, we have light and dark, day and night, land and sea, sun and moon.

But we know from our experience that this is not how nature works. There are no strict divisions between two things. I’m writing this at dusk, when there is still light in the sky but the day has definitely ended. On my early morning dog walks recently I watched the sun rise in the east while the full moon was still visible in the west. Living by Puget Sound we become familiar with the rise and fall of the tides, so we know that the demarcation between land and sea is constantly shifting and earth can alternate between being underwater and visible.

Nature—God’s Creation, as it were—is not a series of binary opposites but rather gradations of experience.

There is a linguistic way to understand what the Torah is doing here. These word pairs are not intended as binary opposites, but are in fact merisms. A merism is a literary device not uncommon in the Torah in which a pair of contrasting words is used to describe a totality. Two parts describe the whole. The Creation of “heaven and earth” is not understood as the creation to two things, but the creation of everything. Light and dark, land and sea can be understood similarly. (A colloquial example is to say that you looked “high and low” for a lost object—meaning you looked everywhere.)

When we use merisms, we no longer need to read these pairs in the Creation story as binaries, as rigid divisions of reality.

Which brings us to another aspect of the Creation story, the creation of humans. As mentioned, the Torah describes humans created in the divine image, and the full verse reads: “And God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God— creating them male and female.”

Here too “male and female” can be understood as a merism. God didn’t create binary opposites, but all people. Perhaps “male and female,” like “heaven and earth,” is not meant to limit the possibilities of God’s creation, but to evoke its expansiveness. The verse invites us to see the diversity of human beings—including gender and gender identity—as part of the holiness of creation.

We turn to this text at a time of rampant transphobia: when our nation’s leaders use slurs against transgender people, when institutions like the military and our schools become battlegrounds in the effort to deny their dignity and existence, and when their very lives are threatened. Here in the State of Washington there are initiatives on the ballot that would, for one, challenge the participation of trans athletes in school sports. (I invite you to join me in voting NO on I-001 and I-638.)

From the very first chapter of Genesis, the Torah teaches that this hatred, this legal warfare, is antithetical to our sacred texts, texts that tell us of the inherent holiness of all human beings and of the diversity of human life. Our ethical task, therefore, is to not force the vastness of God’s creation into the narrow boundaries of ours.