Shabbat Sukkot  18 Tishre 5769, 17 October, 2008

Shabbat Shalom: Parshat Bereishit                   
          
By Shlomo Riskin

What Kind of World is This Anyhow?

Efrat, Israel -  "And G-d saw the light that it was good, and divided between the light and the darkness" [Gen. 1:4]

There is an old Yiddish folktale, bordering on 'black humor' about a man who provided a tailor with yards of the best cashmere wool for a classic three piece suit. Weeks passed, then two months, six months. Finally the customer lost his patience and came barging into the old man's shop. "It took Almighty G-d only six days to create the entire universe, so why must I wait six months for a suit?!" The wise craftsman smiled at his customer. "I'm giving you a perfect-fit suit, a far cry from the mess of a world that God created!"

The reality is that our world appears unfair, incomplete, a world in which the righteous are often punished and the wicked are often rewarded, a world with light and goodness, but still with darkness and evil:  

"The One Who Forms light and creates darkness, who makes peace and creates evil, I am the Lord, who makes all these things" (Isaiah 45:7). 

And so, alongside of the Talmudic view that "there is no death without sin and no suffering without transgression," that a righteous person who suffers cannot be entirely righteous, and a wicked person who prospers cannot be entirely wicked (B.T. Berakhot 7a), there exists the antithetical view, "…that there is no reward for the performance of the commandments in this world" (B.T. Kidduhsin 39b), that only in the afterlife, in the eternal world of souls, are the righteous fully rewarded and the wicked completely punished. 

Perhaps the most outspoken expression of this view is recorded in the name of Rava, a third century Amora whose views were generally in consonance with normative Jewish law: "Our lifespan, our children and our sustenance are not decided by our merits but rather by luck (mazala)." And so the Talmud continues to record the unfair differences in the lives of Rabbah and Rav Hisda, two equally righteous sages: Rav Hisda lived to be 92, Rabbah to 40; the house of R. Hisda celebrated sixty weddings in one year, the house of Rabbah mourned at 60 funerals that year… And while the household of R. Hisda fed their dogs the most expensive bread, the household of Rabbah fed their people the coarsest bread, and even that was not to be found" (B.T. Moed Katan 28 b). And luck, or mazala, means the fate of the draw, the often blind rules of physics and nature, of genetics and climatic conditions (see Tiferet Yisrael, end Mishnah Kiddushin, Yakhin and Baoz).  

And so, when the Talmud (B.T. Rosh Hashanah 16 b) speaks of "three books" which are opened on Rosh HaShanah, of the wholly righteous who are immediately inscribed and sealed for life,  of the wholly wicked who are immediately inscribed and sealed for death, and of those people who are neither here nor there and whose merits (or lack thereof) during the Ten Days of Repentance will decide their fate, the Tosafot Commentary (ad loc) as well as the famed Vilna Gaon insist that this passage is referring to the world-to-come, the world of the after-life, the eternal world of souls.

The theological bases for all of this is provided by Rav Haim Vital, one of the major 16^th century kabbalists of Safed, who teaches that G-d is a G-d of consummate love, and so He must have an "other" – apart from Himself, as it were – to love. This "other" must have room to be, must be endowed with free choice, freedom even to do that which G-d would not want him to do, this is necessary if indeed he is to be the "other," and not merely a puppet extension of G-d Himself. But the price of such a world is that it is not necessarily fair, that it is a world where good people will suffer and bad people will prosper; nevertheless the Talmud notes that every Rosh Hodesh (beginning of the new month) the Almighty Himself (as it were) brings a sin offering for His having created such a difficult world (B.T. Shavuot 9a)! 

Indeed, if such are the ground rules of this world, where is G-d to be found in it? One response to this question emerges from our portion of Bereishit: G-d is to be found within every human being, within the indelible part of G-d infused and inspirited in every human being. "And the Lord G-d formed the human being dust from the earth, and He breathed into his/her nostrils the breath of life, and the human being became a living creature" (Gen 2:7); and as the holy Zohar and the first chapter of the Tanya record, "All those who exhale, breathe out, exhale from the very essence of themselves." Hence, the eternal G-d within us, as indestructible as G-d Himself, elevates us to the position of G-d's partners; it endows us with the ability to choose, to love, to create; it insures our afterlife when our divine souls are returned to the G-d who gave them to us; and it gives us humans the responsibility of completing an incomplete world, of perfecting an imperfect world under the Kingship of the Divine.  

G-d also stepped into the world to give us a Torah-the formula by which the world can be perfected-and promises that He will always step in to prevent the destruction of the Jewish people, His covenantal nation.  Ultimately He will also step in again to see to it that all nations will rush to the third Temple in Jerusalem and accept a G-d and life of morality and peace (Lev 26:42,42, Isaiah 2, Micah 4, etc).

G-d likewise "steps in" by performing miracles and sometimes responding to prayers; and it is up to us to seek Him out by performing His commands of love and kindness, by listening for His "great voice which never ceases" (Deut. 5:18), and by developing the souls within ourselves to receive the omni-present G-d messages which remain all around us, from the perfection of a snowflake to the optimism of a child's laughter.

And G-d is there with us to strengthen us in our times of greatest need.  A story is told of a Hassidic sage who dreamt one night about all the journeys he'd taken throughout his long life, a virtual "this is your life" review, revealing two sets of footprints that appeared side by side through gravel, and grass and earth and sand.   In the dream he acknowledged that one set of footprints belonged to G-d, who "walked" together with him; but in real times of trouble, he saw only one set of footprints, causing him to feel disconcerted. Where was G-d when he really needed Him?  "Don't be concerned," came the Divine voice in his dream.  "The one set of footprints are Mine, not yours.  At those times I carried you in My arms…." 

Shabbat Shalom