Images at work versus words at play: Michelangelo's art and the artistry of the Hebrew Bible

Judaism, Spring, 2002 by Richard S. Ellis

A tension between the first two words of Genesis 1:1 animates Rashi's commentary. His reading of this verse as "In the beginning of God's creation of the heaven and the earth" is not consistent with the Masoretic form of the second word, here translated as "creation." (21) This word must be revocalized for Rashi's reading to make sense. In order to resolve the tension, Rashi prefers a metaphorical, Midrashic interpretation that depends on another sense of the first word bereyshit.

The word bereyshitconsists of the ambiguous and common preposition b,' which has the various senses of "in" or "with" or "for" or "for the sake of," and the noun reyshit, meaning "the beginning of." In order to interpret the opening verse of Genesis, he cites Proverbs 8:22 and Jeremiah 2:3, which single out two entities of great significance that are called reyshit: the Torah and Israel. This leads to another reading of Genesis 1:1: "For the sake of (b') [the Torah and Israel which bear the name of] reyshit, God created the heaven and the earth." (22)

"For the sake of the Torah, God created the heaven and the earth." This interpretation of the first verse of the Torah confers on the Torah a cosmic significance. From here it is a small step to the Talmudic reading that in fact the Torah preceded creation as the blueprint of creation. (23) Only after the Torah was consulted could God's creation commence. In the words of a Midrash, "The Holy One, blessed be He,... looked into the Torah and created the world." (24)

The idea that the Torah is the blueprint of creation has enormous textual implications. Handelman explicates the idea by connecting it with the act of interpretation: "[W]ith the proper methods of interpretation, one can unlock the mysteries of all being. Every crownlet of every letter is filled with significance, and even the forms of letters are hints to profound meaning. To understand creation, one looks not to nature but to the Torah; the world can be read out of the Torah, and the Torah read from the world." (25)

Because the text lacks vowels and punctuation, because of ambiguities at the levels of letters, words, verses, and chapters, meaning in the Torah is not an absolute quality inhering in the text alone. Rather, meaning is the fruit of reader-text co-involvement. As a result, the personality of God and the human relationship with God as portrayed in the text cannot remain fixed. The reader's perceptions of that personality and of that relationship change as the experiences that the reader undergoes change.

Besides those of Rashi, other readings of the first verse of Genesis are possible. A number of these focus on the root of bereyshit, which is rosh, meaning "head." The root meaning is brought out if one shifts the last two letters of bereyshit onto the next word and revocalizes, obtaining a Hebrew word meaning "will create himself." This shifting of letters is not unreasonable since in ancient Torah scrolls not only were vowels and punctuation missing, but also the spaces between individual words. (26) With these changes, the opening verse of Genesis can also be read as follows: "In his head God will create himself [along] with the heaven and the earth." (27) This is consistent with mystical insights, both Jewish and Christian, that the cosmos is a thought in God's mind. (28)