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

Judaism, Spring, 2002 by Richard S. Ellis

As I read the opening verse of the Torah, my interaction with the text releases a cornucopia of interpretations: "In the beginning of God's creation ...," "For the sake of the Torah God created...," "In his head God will create ...," "The head inside the house" with which the cosmos began (see note 28). All these readings and more blossom out of the astonishingly fecund opening verse. And all these interpretations become infinitely enriched by their interactions with the thousands of verses that follow it, an infinite orchard of interpretation whose seed is the polysemous first word bereyshit. (29)

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." So reads the majestic opening verse of the King James Bible, reproducing word for word the translation in Jerome's Vulgate. In the King James, this opening verse is the prelude to a lucid narrative of the orderly, logical creation of the cosmos. However, when one reads the Hebrew text through the lenses of the commentaries by Rashi and others, an aura of the open-ended and unfathomable mystery of creation becomes apparent. "There is a tension," Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes, "between the benevolent clarity and power of the narrative and the acknowledgment of mystery that inheres in the very first word and that develops as the implications of the beginning are realized." (30)

In contrast to the linguistically creative and created God of the Torah, a pictorialized or sculptured divinity is a limited divinity, whether God the Father on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or God the Son on the chapel's front wall. Only words can sculpt an invisible God. By evading the limitations of visual representation, the Second Commandment creates virtual spaces of great expressive and interpretive freedom that open the imagination up to face infinity, such as the words of the creation narrative or the poetry of a Shabbat morning prayer, which contains the largest number in the Jewish liturgy: "Were our mouth as full of song as the sea, and our tongue as full of joyous song as its multitude of waves, and our lips as full of praise as the breadth of the heavens, and our eyes as brilliant as the sun and the moon, and our hands as outspread as eagles of the sky and our feet as swift as hinds--we still could not thank You sufficiently, HASHEM our God and God of our forefathers, and to bless Your Name for even one of the thousand thousand, thousands of thousands and myriad myriads of favors that you performed for our ancestors and for us." (31)

In contrast to Michelangelo's wondrous, but limiting portrayals of creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the open-ended interpretability of the creation narrative in the Torah enacts creation's infinitely inaccessible mysteries. Does God create the cosmos? Does the Torah create God?

In Genesis 1:2, we read about the faces of the ocean covered by darkness at the beginning of creation and the faces of the waters over which the rushing spirit of God hovers protective1y. (32) And while hovering, God, Narcissus-like, sees God's own panim, God's own faces. The astonishment of it. Rashi points out that the word tohu in tohu vavoku "signifies astonishment and amazement, for a person would have been astonished and amazed at its emptiness."(33) The infinite energy of it. Perhaps God queries the reflections of God's faces in the faces of the waters using the words of Emily Dickinson: "Infinitude--Had'st Thou no Face that I might look on Thee?" (34) In order to dilute the energy of those faces, God creates the cosmos. Or the Torah creates God.