Beginnings: Human & Divine

OR N. ROSE

SHMA.COM

The following text is taken from the Kedushat Levi, a collection of sermons on the weekly Torah portions and Jewish calendar cycle by the famed Hasidic master, Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev (1740–1809). In this brief homily, Levi Yitzhak uses several biblical, rabbinic, and mystical symbols to explore the mysteries of creation and the renewal of life. Framing the text are my own explanatory comments on some of the more esoteric elements of this teaching.

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Bereshit — Like several earlier interpreters, Levi Yitzhak deconstructs the first word of the Torah, “Bereshit,” reading it as two separate words: “Bet” — the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with the numerical value of two — and “reshit,” meaning “ beginning.” This word play provides him with the opportunity to explore the roles of God and humankind as partners in the unfolding of life.

Bounty — God’s creative outpouring, say the mystics, animates all of life, emanating from the depths of the Divine and coursing throughout the cosmos.

that on this auspicious day, described by the rabbis as the birthday of the world, God’s bounty emerges from the heavens with special vigor. The question posed to us by our author is what will we do with this gift as we begin a new year.

The word Bereshit (“In the
beginning”) can also be read as
Bet reshit (“Two beginnings”).

“In the beginning (Bereshit)…” (Genesis 1: 1)

The Holy One bestows bounty upon us, and we, through our prayers, limit and shape this bounty, each of us according to our will. One person shapes the bounty into the letters of the word “life,” another forms the letters of the word “wisdom,” and yet another, the letters of the word “wealth.” And so it is with all good things, each is shaped according to our will.

Now everything spiritual has a physical counterpart. Sound and speech, for example, exist in the corporeal realm. Sound is undifferentiated, while speech is the parsing of sound through the letters of speech. The sound of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is the bounty of the blessed Creator — it is undifferentiated. The prayers we say on this holi-day… serve to shape the Divine bounty through the letters, each according to our will.

The all-inclusive bounty that emerges from the blessed Creator is the Written Torah and that which we fashion with it is the Oral Torah; for Oral Torah is formed according to the will of Israel, according to our interpretations of the Written Torah. This is the meaning of “Bereshit” — Bet reshit, “Two beginnings” — Written Torah and Oral Torah.

Prayer — The words we utter during the Rosh Hashanah liturgy serve as the beginning of the articulation of our spiritual vision for the coming year. While the text of the High Holiday prayer book may serve as a helpful resource at the outset of this process, ultimately each of us must write the script of our own lives.

Rabbi Or N. Rose is an associate dean at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College. A member of the Advisory Board of Sh’ma, he is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Jewish Mysticism and the Spiritual Life: Classical Texts, Contemporary Reflections (Jewish Lights).

Limit — While many kabbalists speak of God as limiting His power or veiling His presence to allow human beings to live independently, in this case it is we who limit and shape God’s flow through our prayers, Torah study, and actions.

Good Things — This homily is designed to empower, and as such does not discuss the “not good” — the origins of evil, why bad things happen to good people, or the evil we can produce with God’s bounty.

Written and Oral Torah — The Written Torah refers to the Hebrew Bible: the Five Books of Moses and the prophetic and later writings. The Oral Torah can refer more narrowly to the interpretations of the Bible by the early rabbis, or more broadly, as in this case, to the ever-evolving Jewish interpretive tradition.

Letters — Our mystical masters teach us that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are a sacred apparatus with which to access, channel, and actualize divinity.

Shofar — When we hear the call of the ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah we are to understand

One might wonder why Levi Yitzhak uses the symbol of the Written Torah to describe God’s cosmic bounty, since the Hebrew Bible is actually a limited corpus. Is not the Oral Torah — with its seemingly endless number of interpretations — a better symbol for Divine vitality? Levi Yitzhak considers the Written Torah all-inclusive because for him it is the word of God, the ultimate source of human creativity; a text in which every letter and word can be plumbed for hidden meanings — Bereshit = Bet reshit.