B'reisheet: Creation, Take Two

Happy New Year - Shanah Tovah! The High Holidays have all come and gone, and the Jewish year of 5780 has officially begun. The last holiday that we celebrated (just a few days ago) was Simchat Torah, where we read
the very last verses of the Book of Deuteronomy; thus concluding all Five of the Books of Moses. We rejoiced upon completing the cycle of Torah readings once again, and celebrated this achievement by... starting the whooooole book right back over again! Which means, of course, that we are back at the famous story of God creating the world, along with the Garden of Eden and the first humans, Adam and Eve. I say "famous" because even people who aren't so familiar with the Bible tend to know at least something about these original ancestors and their paradise-like starter-home. Sooo... how come the facts in the actual text don't match up with what we "know"?

Well, wait a minute. That can't possibly be true, can it? I mean, maybe we don't know ALL the in's and out's of the text, but there are at least a few basic plot points that we all
KNOW to be true, right??? Let's see... well, for instance, most people know that Adam was created first, correct? He was formed out of the dust of the earth, and God blew spirit into the nostrils of this lump of clay and POOF! Instant Human. Sometime later on, God decided Adam shouldn't be alone, so God took out one of Adam's ribs and turned into a second human, Eve. I mean, so far that's all part of the original story of humanity... isn't it? Well, no, actually. Not exactly. You see, all of the details I just mentioned happen in Genesis, chapter TWO... but there's an earlier creation story - back in Chapter One - where the specifics are surprisingly different.

In Genesis 1:27, the Torah states: "And God created the (hu)man in God's Own Image; in the Image of God, God created him; male and female, God created them." My translation may be a bit awkward, in my attempt to avoid male pronouns for God,
but nevertheless, two things are certainly true: the text does NOT indicate a source-material for this new creation, AND female and male versions were created TOGETHER! Traditional commentators will try and explain that Chapter Two is just a recapitulation of the verse I just quoted, but the inconsistencies continue. In Genesis One, the last thing God creates on Day Six is human beings, but in Genesis Two, the story BEGINS with God forming Adam out of dust (v. 7), and only subsequently describes God adding plants and animals (vs. 8-9, 19) to the picture. So which one is the REAL creation story???

The answer (of course) is "both." Aspects of each narrative have made it into the "common" wisdom about our origin story, while parts of each have also fallen by the wayside. To me, the lessons in all of this are quite powerful: There's never just ONE,

true version of how something happened. We like to imagine there's an objective "truth" out there, but even the very FIRST origin story of our entire world has multiple versions. There are gray areas in EVERY story. I also think this teaches us that even God doesn't get everything right the first time. The Divine, Omnipotent Creator of All also has restarts and second takes and do-overs. On the one hand, this seems like shocking information, upending a lot of what we believe we "know" about the Creation story. But on the other hand, I hope it can also serve as something of a relief, to know that even God makes mistakes, changes God's mind, and has multiple versions of how it all began. And surely, if The Source of Everything, The Lord of the Universe, The All-Powerful, Omnipresent, Divine Originator, GOD gets to be flawed from time to time... can't we afford ourselves, and one another, the same leeway? Happy New Year!


CC images in this blog post, courtesy of:
1. Richard Cahan on Flickr
2. Pixnio
3. RAZ Zarate on Flickr
4. Horia Varlan on Flickr