Reflections from Rabbi Ellis

This week’s Parsha is the most mysterious of the Torah. It reveals as much as it conceals. The creation of the world is the most mystical and engaging part of the Torah. The Midrash tells us a secret about the relationship between our world and the Torah. “Thus, the Holy One, blessed be He, consulted the Torah when he created the world” (Bereshit Rabbah, I:2). The Torah is the blueprint for the world, it was the spiritual design that the physical world was supposed to conform to. The world clothed in physicality all of the lofty spiritual concepts that the Torah expresses. There was a problem though things didn’t come out the way they were supposed to.

The first sign that things went awry comes on the third day, when G!d creates fruit trees. G!d says that fruit trees should be fruit, meaning that the tree itself should be as edible as the fruit. In the end we got what we have today, trees that bear fruit instead of trees which are themselves edible. It’s such a small detail, but one that the Rabbis felt necessary to point out.  G!d, who is perfect, used the Torah, which is perfect, to dictate how our world should be and it came out imperfect.

The results are so bad that by the end of this week’s Parsha G!d has already witnessed humans: murder, lie, cheat, rape and steal. It’s so bad that by the end of the Parsha G!d declares “every plan devised by the human mind was nothing but evil all the time.” (Breishit 6:5)

The good news is that feeling that things are not quite the way they are supposed to be is correct, the bad news is that it’s been this way since the beginning. So how could a perfect G!d and a perfect Torah produce a world that is so clearly imperfect?

G!d didn’t create our world for perfection, at least not the kind of perfection that we usually speak about. According to Lurianic Kabbalah before G!d created the world there was no lack of perfection, in fact perfection was all that there was. As such it was not so perfect, that is to say it had never contacted anything less than perfect, so no one really knew that it was perfect. G!d created our world to be a place of imperfection, and to see if this could give birth to something better than perfection, love.

Love can only exist in a place lacking in perfection. G!d did not look into the Torah to create a world full of perfection, he looked in the Torah to create a world full of love. The war that we have been dragged into, the same one we have been fighting all over the world for the last three-thousand years, is a war of love versus hate. We need to ensure that through all of the tragedy and heartbreak that we never lose our goal of filling the world with justice and love.

Shabbat Shalom!

Yehoshua