We have just begun the year 5786. By Jewish tradition, that means a bit under 6,000 years have passed since the world was created.
Huh? Could this be possible? Do we not have acknowledged carbon or radiometric-dated evidence that the world is much, much older than that! Scientists estimate the Earth to be about four and a half billion years old; we even have a rock from the moon – one that is said to have originated on Earth and was brought back by Apollo 14 astronauts – that formed four billion years ago.
And what about the dinosaurs? Scientists say they lived between 245 and 66 million years ago, and there is a vast fossil record of their bones, teeth, eggs, nests, and footprints. While some communities attempt to dismiss the past existence of dinosaurs as science fiction or fairy tales – indeed, barring their mention or pictures in school texts – the rest of the world fully accepts their reality.
Rabbinic and other sources struggle with somehow rationalizing both the creation story and modern science, and there are numerous approaches. But I want to focus on a famous midrashic opinion. The fact that there is no specific mention of God creating night – “Let there be evening” is conspicuously not written; only “And there was evening” – leads Midrash Bereisheit Raba to a dramatic conclusion: God created many worlds but then destroyed them all, one by one, until the present world was formed, to God’s satisfaction. Thus, the oft-repeated verse “And God saw that it was good” implies that there were predecessors that were not very good at all.
Some even want to say that as many as a thousand worlds – or generations – preceded our own. Rav Yehuda quotes God as saying in Aramaic, as it were, “Dayn han’yan li; yathon lo hanyan li” – “This world is to My liking; those other [worlds] were not.” So, in this opinion, the dinosaurs, moon rocks, and fossils are merely remnants “left over” from other worlds that predated our own, the present world, which began with Adam and Eve.
Why did it take God so long to make the world right?
But there is an obvious question here: If God is all-seeing, as we believe, and exists simultaneously in the past, present, and future, didn’t God know from the get-go that the other worlds were imperfect?! So why didn’t God create the world as we know it from the very start, instead of building and tearing down the ones before it?
To solve this puzzle, let us take a moment to examine the Torah narratives we are currently experiencing. The Torah starts with the story of Adam. Adam lives, literally, in the Garden of Eden. He has, at least initially, the most perfect life. He rises above all the other creations; he does not have to work for a living; he has no enemies to contend with and practically no obligations or restrictions to constrict him.
But then, he and wife, Eve, commit the “original sin” and are evicted from the garden. Now, in the “real” world, they will experience pain, struggle, and loss. Adam will have to earn his daily sustenance by “the sweat of his brow.” And they will have to deal with the violence and murder that results in the loss of a child.
The next major figure in the Torah, the star of this week’s portion, is Noah. He, too, is leading a rather uneventful life when suddenly – at the age of 500 – he is told that trouble is headed his way in the grandaddy of all midlife crises. God has chosen him – a simple but decent, morally stable fellow – to either reform his society or escape from it.
And, so, Noah takes a century-plus to build the ark and “rescue” humanity and the animal world from oblivion. Noah’s world is washed away, and now he, too, must fend for himself and his family. All alone in a brave but daunting new world, he must work the land – the rabbis say it was Noah who invented farming tools – and deal with his own children’s pressing problems. Is it any wonder he “hit the bottle” to ease his anguish?
The third member of this opening trilogy is Abraham. He, too, is commanded by God to leave behind everything he knows – his home, his neighbors, his country – and head for a new land and a new challenge. He will confront a host of hostile characters, deal with painful family matters, and struggle mightily to spread the concept of one God to less than receptive neighbors, until he succeeds in changing humanity forever.
These three towering heroes – Adam, Noah, and Abraham – have a commonality. To survive, they were forced to leave the places they knew and start all over again. The very thought of it was fearful and foreboding, yet each succeeded, and that is why we, all of us, are alive today. But how were they able to meet this gargantuan task?
The answer is that God also went through this very same process. God, too, created worlds and then left them behind, and in doing so created the DNA that was transferred to God’s creations, exemplified by Adam, Noah, and Abraham. If God could start over and persevere, you see, then so could man. And so can we.
We Jews have a long history of starting over. We have settled in – and then were evicted – from virtually every locale on Earth. We were expelled from France in 1182, 1306, and 1394; from England in 1290; from Spain in 1492; and from virtually every European country, including Switzerland. We were driven out of parts of South America, forced from Russia under severe intolerance, and driven from all the Arab/Muslim lands at one time or another.
How did we survive, despite the severe animosity and anti-Jewish laws we encountered in the countries to which we ran? How did we start over, with only the clothes on our backs? How did we defy all odds to not only survive but prosper? The answer is the miraculous, life-saving, God-given DNA that runs through our blood.
We have come to Israel for the third and final time in our history. And though we will not be driven out again from our ancestral homeland, we still need that precious DNA to start over again after experiencing intense trauma. This current war – which is far from over, largely due to the disastrous “deal” to which we agreed, or were forced into – is severely testing our society, threatening to break our national will.
We have to gather our resolve and “come back” to the spirit that enabled the miracle of our independence and led to our victory in a dozen previous wars. It is characterized by the courage of our heroic soldiers and the stubborn determination of our populace. It is a tall order, but we can – and must – meet the challenge.
I remind you of the story of the scientists who announced that in three days a worldwide flood was coming that would engulf the planet. While the mullah stood up and told his congregation to admit their sins before they die, and the priest told his flock to pray night and day, the rabbi simply announced to his people, “Haverim, friends, we have only 72 hours to learn how to live underwater.”
The writer is director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana. rabbistewart@gmail.com