I went to a funeral yesterday, and if there’s one thing a funeral teaches it’s this: we may not know the details of our lives, but we certainly know the end of our story. With this in mind, and remembering the sterling character of Harry Newman, and wishing comfort to his grieving family, the story of the Torah is today’s subject.
The first word or two of Genesis is hard to put into English, and that’s because their grammar is a problem in Hebrew. We’re all familiar with “In the beginning, God created” and perhaps less familiar with “in the beginning of creation,” but other possibilities are many. In fact, the meaning of בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא is far from clear.
The root of the first word is ראש or “head” or “start.” So far, so good. But there’s a preposition in front of it, the letter ב for “in/with/at/through,” a preposition of time and/or place. The word ends with a suffix that indicates the “construct” form. In English,we have a possessive form, like the Latin genitive case: my book means the book belonging to me, and my is a variation of the English pronoun I. To English speakers, it seems perfectly natural that possession is marked by a change to the possessor, not the possessed. But in Hebrew (and other languages), it can be the other way around. It’s the possessed object that changes its form to show that it’s “possessed,” and this is called the “construct” form. That’s why רֵאשִׁית means “the beginning of.” The Book of Proverbs begins with this word: “The beginning of wisdom is respect for God.”
So בְּרֵאשִׁית doesn’t exactly mean “in the beginning,” but more likely “in the beginning of.” Of what? Well, that’s why the second word is a problem. “In the beginning of” demands a noun, but the next word, בָּרָא , looks like a verb, the third-person singular past tense for “create,” so it should mean “he/it created.” Now, you could say it’s not a verb but a noun–the difference would be in the vowels, not the letters, and as we all know the Torah is written without vowels. So if you change the vowels, you can make it “In the beginning of creation.” But you can’t just change the vowels because it suits you: our tradition is that the vowels we have are the ones we should use. And what’s more, people who study manuscripts follow a principle of durior lectio–you accept the more difficult reading because you think copyists would tend to simplify problems in the text inadvertently unless they had a very good reason to retain the troublesome reading.
Basically, then, the first two words of the Torah could be translated: In the beginning of he/it created. There is a way to make sense of this, but it’s a strange kind of sense, and I think it’s one of the many meanings the Torah conveys. Imagine that the real beginning of the story was “God created sky and land.” The Torah would start, “At the beginning of this story of God created sky and land,” and it would go on from there. All of the rest is a story, and what’s more, it’s a familiar story. Everybody knows how it begins; the interesting part of the story is finding out what happens in the middle and looking forward to the end.
“In the beginning of” is now possessed by a noun clause, not by a noun. It’s a very long noun clause that covers (some might say) all of human history.
We can punctuation in English: In the beginning of “He created …”
Imagine you knew your story before you lived it. As I said, at a funeral we realize that the broad outlines of most of our stories are familiar and predictable. For Oedipus, the course of human life was obvious. The Sphinx’s riddle–what goes on four legs, then two, and then three?–was easy to crack. And Oedipus himself spent a lifetime struggling with the oracle’s prediction for his own life, just a few broad strokes that came true in the most horrifying manner.
Likewise, we can argue that the figures in the Torah knew their story before they lived it. All the Hebrew people would surely have transmitted God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that one day their descendants would have their own land. God promised Abram that his descendants would be enslaved for a time; does anyone doubt that this prediction was part of Hebrew lore in every generation? We have a tradition that Isaac spent 14 years studying at the yeshivah of Shem and Eber; what would he have studied if not Torah? Of course, in one sense it’s silly to say that the Torah existed before it was given to the Hebrews, but in another sense it’s intriguing to think that the entire history of the Jewish people was available and probably well-known by all its principal characters. Joseph would have known that his brothers would hate him, that he would be sold into slavery and taken to Egypt, and all the rest of his story.
Let’s note that the Torah is far from detailed; only a few incidents are recorded, and for all the names we can read there are hundreds of thousands more whose names are not mentioned. The Delphic Oracle condemned Oedipus to perform two actions, to kill his father and marry his mother; it never said whether he would eat a banana for breakfast or learn how to fix a chariot wheel. Similarly, while the Torah seems long, there’s always been room for people to amplify its stories and add others (like the story of Isaac at the yeshivah).
As human beings, we know that one day will be our last; we know the end of our story. Sometimes, we feel we know parts of our future in more detail, or we may recognize that parts of our past were predictable. The Torah’s opening words with their difficult grammar, it seems to me, suggest that we are aware of our own role on this planet, that we seek to understand the purpose of our existence, that we struggle to discover whether we are free to fashion our future or whether all is predetermined and our only choice is to accept our fate with grace or resist it. Above all, our self-awareness cna motivate us to use our time wisely and well, whether we live 96 years, like Harry Newman, or ten times as long, like Methuselah.
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