On Simchat Torah we finish our yearly reading of the Torah, and start again “in the beginning.” This week, we offer these reflections on the Book of Genesis (B’reishit).
Admittedly, I am biased, but I did think it was particularly cute to ask my daughter, in her first year of our Aaron Milken Center Hebrew Immersion program, what the world was like before creation. “Tohu va’vohu,” she would say with a perfect Israeli accent. “What does that mean?” I would ask. And, with an adorably dismissive hand gesture, she would say: “Chaos and mess!”
Most often, this phrase is translated as “chaos and void,” and is meant to describe the unformed-ness of the world before God’s process of creation. Often, the creation story told in Genesis is understood to be creatio ex-nihilo, creation out of nothingness. But today, as we begin the Torah again—and still at the start of 5783—I want to offer a different reading.
The Midrash records a conversation between a philosopher (presumably Roman) and Rabban Gamliel, a leader of the Jewish community of his time. Perhaps meaning to insult Jewish text and story, the philosopher says: “Your God is only a great artist because God found great materials that helped: tohu and vohu, darkness, spirit, water, and the depths.” I am no artist, but I find this more inspiring than insulting.
Miriam Faust, the rector of Bar Ilan University in Israel, wrote a piece entitled: “In Praise of Tohu VaVohu.” Using the imagery of this primordial chaos as a catalyst for the human creative process, she writes:
Everyone who creates might have to “break” and “disorganize” the familiar picture of the world in order to free himself from it and view reality in another way. Current research dealing with creative thought indeed supports this assertion and points to the need for a sort of tohu va-vohu, or a certain measure of what one might term cognitive chaos, in order to discover and create something new in all walks of human creativity. These findings associate the state of being “unformed and void” that preceded Creation with a universal human state which is a precondition for the ability to create …
The Jewish Studio Project cultivates creativity as a Jewish practice for spiritual connection and social transformation. In their work, the language of tohu va-vohu is a core value, a framing text both for the work that they do and the work they encourage us to do. As we look ahead into 5783, what are the materials in our lives with which we might be working? What might feel chaotic, or unformed? What might be transformed? What might we do with them? And—what might we be able to create for ourselves and for the world?
—Rabbi Sari Laufer