Genesis: "Unto the Abyss"

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1)

For the opening pages of the Zohar, the beginning of the Torah reveals a secret: Genesis is actually describing a process of divine unfolding whereby different aspects of God — the sefirot — emerge from Binah, the divine womb.¹

Such a theology is certainly radical insofar as it transforms a story about a transcendent God creating a non-divine world into a mystical narrative of divine immanence. Yet despite that radicalism, the image offered by the Zohar is quite comforting: creation is a slow process of divine emergence that proceeds without crisis or rupture: from Binah to Chesed to Gevurah all the way down to Malkhut, the lowest sefirah. Our role is to meditate on God’s wonder, to revel in radical amazement, to lift our eyes to the heavens and say, “Who created these?” (Isaiah 40:26).²

Elsewhere in the Zohar, though, creation is described in far more terrifying terms:

“And the earth was welter and waste”³ (Gen. 1:2). Rabbi Shimon said: The companions study the account of Creation and comprehend it, but few know how to allude thereby to the mystery of the great sea serpent.⁴

Rabbi Shimon goes on to explain how each verse of creation actually describes a cataclysmic battle between God and the great serpent, who is finally defeated, paving the way for existence as we know it. For R’ Isaac Luria, the progenitor of Lurianic Kabbalah, that same verse — “And the earth was welter and waste” — signifies not a battle but a catastrophe: the shattering of the vessels of divine light that occurs in the process of creation.⁵

For both R’ Shimon and R’ Luria, creation is not a smooth process that evokes awe but rather a rupture that induces fear: a battle against the forces of evil or a tragic collapse in the creation of good — a collapse that itself produces those evil forces. Our task is not merely to revel in God’s majesty but to join the fight, to fix what is broken, and redeem the world.

Even in these terrifying understandings of creation, there is still room for comfort: we may not be able to take refuge in belief in an orderly, benign cosmos, but we still have a task that gives shape and order to our lives. In the words of William James:

For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the Universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight; as if there were something really wild in the Universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.⁶

This is why the most terrifying understanding of Genesis is not as a battle or a crisis but rather that of the Talmud — as involving an absence:

Rabbi Yochanan said: The sheeteen (“pits”) under the altar were created during the six days of creation… they bore and descend unto the abyss… It was taught by the school of Rabbi Ishmael: Bereishit (“Genesis”) — do not read it as Bereishit but Bara Sheet (“created a pit”).⁷

According to the Talmud, what inherent in creation is neither a wonderful plenitude nor a battle in need of our efforts but simply a lack: creation is created with something missing.⁸

It is tempting to read this, too, as a mission: our task is to find the missing piece that will fill the lack. But the abyss under the altar is not described as a flaw in creation but rather as partially constitutive of it — existence is defined by the existence of an absence that cannot be redeemed.

Maybe this is why the Zohar connects the sheeteen to the the binding of Isaac and says that during the six days of creation, alongside the pit under the altar, God also created the ram offered in Isaac’s stead.⁹ Child sacrifice is, perhaps, the fantasy that in offering up everything, the cosmos’ lack, the gods’ desire, might finally be sated. In offering up a child, the worshipper bows to an infinite yearning that must — but never can — be appeased. In demanding Isaac, God, too, suggests Abraham subscribe to such a fantasy: if Abraham sacrifices all that he has, God will finally be satisfied.¹⁰ God’s instruction, at the last moment, to offer up a ram is designed to disabuse Abraham of this notion. God wants something from him, but not everything. Not because that something could ever be sufficient, but because everything, too, is insufficient. There is a lack that cannot be filled, and the attempt to either deny its presence or submit fully to its insistence leads to catastrophe.

There is a demand made upon us in a burning world: “A person should suffer along with the community.”¹¹ It is tempting, particularly if we ourselves are not suffering, to attempt to retreat into the world described by the opening lines of the Zohar: to imagine that the world is fully suffused with divine goodness, to cut ourselves off from what is shattered. Instead, like R’ Shimon and R’ Luria, we must commit ourselves to a fight amidst the ruins. But we must do so with the awareness that perhaps some of what is missing cannot be found and without a guarantee that the fight can be won. We must listen for God’s demand, and we must find the ram again and again.

1. See Zohar I:2b.

2. In the Zohar, “Who” is a name for Binah, and “These” is a name for the lower six sefirot (from Chesed to Yesod). For the the Zohar, “Who created These” is a statement, not a question. Ibid.

3. Trans. Robert Alter.

4. Zohar II:34b. Trans. Daniel Matt.

5. E.g. Otzrot Chayyim, Sha’ar HaNekudim, Ch. 5 and 7.

6. William James, “Is Life Worth Living?”

7. b. Sukkah 49b, Rashi ad loc.

8. As R’ Shagar argues, “This abyss — the sheeteen — is created as part of the creation of the world… Two types of abysses typify our world — first, the individuation that produces alienation and a split between a person and the Other, and second, the split between the world and the presence of God.” R’ Shagar, Be-T’sel Ha-Emunah, 160.

9. Zohar Chadash, Genesis.

10. My thoughts here are influenced by Yishai Mevorach’s discussion of Abraham in Teologia Shel Cheser, 124-135.

11. b. Ta’anit 11a.