Order Out of Chaos

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, August 18, 2007

For most of us raised with some exposure to Greek philosophy and Western thought, creation means, making something out of nothing. That is to some the way in which God differs from mere mortals, as we finite beings can only transform matter and energy, but we cannot really create it. But in the Biblical tradition, creation is not ex nihilo, something out of nothing, it is really about making order out of chaos. We have much evidence that the Biblical account of creation presumes an existing chaos, a sort of primordial soup, out of which God creates the world as we know it.

Many of us learned the first sentence of Genesis in English as: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, but a truer translation of the Hebrew would be “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth, and the world was tohu vavohu, was unformed, was shapeless and formless. Bereishit is not barishonah, in the beginning, bereishit is a contraction, in the beginning of.

The idea that God’s task in creating the world was to make order where there once was chaos, becomes important to Jewish theology. Chaos is the source of evil in the world, and the existence of evil in a world created by a good God, is a reflection that God’s work of creation is not yet complete. This chaos leads to suffering as disordered cells bring disease, disordered weather leads to calamity, and disordered human choice leads to destruction and even Holocaust. But this is also where we become partners with God in completing the work of Tikkun Olam.

Our Torah portion this week is also about creating order out of chaos, not in the work of creating the universe, but in the work of creating society. Moses is giving the Israelites a structure for the new society they will establish after his death on the other side of the Jordan river. The dangers of disorder in a community are great, just think of contemporary Iraq, and so the potential for disorder needs to be limited.

Our Torah portion deals with the establishment of courts and government to limit the potential for disorder within a community. The courts are to adhere to measures of justice and equity and not to be swayed by bribes or by the status of the defendants. Where people feel there is recourse to a system of justice which is fair to them, there will not be the ongoing unresolved disputes between individuals which could prompt resentment and vendettas leading to violence. Government is also understood as a way of preventing disorder. In the minds of the rabbis, without a strong government, the different interests in society would come into conflict, which could lead to civil war, or the abuse of the weak by the strong. As important as government was understood to be, still the power of the king was to be limited in various ways. He was not to amass money or horses, which would be an incentive to warfare, and he was to carry with him at all times a copy of the Torah which he himself has hand written as a reminder that he too is limited by the mitzvoth. In this regard the Torah wanted to insure that the cure, monarchy, would not be worse than the illness itself, disordered society.

The portion also deals with the laws of warfare, attempting to impose an order that would limit destruction, even in this most destructive of enterprises.

To be human is a terrifying enterprise as we are prone to the destructive effects of chaos, of sudden illness which strikes those whom we love, of accidents that happen in a split second and destroy the promise of the future, of so called “acts of God” earthquakes and tornado’s and floods. This is the issue that Jonathan alluded to in his discussion of Harold Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People. It is because we are prey to the lack or order that still exists in our universe, that our task in establishing order where we can is so significant. Even in the face of tragedy we can create loving communities which are dependable supports in the physical world. We can struggle to overcome the pockets of chaos, in our world as we do the work of tikkun olam, of social action and social justice, to overcome poverty and hunger, disease and despair. Finally, as humans we can also create systems of meaning, which help us reign in the terrifying chaos of not understanding what is happening to us.

One of the most basic of Jewish mitzvoth is to imitate God- as God is just so should we strive to be just, and as God is merciful so should we strive to be merciful, and as God is holy so too should we strive to be holy. As we learned from this week’s portion, as God is a creator of order so should we be among those who help create order in our world.