In the Beginning, God

Basic instructions before leaving earth

This morning we rolled the scroll all the way back to the beginning. Now, at Minchah, we read it:

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

The word BIBLE stands for “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” It is a joke, but it is also true. We are all going to leave this earth one day, and we had better know where we are going.

This afternoon we will look at the great argument of our time: creation or evolution. We are not doing this to win debates. The Brit Hadashah tells us: “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). Our sages said the same:

Be diligent to learn Torah, and know what to answer an unbeliever. (Pirkei Avot 2:14)

Notice the words “with meekness and fear.” We answer with humility, not mockery. The goal is not to make people look foolish. The goal is to bring them closer to Hashem.

The four great questions

Every religion and every philosophy on earth tries to answer four great questions:

1. Who am I, and what am I worth?

2. Where did I come from?

3. Why am I here?

4. Where am I going when I die?

How you answer them depends on your worldview, the glasses you look at the world through. There are really only two choices. Either the world made itself by chance, or Someone made it on purpose.

Our sages put these questions in one of the most famous teachings in the Mishnah:

Akavya ben Mahalalel said: Look at three things and you will not come into the hands of sin. Know from where you came, where you are going, and before Whom you will one day give an accounting. (Pirkei Avot 3:1)

Now see how the two worldviews answer the four questions.

If the world made itself by chance: You are an accident. You came from a long line of accidents. There is no reason you are here, so you might as well do whatever feels good. And when you die, you go into the ground and become food for worms. That’s all.

If Hashem created the world: Everything changes.

• Who am I? You are made in the image of Hashem. “Beloved is man, for he was created in the image of God” (Pirkei Avot 3:14). Our sages taught that Hashem created only one man at the beginning so that every person would say, “For my sake the world was created” (Sanhedrin 37a).

• Where did I come from? From the hand of the Creator, who formed Adam from the dust and breathed into him the breath of life (Genesis 2:7).

• Why am I here? To know Hashem and to serve Him. The Mishnah says: “I was created only to serve my Maker” (Kiddushin 4:14).

• Where am I going? “This world is like a hallway before the World to Come. Prepare yourself in the hallway, so that you may enter the banquet hall” (Pirkei Avot 4:16).

The surprising part is how Akavya ben Mahalalel answers his own questions:

From where did you come? From a putrid drop. Where are you going? To a place of dust, worms and maggots. And before Whom will you give an accounting? Before the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. (Pirkei Avot 3:1)

Notice that the first two answers sound almost like the evolutionist’s: we come from something small, and we end in the dust with the worms. Our sages were not afraid of that humility. But the third answer changes everything. There is a King, and we will stand before Him. That is the one answer the world without a Creator can never give.

And if Hashem created the world, He owns it. If He owns it, He makes the rules. And if He makes the rules, we had better find out what they are. That is why the Torah begins with creation. Rashi asks on the very first verse: why does the Torah, a book of commandments, start with the story of creation? He answers that the whole earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gives it to whomever He pleases (Rashi on Genesis 1:1).

In the beginning God, or in the beginning dirt?

Ask a scientist who believes in evolution how the world began, and he will probably tell you about the Big Bang: billions of years ago, all the matter in the universe was packed into a point smaller than the period at the end of a sentence, and it exploded.

So ask the next question: where did that point come from? Who made the matter? Who made the laws of nature, like gravity, that tell it how to behave? Who supplied the energy? The honest answer is: “We don’t know.” Some scientists now say the universe came from “nothing.”

But nothing comes from nothing. Everything we have ever seen has a cause. So in the end, there are two choices. One person says, “In the beginning, God.” The other says, “In the beginning, dirt,” or even, “In the beginning, nothing.” Neither one was there to watch. Both are beliefs about the past. The news often calls it “science versus religion,” but it is really one faith against another. As we have taught in our own community, both views of the beginning stem from faith, and neither can be fully proven in a laboratory. The question is which faith fits the evidence and the Word of Hashem.

The Rambam begins his entire code of Jewish law with our answer:

The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of all wisdom is to know that there is a First Being, and He brought into being everything that exists. (Rambam, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 1:1)

Rabbi Akiva was once challenged by an unbeliever: “Prove that the Holy One created the world!” Rabbi Akiva asked him, “What are you wearing?” “A garment.” “Who made it?” “A weaver, of course.” “Prove it!” The man had no answer; it was obvious. Rabbi Akiva said:

Just as a house testifies to its builder, a garment to its weaver, and a door to its carpenter, so the world testifies to the Holy One, blessed be He, who created it. (Midrash Temurah 5)

Paul said the same: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20).

“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3).

Creation is not only something that happened long ago. Every morning in our prayers, we bless Hashem “who in His goodness renews the work of creation every day, continually.” The world does not run itself. If Hashem stopped holding it up for one moment, it would return to nothing. “Thou, even thou, art Hashem alone; thou hast made heaven… and thou preservest them all” (Nehemiah 9:6).

The oldest lie

Where did the idea that the world made itself really begin? Not with Charles Darwin. It began in the Garden of Eden.

The serpent said three things to Chavah. First: “Yea, hath God said…?” (Genesis 3:1). He planted doubt about Hashem’s word. Second: “Ye shall not surely die” (3:4). He called Hashem a liar. Third: “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (3:5). That is the oldest lie in the world: you can become God. You can decide for yourself what is good and what is evil.

Rashi shows how clever the serpent was. He told Chavah:

“Hashem ate from this tree and created the world. Every craftsman hates his competitors. He doesn’t want you to eat, so that you won’t create other worlds.” (Rashi on Genesis 3:5, from Bereshit Rabbah 19:4)

Do you hear it? The serpent claimed even Hashem got His power from somewhere else, and that you could have it too. This is the same pride we read about in Isaiah: “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:13–14). Every worldview that leaves Hashem out ends in the same place: man on the throne.

How do you get someone to believe a lie? You mix it with truth. Rat poison is almost all good food, with a little poison mixed in. There was once a little boy who got the last banana at breakfast. His big brothers wanted it, so they told him bananas are made from the dead legs of spiders. “Cut it open,” they said. “You can still see the black spots where the legs were.” He looked, saw the spots, and didn’t eat a banana for three years! The spots were real. The story was a lie. But the little bit of truth made him believe it.

Rashi taught this long ago about the spies who brought a bad report about the Land of Israel. They started by saying the land really does flow with milk and honey. Why?

Any lie that does not have a little truth at its beginning will not stand in the end. (Rashi on Numbers 13:27, from Sotah 35a)

Remember what we learned on Hoshana Rabbah: the seal of Hashem is emet, truth, and the number of the beast is the number of sheker, the lie. The lie always borrows a little truth to stand on.

What do you mean by “evolution”?

That is exactly what happens with the word “evolution.” It can mean many different things:

1. Cosmic evolution: time, space and matter came from nothing.

2. Chemical evolution: all the elements formed by themselves.

3. Stellar evolution: stars and planets formed by themselves.

4. Organic evolution: life came from non-living chemicals.

5. Macro-evolution: one kind of creature changes into a completely different kind.

6. Micro-evolution: variety within a kind.

Only the last one has ever been observed. Dogs come in big and small, long-haired and short-haired, but a dog always gives birth to a dog. Darwin saw finches whose beaks changed size. That is real, and no one argues about it. But then textbooks use these real examples as if they proved the other five, which no one has ever seen happen. That is the bit of truth that makes the rest go down.

The Torah agrees with number six. Ten times in its first chapter it says Hashem made each living thing “after his kind” (Genesis 1:11–12, 21, 24–25). A kind can have great variety inside it. But the Torah’s word is “kind,” and Darwin’s book was called On the Origin of Species. Change the word, and you change the argument.

Christians today are divided on this. Many hold to a young earth and six literal days. Others, like the astronomer Hugh Ross, believe the earth is billions of years old but reject evolution. Still others accept evolution and say God guided it. In the 1800s, a famous seminary professor named Crawford Toy studied evolution in Europe, came home, and taught that the Bible’s six-day creation was simply wrong. Once he gave up the beginning of the Bible, the rest soon followed, and he left his seminary.

How old is the world?

If you add up the ages in the Bible, from Adam to Seth to Enosh and onward, you come to about six thousand years. Our sages did exactly this. The ancient book Seder Olam, written by Rabbi Yose ben Halafta in the second century, counts the years from creation. That is where our calendar comes from. This year, 5787, means 5,787 years since Adam was created on the sixth day (Vayikra Rabbah 29:1). Christian scholars like Archbishop James Ussher made similar counts and came to about 4000 BC. The two counts differ by a couple of centuries, mostly over how long the Persian period lasted, but both agree: thousands of years, not billions.

The strongest witness to six days of creation is the day we are standing in right now. In the Ten Commandments, Hashem says: “For in six days Hashem made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore Hashem blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:11). He calls Shabbat “a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days Hashem made heaven and earth” (Exodus 31:17).

If the “days” of creation were billions of years, the commandment loses its meaning. We work six days and rest on the seventh because Hashem did. Every Friday night, when we say Vayechulu, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished” (Genesis 2:1), we are giving testimony. The sages said:

Whoever prays on Shabbat eve and says “Vayechulu,” Scripture considers him a partner with the Holy One, blessed be He, in the work of creation. (Shabbat 119b)

Every Shabbat, the people of Israel stand up as witnesses that Hashem created the world in six days.

Yeshua read Genesis the same way: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female?” (Matthew 19:4). “From the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). For Yeshua, Adam and Chavah were there at the beginning, not billions of years after it. And he said: “For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me” (John 5:46).

Here is something you will not notice just reading the Bible, but you will see if you chart out the years. Adam lived 930 years. Lemech, the father of Noah, was alive for 56 of those years. Noah’s son Shem lived for centuries after the flood, long enough to know Avraham, Yitzchak, and even Yaakov. Our sages teach that Yaakov studied in the “tents” of Shem and his great-grandson Ever (Rashi on Genesis 25:27). When Yaakov stood before Pharaoh, he said: “The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers” (Genesis 47:9).

Think about what that means. The story of creation passed from Adam to Lemech, to Shem, to Yaakov, to Levi, and down to Moshe, through only a handful of people. It is like hearing your great-grandfather’s stories from your grandfather.

People sometimes ask: then who did Cain marry? The Talmud answers plainly:

Adam was not permitted to marry his daughter, so that Cain could marry his sister, for it is written: “The world is built by kindness [chesed]” (Psalm 89:3). (Sanhedrin 58b)

The midrash says Cain and Abel were each born with twin sisters (Bereshit Rabbah 22:2). In the first generations, there was no other choice, and there was no Torah law against it yet. That law came much later, at Sinai (Leviticus 18:9).

Were you there?

How do we know how old things are? Imagine a diver finds a sunken treasure chest full of gold coins. When did the ship sink? You do not look for the oldest coin. You look for the newest one. If there is a coin from the year 1750, the ship could not have sunk before 1750. Scientists call this the limiting factor.

In nature, there are many “clocks.” Some seem to give very large numbers, and some give small ones. Every one of them depends on assumptions about the past: how fast things happened, what the starting point was, and whether anything interfered. Sometimes what we assumed takes ages happens very fast. When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it laid down layers of rock many feet thick in a few hours, and a mudflow two years later cut a canyon in a single day.

We should be honest: not every young-earth argument you hear is a strong one. Some have been answered, and some creationist scientists have asked people to stop using a few of them. We don’t need weak arguments. We have the testimony of the only One who was there. Hashem asked Job: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding” (Job 38:4). No scientist was there. Hashem was.

What you believe determines how you live

Does any of this matter? It matters very much, because what you believe determines how you behave.

If you are only an animal, why not act like one? If there is no Creator, who decides what is right and wrong? A young atheist once said, “I decide what is right and wrong. I’m the god of my own universe.” Then what stops someone else from deciding that hurting you is right? The book of Judges describes a society like that: “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

The ancient Aramaic translations of the Torah tell us what Cain said to Abel in the field, right before he killed him:

There is no judgment and there is no Judge, and there is no world to come. (Targum Yerushalmi on Genesis 4:8)

That is the first murderer’s worldview. If there is no Judge, everything is allowed. But if Hashem created the world, then there is a Judge, and right and wrong are not up to us. “Thus saith Hashem” settles the matter.

There is another danger. If the world took billions of years of death and suffering to make, then death came before Adam’s sin. But the Torah teaches that in the beginning, people and animals alike ate only plants (Genesis 1:29–30). The Talmud says Adam was not permitted to eat meat (Sanhedrin 59b). And the Brit Hadashah says: “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” (Romans 5:12); “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:21). If death was always part of the plan, then what did Messiah come to defeat?

If it is right about the beginning, it is right about the end

Here is the most important point of all: if the Bible is right about the beginning, then it is right about the end.

The prophets promise that Hashem will restore His creation. Restore it to what? To the way it was before sin:

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid… They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Hashem, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6, 9).

Our sages read this in two ways. The Rambam teaches that it is a picture: the nations, who were like wild animals, will live in peace with Israel (Hilchot Melachim 12:1). The Ramban teaches that it is literal: in the days of Messiah, animals will return to their nature from before Adam’s sin, when no creature hunted another (Ramban on Leviticus 26:6).

Both are true. The nations will make peace, and creation itself will be healed. The end will look like the beginning. “He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord Hashem will wipe away tears from off all faces” (Isaiah 25:8). “And there shall be no more death” (Revelation 21:4). The Creator who made a world without death in Bereshit will make it new again.

Everything in this world wears out. Leave a house alone, and it falls apart. Nothing gets better by itself. The psalmist said this about the heavens themselves: “Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed” (Psalm 102:25–26). Creation is not climbing upward on its own. It is waiting for its Maker to make it new.

Peter wrote that “the heavens shall pass away with a great noise” (2 Peter 3:10). There will be a “big bang” one day, but it is still coming. And after it: “Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:13).

Look up tonight

In a few hours Shabbat will end, and we will make Havdalah over a flame. Our sages teach that on the very first night after Shabbat, Hashem gave Adam the wisdom to rub two stones together, and fire came out (Pesachim 54a). That is why we bless the light of the fire every Saturday night.

So tonight, after Havdalah, take your children outside and look up. Turn off the screens for a few minutes. “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:3–4). Our children hear “millions of years ago” from their very first science books. They need to hear something else at home: “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children” (Deuteronomy 6:6–7). The best answer to the question “Where did I come from?” is a parent standing under the stars saying, “Hashem made all of this, and He made you.”

Know from where you came

So as Shabbat and the festival come to a close, let us go back to the three things Akavya ben Mahalalel told us to remember.

Know from where you came: not from an accident, but from the hand of the Creator, in His image.

Know where you are going: this world is a hallway. The banquet hall is ahead.

Know before Whom you will give an accounting: before the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.

The serpent’s question has not changed in six thousand years: “Yea, hath God said?” Our answer has not changed either. Yes. He has said. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

“Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Revelation 4:11).

Shabbat shalom, and chag sameach.