In the Beginning


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Kabbalah · Genesis 1:1

In the Beginning God Created

The heresy the Bible conceals in its first line

It is the most widely read sentence in the Western tradition and, for that very reason, the one least closely examined.

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים

Bereshit bará Elohim.

The translation says: in the beginning God created. The Hebrew says something else. Elohim has a plural form, the ending im being the masculine plural ending, while the verb bará, “created,” is singular. If we assume there is no grammatical error, the plural remains there, visible and unexplained. A noun with a plural form sustained by a singular verb. The translation resolves the enigma before the reader has a chance to see it. The Kabbalists did the opposite: they remained looking at it as it is written:

In the Beginning created Gods.

86

Each Hebrew letter has a numerical value, and adding the values of a word makes it possible to read it alongside another word with the same value. It is a mode of reading the tradition uses to uncover the secrets of the Logos.

אלהים

Elohim, God

1 + 30 + 5 + 10 + 40

86

```

הטבע

haTeva, Nature

5 + 9 + 2 + 70

86

```

And it is not teva, nature in the abstract, which adds up to 81. It is haTeva, The Nature with the definite article: the totality of all that exists and never ceases to produce itself.

The name of the God who creates in the Bible and the name of Nature carry the same numerical weight. The radical Kabbalistic reading concealed here is this: Elohim would not be a being situated outside the world, but the world itself unfolding. Not the architect, but the builder who makes nature be nature.

The Other Names

If Elohim is nature, then Elohim is not what comes first. He creates, but is not the origin of himself. And that same intuition appears in other languages.

The Gnostics called it the Demiurge: the one who gives form to the world without being that from which the world itself comes. Later Kabbalah called it Metatron, the angel whose name tradition came to identify with that of Elohim, and who had to be separated from the throne with the warning that he was not “a second power in heaven.”

Demiurge, Metatron, Nature. The same position: the one who creates is not the true God.

The Heresy of Clarity

In 1656, a Jew in Amsterdam was expelled from his community. Baruch Spinoza would later write three words that summarize his heresy: Deus sive Natura, God, that is, Nature. A single infinite substance, with nothing outside it from which to create, because the infinite has no outside. Nature is not the work of God: it is God expressing himself.

He did not invent it. He said it in Latin, plainly, for anyone who knew how to read. And he paid for it with excommunication.

The heresy was not in the content. It was in having spoken it outside the secret.

The Empty Crown

The question protected by the secret remains. If the one who creates the universe is not Elohim, what, then, lies behind him?

They called it Ein Sof, Without End, if only to give it a name. But a name is not someone. Perhaps behind Elohim there is a higher and more hidden origin, so high that we could not distinguish it from nothingness. In Kabbalah, the highest of the emanations was called Crown, Keter, and it is a crown because it remains empty. Not because we know that no one occupies it, but because we cannot know. Knowledge stops there.

Seen from that limit, an ancient commandment changes its meaning. You shall make no image of me. It no longer sounds like jealousy. It sounds like the warning of one who knows he is not the end of the path, and does not wish to be worshipped in place of that which may have no face, and may not even exist.

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