Friends,
"Our bodies churn with creativity rooted in the beginning of time.”
This line jumped out to me from an article by Brian Thomas Swimme called Cosmogenesis - The Meaning of Life , shared by a friend a few days ago in this week where we start reading the Torah from the beginning again - Genesis, Bereshit.
After almost a full month of Jewish holidays, culminating with a joyful Simchat Torah on Monday night, I am very grateful that I managed to get back to the UK for a week, and the day I got back here, the Prime Minister, Liz Truss resigned from office after serving the shortest term ever in that top job. Weirdly I was also here a few months ago the day Boris Johnson resigned. I am not mentioning this to be political in any specific way, but there is a global sense of chaos and instability with so many of our institutions and cultural norms feeling on the edge of collapse. We are living through upsetting and stressful times, with so many around the world impacted by rising inflation and so much more.
The primordial state right before the creation of light is described in the Torah as tohu v’vohu, without form and void, and then the intention of creation to bring form out of that light. There is something about the powerful notion expressed in the article mentioned above that gives me tremendous hope and comfort. We are all, it suggests, connected to that creative light force in the first moments of the creation of this universe, perhaps even made from it. The first human, literally earthling (Adam), is created b’tzelem elohim, in the Divine Image. It blows my mind a bit to think that perhaps that Image is actually that we are all made from that primordial light, radiating through time and space and connecting us beyond anything that seems apparent or obvious in this chaotic, broken world. All of the conflict, suffering and anxiety of our age is real and disturbing, and yet if we were all able to see ourselves and each other as pulsing with the original, creative impulse, it might give us a different perspective and a sense of meaning that transcends the chaos.
We all carry sparks of divinity within us.
The first Shabbat described in the parsha is the culmination and manifestation of creation, reminding us every week to breathe and to see ourselves reflected in the light as we truly are.
Shabbat Shalom from London,
Rabbi Marc
