Bubbameises of Creation

In reading about Torah, one comes across legends: bubbameises, or fairy tales, from the sages, which, for years, I never understood. For example, from Midrash Rabba, (I:1) "In human practice, when a mortal king builds a palace, he builds it not with his own skill but with the skill of an architect. The architect moreover does not build it out of his head, but employs plans and diagrams to know how to arrange the chambers and the …doors. Thus God consulted the Torah and created the world, while the Torah declares, IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED (I,1), BEGINNING referring to the Torah, as in the verse, God made me as the beginning of His way prior to His works of old (Prov. VIII, 22), or also, I:4 “Six things preceded the creation of the world; some of them were actually created, while the creation of the others was already contemplated. The Torah and the Throne of Glory were created;” or in the Talmud (Shabbat 88b), “When Moses ascended on high, the ministering angels spoke before the Holy One, blessed be God, ‘Sovereign of the Universe! What business has one born of woman amongst us?’ ‘He has come to receive the Torah,’ answered God to them. Said they to the Holy One, ‘That secret treasure, which has been hidden by Thee for nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created;” Or from the Zohar (I 5a) “See now, it was by means of the Torah that the Holy One created the world…. God looked at the Torah once, twice, thrice, and a fourth time. uttering the words composing her and then operated through her. … Seeing, declaring, establishing and searching out correspond to these four operations which the Holy One, blessed be God, went through before entering on the work of creation. Hence the account of the creation commences with the four words Bereshit Bara Elohim et (“In-the-beginning created God”), before mentioning “the heavens”, thus signifying the four times which the Holy One, blessed be God, looked into the Torah before performing God’s work.”
These statements tell us that the sages actually thought that Torah preceded creation, as a plan or specification precedes the construction of a building. We also encounter this idea every Friday evening in the first verse of the L’cha Dodi prayer by the 17th Century mystic Alkabetz: “Sof maaseh b’machsheva t’hila: the end of deed is first in thought.” It is only recently that for me, these bubbameises began to make sense. Not that the statements are literally true, but that they offer a window into the way the world is constituted. What the stories are trying to tell us is that the structure of creation is embedded in Torah. Torah gives us the information about the way the world is put together by giving us guidelines or underlying principles by which to understand that which happens. In this sense, what was revealed in the revelation: the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Mt Sinai, was what we as human beings felt all along. We, as part of creation, can feel Torah in our own bodies. We feel when we do what is right, and we feel when we do something wrong, simply because it is part of us and we are part of it. The Torah is the manual that describes the way the world works. It tells us that by doing certain kind or virtuous things that we are going with the mechanisms of creation; and by doing certain other things, like murder, lying, stealing, or engaging in acts of selfishness, that we are opposing creation and causing dis-harmony. This suggests that the principles of Torah are not so much commandments as a blueprint, in story form, revealing the underlying structure of creation. It is our manual for living but it is also a manual for the unseen mechanisms of cause and effect. Rabbi Arthur Green, a contemporary mystic expresses it this way: “The Torah is the key that unlocks the hidden meaning of all existence.” To have such a precious document at all is remarkable. To be able to understand it is God’s gift to us. That we are privileged to celebrate the giving of its wisdom once each year on Shavuot is a great and deep joy. May the Torah continue to speak to us, revealing its secrets, as we change and grow, allowing us to be changed; gaining insight into the functioning of the world and ourselves, expanding our hearts, and leading us to holiness.