Protecting the Creation Is Never Done

The Torah’s opening account of the creation of the world is often understood as the epitome of order and stability. Structurally, creation unfolds according to a precise cosmic order, with each stage following the next in a manner that would have made sense to the ancient world. And so, the Torah’s second verse simply describes the primordial condition that preceded God’s orderly creation of the world:

“And the earth then was emptiness and void (tohu va-vohu) …” (Genesis 1:2)

The likely pshat, or plain meaning, of this verse is not value-laden; it is simply descriptive. Yet the words tohu va-vohu are evocative. The medieval commentators generally understood them as describing a condition of emptiness or formlessness. In other words, they understood the verse as describing the state of the world before God brought order to it.

The following midrash, however, offers a radically different interpretation:

“The earth was emptiness and void [tohu va-vohu].” Rabbi Berekhya opened [his derashah with a verse from Proverbs]: “Even a child may be recognized by his acts, whether his deeds are pure and proper” (Proverbs 20:11). Rabbi Berekhya said: “While the plant was still immature, it produced thorns. This is what the prophet would one day prophesy in its regard: ‘I have seen the land, and behold, it is emptiness and disorder (tohu v’vohu)’” (Jeremiah 4:23). (Bereishit Rabbah 2:1, Theodore-Albeck edition, pp. 14–15)

We must unpack this brief but significant derashah. The sense of the verse from Proverbs with which Rabbi Berekhya opens is that a child’s initial actions may be deceptive; his or her essential characteristics may only become apparent over time. Rabbi Berekhya uses the image of a plant to make the same point. A plant’s harmful characteristics may not be visible at first, but as it grows, its thorns reveal what was already inherent within it.

For Rabbi Berekhya, tohu va-vohu, then, does not merely represent emptiness or formlessness. It represents chaos, and perhaps even evil, that is already present within creation. The same term shows up in the words of the prophet Yermiyahu (Jeremiah) in talking about the chaos in the generation of the destruction of the First Temple. All of this reflects an obdurate reality of existence that must continually be confronted and overcome by both God and humanity. The struggle against this reality is one of the central tasks of the divine-human relationship.

This idea seems to run counter to the Torah’s opening creation story, which repeatedly stresses the goodness and order of the cosmos. Yet it is implicit not only in the human experience of the world, but also in the biblical literature itself. Indeed, this understanding of tohu va-vohu may be closer to the biblical conception of creation than the later idea of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, which emerges historically much later.

The expectation that God’s creation of the world was an act of absolute perfection has often led to false expectations about God’s “omnipotent” role in the world. If, however, the primordial reality is not nothingness but tohu va-vohu—chaos, disorder, and the potential for destruction—then we are offered a different and, perhaps, more compelling picture of God’s relationship to creation. God is not simply the one who created a perfect world once and for all. Rather, God is constantly engaged in the struggle to establish and maintain order, goodness, and divine sovereignty within a world in which tohu va-vohu remains a persistent reality.

The human task is therefore not separate from the divine one. We are called to participate in that same struggle: to keep tohu va-vohu at bay, to resist the forces of chaos and destruction, and to join God in the ongoing work of creation.