Frankfurt - On God's Creation PDF

# IO ## On God's Creation Leazar said in Bar Sira's name: About what is too great for thee inquire not; what is too hard for thee investigate not; about what is too wonderful for thee know not; of what is hidden from thee ask not; study what was permitted thee; thou hast no business with hidden thi...

# IO ## On God's Creation Leazar said in Bar Sira's name: About what is too great for thee inquire not; what is too hard for thee investigate not; about what is too wonderful for thee know not; of what is hidden from thee ask not; study what was permitted thee; thou hast no business with hidden things. **Midrash Rabbah** 1. I propose to ignore these instructions.¹ I shall consider certain hidden things. In just what way did God create the world? What was the state of affairs before He created it? What was the nature of the creative process? What, exactly, did He do? And how may we understand, in the light of what He did, His relationship to the world and to mankind? Of course these questions are too great, too hard, and too wonderful. It is true that we have no business with them. Still, there are other things in life besides business. 2. No one has yet produced, so far as I am aware, an adequate biography of God. We have no systematic developmental account of the character and activities of the deity whose career is related in the Old Testament. It is plain, however, that He is responsive to human behavior, and that He often reacts to it with great intensity. Moreover, it often seems that He regards Himself as being in some way dependent on the conduct of mankind. The things people do appear at times to affect Him in ways that even suggest a certain vulnerability on His part.² A rather striking manifestation of this dependency is God's recurrent interest in executing covenants with human beings. Insofar as a covenant is a contract, it is an agreement entered into for mutual advantage. If it is to rest neither on ignorance nor coercion, it must offer benefits of comparable magnitude to everyone who is to be bound by it. Now it is not difficult to understand how humans might profit by entering into contractual arrangements with a being of enormous power and energy who is in an incomparably effective position to promote and protect their interests. But what is in it for God? In what way might He expect to benefit from 1. The epigraph is from _Midrash Rabbah_, ed. H. Freedman and M. Simon (London: Soncino Press, 1939), vol. 1 (Gen. 1), p. 56. 2. Thus God responds to the sin of Adam and Eve not simply with anger and curses but also with fear (cf. Genesis 3:22). ## NECESSITY, VOLITION, AND LOVE any human performance? How could it be in His interest to obligate Himself to man? What difference can it make to Him how people act? Why does He care about it at all? One line of response to these problems is grounded in the familiar image of God as an absolute and imperious ruler, an exigent and all-powerful issuer of commands and decrees. On this account, the reason people are obliged to obey and to worship God is not that doing so is inherently desirable or that it is beneficial to anyone. They are required to submit to God's will only because He demands their submission; and He demands this just because, whether out of pride or out of jealousy or out of sheer willfulness, He wants it. Thus the considerations that define the relationship between man and God are, from a moral point of view, quite arbitrary: human beings must do what God commands, and He commands it simply because it is what He wants. The ultimate relevant fact is that it pleases Him to be worshipped and obeyed. There is nothing more to be said about the matter than that. Another line of response invokes a far different, though equally familiar, image of God as a loving parent. On this account, God is not motivated in His relationship with mankind by any willful desire for glorification. He does not regard people primarily as His subjects, but as His children. It is because He wishes them well, rather than because He is concerned with Himself, that He is preoccupied with their behavior. What He fears is that they may act in ways that will be detrimental to their best interests. For this reason, He devotes Himself paternally to instructing them and to guiding their conduct. When He berates them or provides them with inducements to do this or that, He does so entirely for their benefit. Since people are not always capable of understanding what is good for them, they cannot be left to themselves. For their own sakes, accordingly, God requires them to accept His authority. Neither of these two lines of response goes deep enough. In both cases, the problem of understanding the relationship between man and the divine remains wholly isolated from the problem of understanding creation. But there must be a profound connection between these problems. It could hardly fail to be the case that God's view of human beings is in some way determined or conditioned by how their relationship began. Thus, there is every reason to think that a clarification of God's creation would illuminate the curious symbiosis between Him and his most notable creature. After all, before God was Lord or Father of mankind, He was the Creator of the world. 3. What was the state of affairs when the process of creation began? Here is what we are told: When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the water. And God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. (Gen. 1:1-3)³ This is manifestly not an account of a creation _ex nihilo_. Whatever basis there may be for supposing that the world was created out of nothing, these opening lines of Genesis appear to be flatly inconsistent with that supposition. They seem to make it quite explicitly clear that before God performed His first creative act – that is, prior to His creation of light – there was already something. Indeed, quite a bit. The text mentions three things: the earth, the deep, and the spirit of God. It may appear to be somewhat uncertain whether we are to understand that the earth was actually in existence at the beginning of the creative process. The assertion that the earth was "unformed and void" might naturally be construed as describing the condition of the earth at a certain time in its history; and in that case it would imply that the earth, although it did not yet have a specifiable form or character, did then exist. But the assertion could also plausibly be taken to imply instead that, at the time in question, the earth did not yet exist. Everything depends on what is meant by saying of the earth that it was "unformed and void." Suppose that we accept Rashi's suggestion concerning how to understand this key phrase.⁴ Then we will probably have to conclude that the earth did already exist when God's creative activity began. The Hebrew words translated as "unformed" and "void” are, respectively, _tohu_ and _bohu_. Rashi says that “the word _bohu_ has the meaning of emptiness and void." As for the other element of the phrase, he explains that "the word _tohu_ has the meaning of astonishment and amazement ..; for a person would be astonished and amazed at the void in the world." Now, if we take this seriously, it is difficult to construe the assertion that the earth was _tohu_ and _bohu_ as consistent with the supposition that the earth did not exist. After all, what would be so surprising about the non-existence of the earth before creation began? No one examining the state of affairs prior to the creation of light would be astonished or amazed to discover an empty space at the location destined in due course to be occupied by the earth. That would surely not be surprising at all. On the contrary: before creation gets under way, one would naturally expect to find emptinesses and voids. Perhaps, then, "the void in the world" does not refer to a simple vacancy or to an absence of matter. Perhaps it refers to a deficiency of another sort, which permits the supposition that the earth did in some way already exist. Rashi says that the 3. The translation is based on the New JPS Translation, in _Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures_ (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988). 4. Abraham ben Isaiah and Benjamin Sharfman, _The Pentateuch and Rashi's Commentary (Genesis): A Linear Translation into English_ (Brooklyn, N.Y.: S. S. & R. Publishing Company, 1949), p. 3. void in the world is astonishing and amazing. Now what is it to be astonished or amazed? It is a matter of being more or less dumbfounded; and this means being to some degree speechless. A person who is struck with astonishment, or with amazement, is not immediately capable of giving an orderly and informative account of what has struck him that way. The experience disorganizes him, and therefore he cannot readily describe it. This may happen when the experience is so unexpected that the person is thrown off balance. Then, because he is startled, the person is for the moment unprepared to grasp the nature of the experience confidently even though it is not something that is inherently difficult to comprehend. However, this is not to the point here. For, as has already been suggested, the terms employed to characterize the earth at the beginning of creation do not mean that the condition of the earth at that time was unexpected. What the terms _tohu_ and _bohu_ convey is that prior to creation the condition of the earth was indeterminate. Genuine indeterminacy would certainly be dumbfounding. It would inevitably leave one speechless, because indeterminacy is precisely a matter of being insusceptible to coherent description. So the reason a person could not grasp the pre-creation condition of the earth discursively is not that the earth does not then exist; nor is it that the nature of the earth before creation would be so surprising that anyone observing it would be irresistibly taken aback. Rather, the person would be dumbfounded by the fact that the earth does not possess a definite nature at all: it exists, but it lacks distinct and fully articulated properties. This is the sense in which the earth is said to be "unformed." It is in a similar sense that the earth is said to be "void." It is void in the sense of being blank, with no identifiable character. Prior to creation the earth was inchoate and hence not describable in the categories of intelligible speech. That is why anyone encountering it at that time would have been, as Rashi intimates, amazed, astonished, and (necessarily) speechless. Now this way of understanding what the passage says about the earth is confirmed by what it goes on to say about the deep. Here the text is quite unequivocal: the deep does already exist. Moreover, we may legitimately suppose that the deep was as inchoate as the earth, even though the text does not explicitly assert that it was unformed and void. For water is naturally and paradigmatically fluid, and this fluidity evokes by itself the notion of something that lacks a stable and determinate character. It is essentially characteristic of water to have no fixed place and no inherent form. Water flows and spreads freely, without inner constraint; and it accepts as its own whatever shape surrounds it. By its very nature, then, the deep is "unformed and void." 4. Although it was unformed when creation began, the deep did have a surface. We are told that there are two things over this surface: darkness, and the spirit of God (ruach elohim). Now why does the text refer here to the spirit of God? What is the significance of the fact that it does not refer simply to God Himself? The spirit of God and God are surely not the same. There is a difference between the spirit of a thing and the thing itself. Roughly speaking, the former provides the latter with its distinctive mode of animation. Of course, not everything has a spirit. Something has a spirit only insofar as (again, roughly) it is integral to its nature to be energetically purposeful. Then its spirit is the general tendency or style that informs its various purposes. It is what sustains and guides the direction of its energy.⁵ Suppose the energy of an active being is sharply focused, its purposefulness wholly determinate. In that case, its spirit is fully defined. But it may be that a purposeful being does not have an altogether certain or determinate purpose. Although it is capable of purposefulness and is tending toward purposeful activity, it may not yet have settled into guiding itself steadily by any specific purpose. In that case, its purpose is not entirely actualized or clearly defined. Its spirit is, to one degree or another, still unformed. And its own nature is correspondingly indistinct. The difference between the spirit of God and God is the difference between a relatively unactualized and a more completely actualized mode of divine existence. This corresponds to the difference between the formless state of the world before creation and the fully determinate state of the world subsequent to the creative process. At the beginning of creation, God was as unformed as the world. The divine was present and active only as an indistinct spirit; its reality was not yet that of God Himself. The nature of this divine spirit was indefinite, and its activity was vague. In the still indeterminate condition of things that prevailed prior to creation, neither the world nor God was wholly developed. The specific character of the deity - i.e., the exact direction of its purposefulness and power - had not yet been articulated or realized. Like the unshaped and fluid world itself, the divine presence was inchoate. Consider how the text represents the divine before the sequence of creative acts and compare this with how it refers to the divine when that sequence of acts begins. With respect to the time prior to creation, we have: “the spirit of God hovered over the water." With respect to the initial performance in the creative sequence, however, we have: “And God said: 'Let there be light.'" The spirit of God is present in the world before the initial creative act. When it comes to the performance of that act, however, it is not by the spirit of God that the act is performed. The act is performed by God Himself. Each subsequent act in the process of creation is also reported as having been performed by God rather than by the divine spirit. A fundamental difference between the spirit of God and God is that the former, 5. The spirit of “’76.” The same notion is involved when we say such things as "His spirit will live on in the institution to which he devoted so much of himself," and "Although I cannot be present, I am with you in spirit." since it has no definite nature, cannot be genuinely active. Thus there is nothing in the text to suggest that it ever accomplishes anything or even that it ever attempts anything. One activity (and only one) is attributed to it: "the spirit of God hovered over the water." Now, hovering is a peculiarly vague and unproductive sort of activity. While it requires energy and may involve some movement, it closely resembles being completely at rest. Indeed, hovering is specifically designed to avoid any passage from one location to another. Its purposefulness is in this respect indecisive and without ambition. The distinctive goal of hovering is precisely to have no direction and to bring about no significant change of place. It is devoted essentially to going nowhere. Its whole purpose is to simulate and to approach total inactivity. As long as it is devoted to nothing more than an indecisive hovering over the shapeless waters of the deep, the energy of the divine agency is basically inactive. Divine agency is then nothing more than the potentiality of an incipient but as yet unrealized God. The text explicitly marks the transition from this state of affairs to one in which the divine is more fully actualized and determinate. It does so by abandoning the term "the spirit of God" and by shifting to the term "God." 5. This transition is simultaneous with the start of the creative activity that transforms an inchoate world into an ordered cosmos. But there is more to be said. The process by which the divine becomes actualized and determinate not only begins at the same time as the series of acts by which divine agency fashions the cosmos. The two sequences coincide. Thus, each begins with the same event – viz., the creation of light. This first creative act both transforms a dark world into a lighted one and transforms the spirit of God into God. What is the nature of the act? It is, of course, an act of speech: "God said, 'Let there be light.'" Moreover, this act of speech is evidently effective without any intermediation: “God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light." Between the utterance and its outcome, nothing intervenes. The act is not like the utterances of magic; creation is not accomplished by the work of some arcane power, subordinate to God, which is summoned and deployed by the casting of a verbal spell. Accordingly, the creative act of speech is not a command. Nor is the act effective by causing a response in something other than itself. The effectiveness of the act is provided entirely by its own creative power. It does not require or depend on anything else. Some words are spoken and, in the very speaking of these words, both the world and the divine are thereby altered. The world is lighted, and the divine spirit becomes God. How are we to understand the relationship between these initial alterations of the world and of the divine? Consider the fact that the Hebrew word translated as "spirit," in the phrase "the spirit of God,” is _ruach_. In certain other translations of the passage at hand, this word is translated as "wind"; and, in still others, it is translated as "breath."⁶ Now each of these three words refers to something elusive 6. Rashi says, in commenting on Genesis 1:2: "The throne of glory stands [suspended] in the air and and indeterminate. Spirits, winds, and breaths are difficult to pin down. For one thing, they lack recognizable shapes or boundaries; for another, it requires considerable scientific sophistication to identify the material of which each is composed. With respect to each, then, neither its form nor its matter is easy to grasp. Before God began creating, the divine nature was indefinite. It was present in the world only as a breath, or a wind, or a spirit. This changed when the divine began to speak. Uttering words involves shaping the breath. Similarly, the formation of a thought entails ordering the mind or spirit. Both speaking and thinking are matters of articulation, which create form by imposing distinctions upon what is previously undifferentiated. Whether it is considered an act of speech or an act of thought, then, "Let there be light" is an ordering or an articulation by which something with a distinct identity is formed. As its identity becomes definite, the spirit of God - previously formless and indeterminate – becomes God. We must ask why the creation of the world began with the creation of light. The primary relevant difference between darkness and light is that in the light it is possible to make clear distinctions. In the darkness, no (visual) distinctions can be made. Under ordinary circumstances, of course, turning on a light reveals distinctions that already existed but that were concealed by the darkness. But the creation of light effects a more radical change. It makes possible, for the first time, the introduction of stable distinctions into a world that was previously fluid and unshaped. That is to say, it provides for the possibility of making a cosmos – an ordered and determinate system of being out of what had hitherto existed only inchoately. Before He began to articulate the utterances by which He created the world, God's will was formless and undefined. He had no determinate intentions or desires; and He did nothing but hover indecisively. It was only in formulating the clear-cut volitions expressed in His successive creative acts of speech that His active nature became focused and specific. These acts of speech were not addressed to anyone or to anything. They were resolutions, or determinations of intention, by which the spirit of God was transformed into a purposeful and active being. Thus God was created by creating. He was defined by His creation, just as the nature of the world that He created was defined by Him. This sounds a bit like Spinoza's doctrines that God and the world are somehow one and that the order of the world is identical with the mind of God. Of course, Spinoza regards the divine order as necessary and thus as self-explanatory, while the view I am here attributing to Genesis is that a world without order is possible and hovers over the face of the waters by the breath of the mouth of the Holy One. Blessed be He, and at His command, like a dove - which hovers over the nest" (ben Isaiah and Scharfman, _The Pentateuch and Rashi's Commentary_, pp. 3-4). Similarly, Freedman and Simon, eds., _Midrash Rabbah_, p. 20: “R. Berekiah commenced in the name of R. Judah b. R. Simon: By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth (Ps. 39:6): not by labor or toil but only by a word; thus, And God said: Let there be light." in fact preceded creation. The Genesis account, as I construe it, is not rationalistic. It does not even attempt to explain why the inchoate became ordered; it offers no understanding of what made the spirit of God transform itself into God. Perhaps the spirit of God possesses an inherent tendency toward order; or perhaps it is this tendency. Perhaps the assumption that there exists a divine spirit in the world means, in other words, precisely this: that the universe tends to acquire and sustain determinate characteristics and a stable order. 6. The final creative act is, of course, the creation of man. Now what God does in creating a man differs quite markedly and suggestively from what He does in His earlier creative activities. At each of the eight steps in the sequence of creation, God declares that something is to happen or to be done. The first seven declarations are uniform in pattern: (i) “Let there be light,” (ii) “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water," (iii) “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area," (iv) "Let the earth sprout vegetation," (v) "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky," (vi) "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds," and (vii) “Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creature." The eighth declaration diverges strikingly from this pattern. God's final utterance is: (viii) "Let us make man." When He comes to the creation of man, God's resolution is for the first time not that something should happen or should be done, but that He should do it Himself. Man is unique, then, in not having been created by an act of speech. The statement "Let us make man" enunciates the intention to create man, but it does not itself accomplish the creation. The actual creation of man is reported separately, as follows: "And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them." That the creation of human beings was not accomplished by speech is confirmed by the second account of creation. At Genesis 2:7, there is no reference to any utterance. The text there refers instead to another sort of activity altogether. "The Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth, He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." In forming man out of dust, God created him, so to speak, by hand.⁷ " In the earlier stages of the creative process, the "Let. utterances are creative by themselves. They require no further or separate activity of implementation. Thus, in the account of every earlier stage except one, the report of the utterance is followed immediately, and with no indication of any intervening events, by a report ("And it was so") that the relevant creation has been accomplished. ⁸ There is 7. Rashi says: "For everything was created by [divine] decree but he was created by the hands [of God]. For it is said (Ps. 139:5), 'And thou hast laid thy hand upon me.'" Ben Isaiah and Scharfman, _The Pentateuch and Rashi's Commentary_, p. 14. 8. The one exception is the sixth utterance ("Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky"), which is not followed by "And it was no suggestion of mediation between the act of speech and the realization of the intention it expresses. In order for the first seven features of the world to be created, it suffices that the divine spirit or will be resolved. God creates them simply through the formation of His own nature. When it comes to creating man, however, that is not how God does it. He begins by making up His mind, or by becoming resolved, to create man. But this resolution of His will does not suffice. It is only preliminary to the activity by which the creation of man is actually accomplished. Unlike every other step in the sequence of creation, God's final creative act is manifestly not an act of selfdefinition. He does not create man by forming Himself but by shaping some dust - that is, by doing something to something else. The creation of man does not come about by a simple articulation of God's volition or thought or breath. It is a mediated process, in which forming the intention is one thing and implementing it effectively is another. God does not create man by a purely reflexive act, which is creative just by advancing the development of His own nature. The creation of man requires work. This has a large and resonant import. It means that man, unlike all other creatures of God, is genuinely an artifact. Human existence and human nature are not created sheerly through the self-definition of the divine; God's formation of humans is not tantamount to His formation of Himself. Their coming into being is distinct from any modification of the divine will. The creation of man is unique in being emphatically not identical with the articulation of an intention. And since human existence was not begun by a determination of God's volitional nature, human history is therefore not unequivocally subject to the determinations of God's will. This implies that, with respect to man, God's omnipotence is limited. Just as the creation of human beings required that God do some real work – it being evidently insufficient for Him merely to resolve that humans should exist – so God so." Instead, it is followed immediately by this: "God created the great sea monsters, and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind." In this respect, the account of the sixth step may seem to resemble that of the eighth; for both appear to report that God does something in addition to speaking. But I think that the significance of this resemblance must be discounted. First of all, it makes no theological sense. Second, there is a more reasonable way to explain the resemblance than by assimilating the creation of sea creatures to the creation of human beings. The statement that God created the sea monsters and the rest may be understood as merely an elaborated report of what His sixth utterance accomplished rather than as the report of additional activity undertaken to implement the sixth utterance. That utterance is creative by itself, and the report that "God created the great sea monsters" does not mean that He performed a further implementing act. It simply reports what the sixth utterance created. This way of construing the sixth step clearly cannot be employed with respect to the eighth. For the eighth utterance ("Let us make...") is unmistakably prospective. It cannot be understood except as proposing to perform a further act of creation. cannot exercise direct power over mankind by mere acts of the divine will.⁹ In creating human beings, God created something separate – something whose being is distinct and radically other than His own. In other words, mankind does not exist just as an articulation of God's will. Therefore, human beings are not wholly dependent on divine volition or immediately subject to it. Man is a product of God's handiwork. In producing people, God produced creatures whose nature is independent of the direct or unmediated control of His will. This explains, for example, why God, when He expels Adam and Eve from Eden, posts guards at the gates. He cannot achieve His intention that Adam and Eve stay out of Eden simply by forming a volition that they do so. Insofar as the world is formed by the formation of His own will, God can shape it by shaping Himself – i.e., by articulating His own thoughts and volitions. But in dealing with man, whose being is distinct and separate from Himself, God can exercise control only through intermediaries. But why did God create something distinct from Himself? By introducing into the world a being other than His own, whose behavior is determined by its own nature rather than by His will, He appears to abandon unequivocal control over His creation. Thus he seems deliberately to undermine His own omnipotence. Why would He do this? Perhaps He did it because in a world in which everything is determined simply by His will, there would really be nothing other than Himself; and His omnipotence would therefore be meaningless. God's control of the world would in that case be nothing more than self-control. It would be power over nothing but Himself! There is a kind of paradox in the notion of omnipotence. A being enjoys absolute omnipotence only if its effective exercise of unlimited power requires nothing more than a determination of its will. If its intentions themselves do not suffice but must be implemented by further exertions, its power is to that extent qualified. The insufficiency of its volition implies some external resistance, which cannot be overcome without work. It follows that a being possesses unlimited omnipotence only if there is nothing other than itself over which to exercise its power. For (a) unequivocal omnipotence entails unmediated control, while (b) the being of anything that is subject to unmediated control belongs to whatever exercises that control. Thus, a wholly omnipotent being would necessarily be alone. There would be nothing other than itself over which to exercise power. It could do nothing but form intentions and thereby alter its own nature. In a sense, then, it would be quite powerless. God needs a being other than Himself, then, in order to exercise His 9. Of course God can exercise indirect power over human beings by volition alone, since the rest of nature does respond without mediation to His will. So God can endeavor to control man indirectly by directly affecting conditions (i.e., just by making up His mind) which are important to human interests. power at all meaningfully. But this means that for the meaningful exercise of His power, He needs a being over which His power is not absolute. 7. The fact that God and man are separate is the source of an ineradicable tension in the careers of each. The story of man's yearning to diminish the distance between himself and the divine has often been explored. Less familiar is the story of God's struggle to accommodate the reality of a being other than His own. The texts make it clear that God has found this struggle frustrating and even demoralizing. Indeed, at the time of Noah it actually led Him to believe for a while that His creation of man had been a mistake: And the Lord regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened. The Lord said, "I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them." (Gen. 6:6-7) Only by the heartening example of Noah was God persuaded to change His mind about this: Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age; Noah walked with God. (Gen. 6:9) Despite his distinctness as an independent being, and his capacity therefore to diverge from God's will, Noah was not distant from God. On the contrary, he "walked with God." It was in this cohesion with God that his righteousness and his blamelessness consisted. The example of Noah convinced God that, even though men are beyond the control of His unmediated will, it is not inevitable that there be a distance between His will and the will of man. God yearns, just as man does, to overcome the distance between them. Since man is separate and can therefore act only by his own will, this cannot be accomplished unless man accedes voluntarily to the divine order. Accordingly, it is necessary for God to threaten, to persuade, and to bargain. This accounts for the importance of covenant. But why does God care whether men act in harmony with His will? Why does He so badly want man to walk with Him? The answer is that He requires man to accept a divine order so as to complete His creation both of the world and of Himself. It is through the articulation of order that God's being is realized and defined. And it is only to the extent that the inchoate is transformed into a cosmos that He exists with a determinate and actualized nature. As long as there is anything outside that cosmos, neither the world nor God Himself is complete. They remain to some extent formless and unactualized. If man's will is disharmonious with the will of God, there is a boundary beyond which divine order does not prevail. In that case, God is not omnipresent. Being is ultimately fragmented. As there is a limit to the extent of divine order, so the cosmos is incomplete and the actualization of the divine is unfinished. It is for this reason that the distance of man is a threat to God. It is understandable why Genesis does not report that, after creating man, "God saw that this was good." Nor is it any wonder that God may sometimes be inclined to think that He made a mistake in creating man. But God has resolved not to destroy mankind. Instead He negotiates, He cajoles, He tries to make a deal. Endlessly, he seeks to induce man to accept at least some kind of coherence with the divine. This would not erase the separateness of God and man; human volition would be as independent as before. But it would at least entail that human life is ordered as God wishes it to be ordered. Hence it would entail that His order prevails universally, albeit not exclusively, by His unmediated volitional control. God has no better hope for completion. God and humans can never be one and the same as God is one and the same with the rest of His creation. He needs man to walk with Him. He depends on mankind's cooperation. Without it, divine order cannot be sustained throughout the world. According to one Talmudic view, God reckons the creation of the world as having been finished only when the Tabernacle was erected. That is, there was a complete and fully ordered cosmos only when His law was decisively established as determining the affairs of Israel. ¹⁰ The point is not merely that the created world is unsatisfactory until human beings accept the divine law, but that it is not complete until then.¹¹ Until there is a coherent harmony between man and God, there is no universal order; that is, the cosmos is unfinished. God cannot complete the process of His creation alone.¹² 10. "At the erection of the Tabernacle, as it says, And he that presented his offering the first day (Num. 7:12) – meaning, the first of the world's creation, for God said, 'It is as though on that day I created My world" (Midrash Rabbah, p. 25). 11. As the editors of the Midrashic text point out: "The world is not really created until man does God's will, here symbolized by the erection of the Temple, and thereby His original design to be at one with man is fulfilled" (ibid., n. 4). 12. The ideas I have tried to develop in this essay derive from conversations with R. Sidney Morgenbesser.