I teach Kitah Gimmel – third grade – at Congregation Beth Shalom’s Hebrew School. In our classroom we have a box, covered in shiny blue metallic paper, that says “Ask The Rabbi” on it. The students can write down questions on pieces of paper and place them in the box for Rabbi Michael to answer when he visits our classroom every week.
My kids? Born Philosophers. And born wiseacres too. They take “Ask The Rabbi” as a personal challenge to see if they can find a question that Rabbi Michael just cannot answer.
Their favorite stump-the-Rabbi question? What came before God? – or – Who created God?
Rabbi Michael’s answer is fair – Nothing. His answer is also meant to work within his 20 minute visit window, and for his young audience.
But, this is Judaism, the religion where two Jews equal three opinions. Of course there should be more to this answer. Even if the ultimate conclusion is still “Nothing”, I am sure that many have weighed in on the subject.
Many Rabbis agree with Rabbi Michael in their assessment. Nothing existed before God – God was the beginning of everything. Or, even better phrased “God has always been”, and therefore there is nothing that could have come before.
When Moses asked God’s name, God replied “ehyeh asher ehyeh”. This phrase can be translated as “I am what I am”, “I am what I will be”, or “I will be what I will be”. The ambiguity as to the time frame is interpreted as meaning God always has been and will continue to be eternal.
There is at least one Rabbi that has stated it is heresy of the highest caliber to even think upon this question. I politely disagree, considering that we should not be condemning a young student’s questioning. I seriously doubt that was the intent of this rabbinical edict, but anything that stops the genuine quest for knowledge seems antithetical to Judaism. We are, after all, the people who struggle with God.
The Zohar gives us a further mystery. It states that we are commonly mistranslating the first sentence in the Torah. “B’resheet Barah Elohim” is normally translated as “In the beginning, God created”. However, you can translate the “B” from “B’resheet” as meaning “with” as well as “in the”, and the subject of “barah” – “created” is unclear, we are not absolutely sure who is doing the creating. The Zohar speculates that there could be a hidden subject, a hidden source who is doing the creating, and therefore the meaning of this first sentence could be rendered “With beginning [the hidden subject] created God”.
And so we are left with a mystery – who is this hidden subject? The Zohar continues:
“The Concealed One, who is not known, created the palace; this palace is called Elohim.” In other words, the Ain Sof, co-eternal with the first Sefirah, Keter, used the agency of Beginning to create the second of the emanations, Khokhmah, which is as far as our human understanding will take us.
(Kenneth Hanson, Kabbalah: The Untold Story of the Mystic Tradition)
Which is a fancy way of stating that God created himself. Because God was intending to create a world of finite beings with a limited viewpoint, God needed an identity that could be perceived by creatures not equal to himself.
Which still leaves us with the conclusion that God always has been. But it seems like an incomplete answer. The inner scientist is not appeased. If all things have a cause, then certainly doesn’t God also need a cause?
Scientifically we know that things always come from other things. You cannot have something come from nothing. If you have nothing, then you will always continue to have nothing. 0+0=0 is simple math. But, since the universe exists, we know that we have something. So there always had to be something for the universe to be created out of.
That’s a long way of saying that science states that the universe needs a creation force in order to exist. Whether you consider that source of creation to be God or the Big Bang (or both!) it doesn’t matter, but it must exist for everything else to flow from it.
The Big Bang theory states that it is the point at which everything came into existence; matter, time, dimension, energy – everything. Therefore, the question of what came before the Big Bang becomes nonsensical. How can you consider the existence of a time before time? The label of “before” cannot possibly apply.
As Stephen Hawking said “Asking what occurred before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole.”
I will leave the conclusions to you.
My kids? Born Philosophers. And born wiseacres too. They take “Ask The Rabbi” as a personal challenge to see if they can find a question that Rabbi Michael just cannot answer.
Their favorite stump-the-Rabbi question? What came before God? – or – Who created God?
Rabbi Michael’s answer is fair – Nothing. His answer is also meant to work within his 20 minute visit window, and for his young audience.
But, this is Judaism, the religion where two Jews equal three opinions. Of course there should be more to this answer. Even if the ultimate conclusion is still “Nothing”, I am sure that many have weighed in on the subject.
Many Rabbis agree with Rabbi Michael in their assessment. Nothing existed before God – God was the beginning of everything. Or, even better phrased “God has always been”, and therefore there is nothing that could have come before.
When Moses asked God’s name, God replied “ehyeh asher ehyeh”. This phrase can be translated as “I am what I am”, “I am what I will be”, or “I will be what I will be”. The ambiguity as to the time frame is interpreted as meaning God always has been and will continue to be eternal.
There is at least one Rabbi that has stated it is heresy of the highest caliber to even think upon this question. I politely disagree, considering that we should not be condemning a young student’s questioning. I seriously doubt that was the intent of this rabbinical edict, but anything that stops the genuine quest for knowledge seems antithetical to Judaism. We are, after all, the people who struggle with God.
The Zohar gives us a further mystery. It states that we are commonly mistranslating the first sentence in the Torah. “B’resheet Barah Elohim” is normally translated as “In the beginning, God created”. However, you can translate the “B” from “B’resheet” as meaning “with” as well as “in the”, and the subject of “barah” – “created” is unclear, we are not absolutely sure who is doing the creating. The Zohar speculates that there could be a hidden subject, a hidden source who is doing the creating, and therefore the meaning of this first sentence could be rendered “With beginning [the hidden subject] created God”.
And so we are left with a mystery – who is this hidden subject? The Zohar continues:
“The Concealed One, who is not known, created the palace; this palace is called Elohim.” In other words, the Ain Sof, co-eternal with the first Sefirah, Keter, used the agency of Beginning to create the second of the emanations, Khokhmah, which is as far as our human understanding will take us.
(Kenneth Hanson, Kabbalah: The Untold Story of the Mystic Tradition)
Which is a fancy way of stating that God created himself. Because God was intending to create a world of finite beings with a limited viewpoint, God needed an identity that could be perceived by creatures not equal to himself.
Which still leaves us with the conclusion that God always has been. But it seems like an incomplete answer. The inner scientist is not appeased. If all things have a cause, then certainly doesn’t God also need a cause?
Scientifically we know that things always come from other things. You cannot have something come from nothing. If you have nothing, then you will always continue to have nothing. 0+0=0 is simple math. But, since the universe exists, we know that we have something. So there always had to be something for the universe to be created out of.
That’s a long way of saying that science states that the universe needs a creation force in order to exist. Whether you consider that source of creation to be God or the Big Bang (or both!) it doesn’t matter, but it must exist for everything else to flow from it.
The Big Bang theory states that it is the point at which everything came into existence; matter, time, dimension, energy – everything. Therefore, the question of what came before the Big Bang becomes nonsensical. How can you consider the existence of a time before time? The label of “before” cannot possibly apply.
As Stephen Hawking said “Asking what occurred before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole.”
I will leave the conclusions to you.
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