Bereshit and the Discovery of God
There are two kinds of scientific discovery. The first happens as a result of assiduous observation, gradual elimination, helped along by a dash of inspiration. The second type is extremely rare, and when it occurs reveals a sudden unimagined vision of the universe beyond all prior cognizance. There are known knowns, i.e. there are things which we know that we know. And then there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also cases we do not know that we don’t know.
As an example of the first type of discovery, consider Penicillin. Anticipated by Paul Ehrlich as early as 1908, it was finally discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928, after nearly three decades of intensive laboratory work.
So too with other normal discoveries; they took time to reveal. They all have share a history and were for the most part foreshadowed by earlier discoveries.
But then there’s the second, more radical type of discovery. No one could have anticipated Einstein’s four 1905 papers, which introduced special relativity, the photoelectric effect, and demonstrated the equivalence of mass and energy. In these papers, all written between March and June of 1905, Einstein upended everything we thought we know about space and time, matter and energy. We simply did not know that we did not know.
But there is another category of unknown. It is an unknown which we know that we know, but at the same time, is simultaneously totally unknown. We cannot even know that we do not know.
That “known” unknown is God.
God is the ultimate paradox. Every truth about Him has its counterpart which contradicts it. Every philosophy about Him carries within it its own contradiction.
No entity has ever been the cause of so much controversy, deafening silence, and worship. No one is so conspicuous while being totally hidden in the physical universe. For some, God is their best friend. For others He is one great disappointment. He is consistent and unreliable at the same time.
He has the disturbing habit of being everywhere and nowhere. He is in everything but also totally outside everything. He saves the Jews from the Egyptian army by splitting the Reed Sea and later exposes them to the Holocaust.
He is the most tragic figure in all of the Torah.
If God were to be treated by a therapist, He would reveal millions of contradictions. He would be “now here” or “nowhere” He is the “uncertainty principle”—not that of Werner Heisenberg, but of Himself. He resembles the beautiful enigma of an oxymoron. The task of God is to be a disruptor in our lives, awakening us from a spiritual slumber, prodding us to keep searching for Him.
And this is all foreshadowed in the Torah’s opening magnificent words: In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth. The paradox begins—and it unfolds, parashah by parashah, in my volume on Sefer Bereshit.
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo is the Founder and Dean of the David Cardozo Academy and the Bet Midrash of Avraham Avinu in Jerusalem. A sought-after lecturer on the international stage for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, Rabbi Cardozo is the author of 13 books and numerous articles in both English and Hebrew. He heads a Think Tank focused on finding new Halachic and philosophical approaches to dealing with the crisis of religion and identity amongst Jews and the Jewish State of Israel. Hailing from the Netherlands, Rabbi Cardozo is known for his original and often fearlessly controversial insights into Judaism. His ideas are widely debated on an international level on social media, blogs, books and other forums.
