IB World Religions 6.4.4. Cosmogony and Cosmology: the Sole Creator, Free Will and Tikkun Olam Notes

6.4.4. Cosmogony and Cosmology: The Sole Creator, Free Will and Tikkun Olam

God as sole creator

1. Jews hold that God alone created everything that exists. Nothing was made alongside him, and no rival power contributed anything to the world.
2. This rules out any dualism of two opposed forces. Isaiah 45:7 is the verse usually cited: I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil, I the Lord do all these things.
3. The liturgy quotes that verse with one word changed. The morning blessing before the Shema praises God who forms light and creates darkness, who makes peace and creates all things.
4. Whether creation was ex nihilo, out of nothing, was genuinely argued. Maimonides defended creation out of nothing against Aristotle's eternal universe, while Gersonides held that God shaped formless matter that was already there.
5. God is described as both beyond the world and present in it. Shekhinah names the divine presence understood to dwell among the people.
6. Creation is not treated as one finished event in the past. The same morning service blesses God who renews daily, constantly, the work of creation.

The Genesis accounts

1. Genesis 1 narrates creation in six days by divine speech, with each stage called good and the finished whole called very good.
2. Genesis 2 tells it differently, beginning from dry ground, forming the man from dust and planting the garden afterwards. Jewish tradition keeps both chapters rather than harmonising them away.
3. The seventh day belongs to the account itself. God rests, blesses that day and makes it holy, which grounds Shabbat in the structure of creation.
4. Jewish reading of these chapters has never been uniformly literal. Maimonides argued that where reason and a plain reading collide, the text should be read figuratively.
5. Genesis Rabba, the classical midrash on the book, has God taking counsel and discarding earlier worlds before this one, which shows how freely the rabbis handled the narrative.
6. The movements differ today. Many Orthodox Jews read the six days as historical and others read them as theological, while Reform and Liberal Judaism generally treat the chapter as teaching about God rather than about the mechanics of nature.
7. What the tradition consistently draws from the passage is not a method but an author. The point pressed is who made the world and that what was made is good.

The image of God

1. Genesis 1:27 states that God created humanity in his own image, male and female. The Hebrew phrase is b'tzelem Elohim.
2. Because Jews hold that God has no body, the image is understood as a standing or dignity rather than a physical resemblance.
3. The doctrine is used to argue for human equality. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 observes that a human ruler stamps coins from one die and they all come out alike, while God stamped every person from Adam and no two are the same.
4. The same passage draws the conclusion that whoever destroys a single life destroys a whole world, and whoever saves a single life saves a whole world.
5. From this follows pikuach nefesh, the principle that saving a life overrides almost every other commandment, including the prohibitions of Shabbat.
6. It also generates ordinary duties. Hillel is said to have treated washing at the bathhouse as a religious act, on the grounds that a person is caring for an image of the King.
7. Human beings are described as made good and made able to choose, which is why the tradition takes moral failure to be a matter of decision rather than of nature.

The two inclinations

1. Rabbinic teaching gives every person two impulses: the yetzer ha-tov, the good inclination, and the yetzer ha-ra, the bad inclination.
2. The pair is drawn from Genesis 8:21, which says the inclination of the human heart is bad from youth, and from a doubled letter the rabbis noticed in the word for formed in Genesis 2:7.
3. The yetzer ha-ra is not a devil and not a corrupted nature. It is closer to appetite, drive and self-interest, which the rabbis treat as harmful only when they run unchecked.
4. Genesis Rabba 9:7 puts the case bluntly: were it not for the yetzer ha-ra, nobody would build a house, marry, have children or do business.
5. The pull between the two is where the moral life happens, and Jews are held responsible for the outcome rather than treated as its victims.
6. Remedies are prescribed rather than assumed. Kiddushin 30b offers Torah study as the antidote, and the daily mitzvot function as training rather than as occasional heroics.
7. Teshuvah, repentance and literally returning, assumes the struggle will sometimes be lost. Its whole premise is that a person can turn back.

Tikkun olam

1. Tikkun olam means the repair or mending of the world. It is among the most quoted Jewish phrases and among the most argued over.
2. Its oldest use is legal. The Mishnah justifies a series of rulings with the words mipnei tikkun ha-olam, for the sake of the good ordering of society, including rules protecting a woman after divorce.
3. Its liturgical use comes from Aleinu, said at the end of every service, which hopes for a world put right under God's kingship.
4. Its mystical use comes from Isaac Luria in sixteenth-century Safed. He taught tzimtzum, God's self-contraction to make room for a world, followed by the shattering of the vessels meant to hold the divine light.
5. On that account divine sparks were scattered through creation, and every mitzvah performed raises one back, which makes ordinary observance cosmically consequential.
6. Twentieth-century usage, especially in North America, took the phrase to mean social justice work, and it now labels everything from food banks to climate campaigning.
7. That widening is disputed inside Judaism. Some Orthodox writers argue the phrase has been cut loose from halakhah and from its mystical setting, while its defenders reply that mending the world was always what the commandments were for.

Free will and cooperation

1. Jews hold that human freedom is real and that God asks for human cooperation. The world is described as deliberately left with work in it.
2. Deuteronomy 30:19 states this as a command rather than a theory: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse, therefore choose life.
3. Pirkei Avot 3:15 holds the tension open without resolving it, teaching that all is foreseen and freedom of choice is given.
4. Maimonides was blunter in the Mishneh Torah, ruling that every person is free to become righteous or wicked, and calling this the pillar of the Torah and the commandments.
5. How God's knowledge and human freedom fit together is acknowledged as a problem rather than solved. Maimonides concludes only that God's knowing is not like human knowing.
6. Because the world is unfinished, the goal Jews describe is a world of peace and justice reached with human hands rather than handed down over their heads.
7. This is why the doctrine of creation runs directly into conduct. The sole Creator is said to have made a world that needs its creatures to help complete it.