On the Origins of Words

One aspect of Rabbi Hirsch's commentary which is immediately evident is his attempt to make sense of the text via understanding and exploring root words.  Hirsch begins his commentary with pages upon pages of explanation of the first verse.

בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ

"From the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."*

He begins by taking apart each word and describing how, for example, bereishit, is related to five different roots, meaning: aspiration to emerge, emergence from potentiality to actuality, and release from bondage.  "Accordingly the root ברא denotes bringing to light, actualizing and bringing something out into external reality...Accordingly בריאה is applied only to the concept of God's creation" meaning that it is creatio ex nihilo.  

This is not a new concept for me, but the way Hirsch arrives at this notion, that there is a special way that God creates and the Torah provides a special word for God's creation, speaks to me this time around.  In part, it has to do with the taking apart to build back up, and how this method reflects God's methods in the first telling of the Creation story (Gen. 1:1-2:4a).  Existence is stripped down to its most base elements, and then taken down even more to an unrealized state of existence: the unformed and void, which I'll get to in a little bit.

Creation is more than the sum of its parts.  Light, dark, water, heavens, earth: these are the building blocks of creation.  But, when they are put in order by the Creator, they become existence.  So too the word בראשית is perhaps an amalgam of root words and concepts, but when put together they become so much more: divine creation through divine speech.  Coming into a new synagogue, I understand the need and desire to take things apart to best understand them, and how when they are put back together, they add up to more than they seem.  

"Verse one shows us heaven and earth as we see them in our own day, and proclaims to us the great truth about them: It was God who brought them into existence in both substance and form."

This quote comes from Hirsch's explanation of the beginning of the second verse:

 וְהָאָרֶץ, הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ

"And this earth was once confused and tangled"*

I don't claim to be a master translator, nor do I have access to the original German, so if anyone out there is a scholar of Hirsch's writings, please let me know if I am not on the right track here, but I take issue with the translation "substance and form" from the above quote.  In preparing my Rosh HaShanah sermon, I only had access to the Hebrew translation of Hirsch, and the Hebrew struck me as more interesting, given that it echoed Platonic thought about reality.  Now, I do understand that the Hebrew language is limited in its terms, but I cannot help but see the word form and assume that the correlative term should be matter rather than substance.  I have only my professor Rabbi Martin Cohen to thank for this blessing/curse.

Plato speaks of form and matter.  Form is the eternal, the idea the "tableness" of the table.  Matter is the stuff which makes up the table.  Every thing has both form and matter.  This is, perhaps, an overly simple explanation of this concept, but suffice it to say, that Hirsch appears to be channeling Plato's ideas here and saying, in contrast to Plato, that God is responsible for both Form and Matter when it comes to creation.  Form is not eternal, it is God created.  So, the notion of tohu vavohu, is truly pre-creation chaos.  There is nothing before God begins to create.  No matter, and not even Form, which Plato teaches is eternal and has always been.

Hirsch uses this point to describe how the Hebrew words תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ describe God's creation of the distinct and various species.  "This is also the fundamental quality of the earth: it yields from its midst a variety of products, each species in its distinctive form [ed. note: see, there it is!], each individual item unique."

Now, it is possible Hirsch had come into contact with Darwinian thought, given that Origin of the Species was published in 1859, but it seems to me unlikely that this is a missive against evolution.  Rather, it appears to be a polemic against some elements of Platonic thought.  Given that this is only the first verse, I will have to keep reading in order to see what else comes of this line of thinking.  

So far, at least in these first couple verses, Hirsch wants to use modern methods of semantics and linguistics to prove the text's veracity.  In the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see when Hirsch's modernity asserts itself and where his traditionalism does.  I have come across some of this myself, as I have been asked questions about why it is that as a Temple, we our school is closed on Chag, given that we are open and have school on Shabbat.  My gut went traditional:  "It's chag.  That's why we're closed."  But my mind went elsewhere.  "Is chag different than Shabbat?"

It's a question I have yet to answer.

*All translations of Torah are Hirsch