Shabbat Parashat Bereishit - 5783

Shabbat Parashat Bereishit - 5783

Rabbi Hal Miller

When the earth was bewilderment and void, with darkness over the surface of

the deep, and the breath of God was hovering upon the surface of the waters.

[Bereishit 1:2]

The words tohu and bohu are certainly difficult to understand here. Rashi says

"tohu means astonished and bafflement" and that "bohu means emptiness and

desolation". Rav Moshe Feinstein asks an obvious question, who did this apply

to? Who was so astonished? "There was no person at that point to experience

such a feeling of astonishment." He answers that Rashi was saying, "when God

imbues a person with the potential to learn and to accomplish great things, and

that person does not make use of his God-given abilities, that we must find

astonishing." In other words, Creation was made with huge potential but (at

least at that point) it was not realized, so we must be astonished at the lack of

the earth's making use of what God gave it. Since we might have thought that

the mere presence of Creation was astonishing, Rashi teaches that even more

so is the lack of implementation of potential by what God created, which could

also be applied to man today.

Radak disagrees with this approach. He says that "the earth was created in

unfinished form, unlike the heavens. The purpose was to show God's power,

that He can change what exists, such as adding light, bringing up dry land,

bringing out life." The absence of anything is not about potential, rather about

God's ability to bring something into existence from nothing.

Rav Soloveitchik writes that rather than apply to what someone might think of

Creation, the phrase applies merely as a description of what God created at

first, "the earth consisted of formless matter". This agrees with Onkelos, who

called it "unformed and empty".

But there are other understandings too. Rav Hirsch calls it "confused and

tangled", and applies words like regret, muddled, and chaos. Saadiah Gaon

relates tohu to firmament and bohu meaning "overlain with a cover of water."

Abarbanel breaks the discussion down into two camps. The first he says is the more widely accepted, that tohu and bohu are in fact synonyms, coming together for one explanation of void or emptiness. His second classification comes from Ramban, who says they are different. Tohu is the primordial matter and bohu the primordial form which, applied to the matter, results in some physical thing with substance. Abarbanel prefers Ramban's approach.