It feels pretty incredible (and maybe even the point?) that every year when I study Parashat Bereshit, despite having looked at it for decades, I always find something new. This year, in reading Leon Kass (a scholar at the University of Chicago), I learned that the days of creation are organized into two different groups: Days 1, 2, 3, and days 4, 5, 6, and these groups parallel each other. The first day serves as a container for its corresponding parallel day - 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6.
On the first day of creation, God says “let there be light”, and on the fourth day, its parallel, the heavenly lights, the sun and the moon and stars, were created, distinguishing day from night. On the second day of creation, the heavens were created, separating the space between the waters below and the waters above, and on the fifth day, the animals that inhabit each of those spaces (fish and fowl) were created. Finally, on the third day, dry land and the vegetation on it were created; on the sixth day, animals and humans that live upon that land were created.
I love the structure and symmetry of this teaching and the way that it organizes creation. The first three days are larger, structural types of creation, whereas the last three give shape and detail to the bigger pieces. They make the world come alive. But even more than this literary understanding, this way of reading the text reminds me that every act of creation, big or small, can be a container for some other type of creation. Every element of creation, even in our lives now, can make way for something else.
We usually don’t think of our daily acts as moments of creation, moments that can be a container for something else down the line. Yet I find it moving and empowering to realize that everything can give way to something else. Every single action we do has a parallel (and that one does, too…), that can help create yet another moment. We are not just like the humans that were created on day six, animating the earth they lived on, we are also containers in this world. We can be the space where something else comes alive, and our energy can give life to something that we could never imagine.
This Shabbat Bereshit, this Shabbat honoring the creation of the world, I hope we remember that we are partners with God in perpetual moments of creation. I hope we honor the way that we are sacred vessels, a holy creation of the Holy One, and that we too can create holiness through our own actions.
