Creation takes place in movement.
—Philo, On the Creation of the World
Somewhere in the long middle section of his treatise On the Account of the World’s Creation Given by Moses, Philo describes the life-cycle of shrubs and plants. “Now in the original creation of all things,” he says, “God caused all shrubs and plants to spring out of the earth perfect, having fruits not unripe but in their prime” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33).1 Not only were these fruits nourishment for animals and humans, but they also, and just as importantly, served “for the perpetual reproduction of their kind, containing within them the seed-substances” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33). These seed-substances contain within them the hidden and imperceptible “principles or nuclei of all things” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33). By causing the shrubs and plants to spring out of the earth perfect—which is to say, producing fruit—God created a golden, self-perpetuating cycle: the seed creates the plant that creates the fruit that produces the seed that creates the plant, and so on into infinity. “For God willed that Nature should run a course that brings it back to its starting-point, endowing the species with immortality, and making them sharers of eternal existence” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33). This matters not just for nature itself, but also because Philo uses the image of the self-perpetuating seed-substance not only with regard to plants and shrubs in particular and nature in general, but also with regard to the creation and perpetual reproduction of humankind, as well as the creation of the cosmos itself, each aspect of creation mirroring and amplifying every other aspect. “For the sake of this He both led on the beginning speedily towards the end,” Philo says of God, “and made the end to retrace its way to the beginning” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 33).
Philo begins his essay on Moses’s account of creation with a discussion about lawgivers and the various methods used to articulate and communicate those laws. While “some have nakedly and without embellishment drawn up a code of the things held to be right among their people,” others, “dressing up their ideas in much irrelevant and cumbersome matter, have befogged the masses and hidden their truth under their fictions” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7). One method, Philo suggests, is too austere to be effective, the other too ostentatious. Moses, on the other hand, disdained both methods and “introduced his laws with an admirable and most impressive exordium” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7). Moses, we are to understand, got the laws just right:
He [Moses] refrained, on the one hand, from stating abruptly what should be practiced or avoided, and on the other hand, in face of the necessity of preparing the minds of those who were to live under the laws for their reception, he refrained from inventing myths himself or acquiescing in those composed by others (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7).
What I find most striking in this description is that Moses refrained from inventing myths himself. Given that Philo refers to Moses as the human author who composed the five books of the Torah, his suggestion that Moses refrained from inventing his own myths is especially noteworthy. Philo is not saying that the laws and narratives contained in the Torah are not myths (perhaps just the opposite); he is merely suggesting that, even though Moses, an author and philosopher—a real human being who existed historically in the world every bit as much as Plato—somehow composed the myths of the Torah but did not invent them. This begs the question: How do you compose something, in writing, without inventing it? Dictation seems to be one way. But whom or what was Moses dictating? Philo would say “God.” After all, he says of Moses that “he had attained the very summit of philosophy” and “had been divinely instructed in the greater and most essential part of Nature’s lore” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9). For humans, it does not get much more authoritative than that. One might be forgiven for imagining Moses’s role vis-à-vis God to be anything less than a divine scribe, the chosen human vessel through which God’s Word coursed. In light of this, “dictation” seems too technical a term. The terms “divine inspiration” or “creative inspiration” more accurately describe how Moses came to articulate the myths surrounding not only the creation of the Law, but, Philo suggests, the Law’s necessary antecedent, creation itself.
Unlike other lawgivers, who flatly state the laws or go too far out of their way to make their laws seem compelling, Moses “excites our admiration in the highest degree” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7). He does this by prefacing the laws with an account of the creation of the world. According to Philo, this juxtaposition implies that
the world is in harmony with the Law, and the Law with the world, and that the man who observes the law is constituted thereby a loyal citizen of the world, regulating his doings by the purpose and will of Nature, in accordance with which the entire world itself is also administered (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 7).
Philo’s assertion is unambiguous. The Law cannot exist without the world and the world cannot exist without the Law. They are inseparable. This is reminiscent of the fruit that cannot exist without the plant that cannot exist without the seed, ad infinitum. The process of generation and regeneration is one movement, a single gesture. Philo says of the world and the Law that they are in harmony together, and the person who observes the Law becomes a loyal citizen of the world. I am tempted to go even further and say that the person who observes the law will enter into the preexisting harmony between the world and the Law, becoming in the process something like a harmonious being. I believe this is what Philo is pointing us to. But still, where does the world come from? Where does the Law come from? And where does the seed-substance, the starting point of all generative-regenerative cycles, originate?
It is important to remember that this is all a prelude to Philo’s account of the creation of the world as told by Moses. Philo has not yet approached the subject of creation directly. He must clear his throat one more time. And what a throat-clearing it is! “Now it is true that no writer in verse or prose could possibly do justice to the beauty of the ideas embodied in this account of the creation of the kosmos. For they transcend our capacity of speech and hearing.” Nevertheless, Philo adds—and this “nevertheless” happens to be the birth, or seed-substance, of Jewish exegetical literature—“they must not on this account be passed over in silence. Nay, for the sake of the God-beloved author we must be venturesome even beyond our power” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9).
As Philo approaches Moses’s account of creation, he acknowledges his, and our, inadequacy in the face of such perfect and perfectly rendered knowledge. To simply respond to such knowledge with silence would be tantamount to desecrating not only Moses, “the God-beloved author” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9), as Philo calls him, and the perfect knowledge he communicates, but also God Godself. Silence is therefore not an option. So, for the sake of God, for the sake of Moses, and for the sake of the Law, for which the myths and the narratives of Scripture, according to Philo, are its subject, we must be venturesome even beyond our power.
For those within the tradition who find Philo to be too much the Hellenist and insufficiently Hebraic, I would respectfully point to this moment as Exhibit A of, among other things, Philo’s fully-formed first century chutzpah, which forged a path for future acts of chutzpah—in other words, for philosophically-minded, Scripture-loving Jews to maintain a certain leeway or latitude toward the text that would allow them to take imaginative and philosophical and revelatory license with regards to God’s Word. I imagine this is what Philo meant when he said that we must be venturesome beyond our power. He seems to be speaking directly to us. But what does it mean to approach the holy texts with a combination of imagination, reason, and faith? What does it mean when we think we have something to say? And even more pointed: What does it mean when we believe we are obligated to have something to say?
This urgency to speak, to articulate in the face of the divine, I recognize as distinctly Jewish. It is based on the assumption that, when we do speak toward God, our words will somehow be heard, that our cries will register somewhere beyond ourselves and our earthly predicament. It is based, above all, on the belief that there is only one God, one ultimate source to which all existence owes its due. But still: How exactly are we supposed to do this?
Regarding our distinctive philosophical-exegetical approach to Scripture, Philo advises: “We shall take nothing from our own store, but, with a great array of points before us, we shall mention only a few, such as we may believe to be within reach of the human mind when possessed by love and longing for wisdom” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9). Pure invention, Philo suggests, is not the way. The point is not to invent something new out of nothing; rather, our job as scriptural philosophers is to select from the profound insights already arrayed before us.2 In this sense, we are not so much artificers or inventors as we are choosers and arrangers of divine wisdom, free beings capable of infinite interpretation. But even this is not the most important consideration, Philo seems to say. The key of all keys is to approach God’s word when possessed by love and longing for wisdom. For it is only in this state that we may experience something like harmonious being, the necessary prerequisite for being in harmony with God.
But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, Philo needs to draw our attention, as he says, “to a matter which ought not be passed over in silence” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9). Regarding this, he writes:
There are some people who, having the world in admiration rather than the Maker of the world, pronounce it to be without beginning and everlasting, while with impious falsehood they postulate in God a vast inactivity; whereas we ought on the contrary to be astonied at His powers as Maker and Father, and not to assign to the world a disproportionate majesty (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 9).
If we had any question about Philo’s conception of God and the world, and the relationship between God and the world, this vital statement begins to fill in some of the gaps. If we hold the material world to be on equal or superior footing to God, we are already lost to confusion. In order to make this blunder, Philo says, we need to believe two things: that the world is without beginning and without end, and that God is inactive, unchanging substance. While Philo would agree that the world is, indeed, without end, to posit that the world had no beginning would make the world coequal with God—a nonstarter for many Jews. This would mean that God could not have created the world, since the world was always already created. And if God did not create the world, God would not have the same fundamentally beneficent relationship with the world. For, Philo writes, “it stands to reason that what has been brought into existence should be cared for by its Father and Maker,” because “it is a father’s aim in regard of his offspring and an artificer’s in regard of his handiwork to preserve them, and by every means to fend off from them aught that may entail loss or harm” (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 11). God, in other words, as the creator of the universe, is by necessity interested in the growth and well-being of God’s creation. Take away God’s role as creator, and you take away the underlying thrust of goodness permeating the cosmos.
Philo is equally bothered with the second, interrelated claim that God is a vast inactivity. If God were a vast inactivity, then God is mere matter. And if God is mere matter, even preexistent matter, then God is just one more thing amidst a vast cosmos of things. According to Harry Wolfson, in Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, Philo “could not accept the view commonly held by contemporary students of Plato that the pre-existent matter out of which, in the Timaeus, the world was created was eternal.”3 But given that Philo was a great appreciator of Plato, says Wolfson, he did not want to reject Plato outright and instead “solved the difficulty by the method of harmonization.”4 He did this by postulating that there is such a thing as preexistent matter, but that preexistent matter was itself created.
“There were thus to him two creations,” Wolfson says of Philo, “the creation of the pre-existent matter out of nothing and the creation of the world out of that pre-existent matter.”5 While this distinction, too, is reminiscent of some of Plato’s writings, the final and perhaps most important distinction between Philo and Plato with regard to the creation of the world and God’s relationship to creation is summed up by Wolfson thus: Whereas, for Plato, God’s creation of the world could not have been otherwise, Philo’s God, the God of Scripture, was and is “an all-powerful free-agent,” who “could have either not created the world or created another kind of world.”6 In other words, the world was not fated to exist. The world—this world, our world—was created on purpose because God chose to create it. To put it even more simply: Philo’s God possesses free will, and Plato’s God does not. For Philo, God is not created, God is the creator of all creation, and all that is created is a creation of God’s free will.
This is not to say that God created everything exactly how it is! God may be the creator of all creation, but He is not the micromanager of all micromanagement. God’s mind may be the seed-substance from which all creation first grew, as Philo suggests elsewhere in his essay, but once the plant starts growing, once it starts flowering and producing fruit and thus the seed-substance from which it will regenerate, it is on its own. The self-regenerating cycle is the God-given piece; how or if any one particular plant survives is up to the plant and the habitat in which it exists. The same goes for us. Our species may be divinely created, and we may be endowed with free-will, consciousness, and two opposable thumbs, but how (or whether) we survive, thrive, or somehow manage to make our way back to the beginning—to God—is almost entirely dependent on us and how we choose to exercise our free will. It behooves us, therefore, to understand our place in creation as outlined by Philo, in which God is in harmony with the world, the world is in harmony with the Law, and the Law is in harmony with God. Where we exist, it seems to me, is somewhere in the middle of that generative-regenerative cycle, somewhere in the beginning, always speeding toward the end so that it, and we, may begin again. We find ourselves, right now, in the midst of creation. We are not above or beyond creation. Creation was not a one-time event, and we do not live in long aftermath of creation. We are creation. And, as a creation of God’s free will, we are co-creators even now. This seems as fitting an entrance as any for Rav Kook, who, a mere nineteen hundred years after Philo, declared somewhat counterintuitively that “the love of all creation comes first.”7
The love of all creation comes first? This simple, benign-seeming affirmation is more complex than it first appears. Should it not be the love of God comes first? After all, God is the seed-substance from which all creation first grew. Why does Rav Kook privilege God’s creation over God? That is exactly what Philo, via Moses, warned us against—that we should not hold the world in admiration rather than the Maker of the world. What I think Rav Kook means is that we cannot go from nonbelief to loving God in one easy step. That would be like skipping all particularities in order to go directly to the universal. And while it may be a good idea in theory to head straight for, and to live only in, the universal, the problem is that none of us lives in the universal. Each of us lives deeply embedded in particularity. Regarding this inconvenient truth, Rav Kook writes:
Great souls cannot dissociate themselves from the most universal concerns. All they desire and aspire for is the universal good, universal in its comprehensiveness, universal in its full width, height and depth. But the whole is constituted of numberless particulars, particular individuals and particular communities. The whole cannot achieve its highest fulfillment except through the perfection of its particular individuals, and the particular communities, whether small or large, of which it is constituted.8
I understand this as an order of operations, so to speak, regarding our material and spiritual life on earth. Start close in, Rav Kook seems to say. Begin where you are. Only then move outward, step by particular step. Rav Kook reminds us that we are creations, created by God, living in creation, which is to say that the particular dimensions and details of our lives matter urgently not only to the meaning of our lives, but also to the overall condition and thrust of the whole, of which we are also always a part. One of the commonalities among people I have known over the course of my life—including, first and foremost, myself—is that we are guilty of dismissing ourselves and our lives as mundane, inauthentic, unreal. This is more than a simple categorical error. It is a complete misunderstanding of the creation of the cosmos, the meaning of existence, and our place in it—not to mention the meaning of history, the nature of knowledge, and the presence of God in the world, among other not-so-minor considerations.
By holding Rav Kook’s directionality in mind, moving from the particularities of creation toward the universality of God, it becomes evident why he would suggest to us that the love of all creation comes first. If you cannot first love the particularities of creation as you experience it, how could you possibly love God? After all, creation exists because of God. More than that, God’s presence emanates throughout all of creation. Loving creation is loving God. “The higher unification,” says Rav Kook, “in which everything finds its completion, rests on the influence of the knowledge of God and the love of God from which it necessarily derives.”9 In other words, knowledge of God is the worldly precondition for resting in the love of God, from which (and from whom) we originate. To put it another way, knowledge of God is our ticket to universality, to the whole, which always already exists within us.
This notion is reminiscent of Philo when he says that the key when approaching the word of God is to be possessed by love and longing for wisdom. In order to become a harmonious being who lives in harmony with God, one must approach God with love and longing for wisdom. I suspect that approaching God with love and longing for wisdom is not something we could try to do. If we tried to live with love and longing for wisdom, we would not be living in love and longing for wisdom, we would be trying to live in love and longing for wisdom. Think of the difference between loving your children and trying to love your children. The difference is palpable. How we come to unselfconsciously live in love and longing for wisdom, Rav Kook suggests, is through the particularities of our worldly lives. This is because
when love descends from the spiritual realm to the created order, it descends by fragmentation into many particulars, to opposition and contradiction. It faces the necessity of confining the scope of the love bestowed to one individual for the sake of another, to many individuals for the sake of many other individuals, and to individuals in general for the sake of the all-embracing collective.10
This is perhaps the hardest of all the hard truths Rav Kook places before us. As human beings created by God, we are necessarily manifested into the world in opposition, contradiction, and fragmentation. These are not indications that something is wrong. This is the way it is supposed to be. We are born into opposition, contradiction, and fragmentation in order that we may grow our souls, expand our inner horizons, and finally, one hopes, come into love and knowledge of God, thus coming to the end that is also a beginning, so the cycle (and we) may begin again. This may explain how Rav Kook could embrace the secular Zionists all around him when he made aliyah to British Mandate Palestine in 1904. It seems counterintuitive that an Orthodox rabbi from Eastern Europe would, on a certain level, embrace not just secularism and atheism among Jews but the particular brand of Zionism those Jews produced and passionately advocated. Even though Rav Kook disagreed with the Zionist movement of his time spiritually, socially, and politically, he was able to recognize them as an authentic and necessary piece of the larger whole. Even still, when writing about those same Zionists, Rav Kook does not hold back:
The visible developments taking place before us here are set in a humble format, replete with material and spiritual poverty. Eretz Yisrael is returning to life through modest efforts, directed by confused thinking, notions shot through with ignorance and despair, soiled with religious nihilism and an inclination to evil. In all of these there is hiding the presence of the living God. “How great are Your works, O Lord, Your thoughts are very deep” (Psalm 92:6).11
What I find so remarkable is that Rav Kook is able to articulate a deeply critical response to his fellow Jews, describing their spirituality as impoverished, their thinking as confused, their notions ignorant and despairing, soiled with religious nihilism, even going so far as to describe them as having an inclination to evil—yet, even still Rav Kook discerns beneath all of those less-than-savory Jewish behaviors and characteristics the presence of the living God. This is radically counterintuitive to how we usually think about the world. We usually think in dialectical, binary terms: good or evil, light or dark, friend or foe. We seldom think about our adversary as also, on another level, our ally. Yet this is precisely how Rav Kook challenges us to think. He is suggesting neither that we agree with people with whom we disagree, nor that we abandon our particular worldly perspectives, the very perspectives that give our individual lives meaning. What he is challenging us to do is to look beyond our subjective perspectives, to integrate into our thinking and doing a living awareness of divinity in creation. In other words, he is asking us to recognize the fact that we are all creations—atheists, secularists, Zionists, you name it—all of us created by God, living together in creation, as creation. The problem with denying humanity, integrity, or authenticity to people or groups with whom we disagree is that, by doing so, we denigrate not just those people or groups but creation itself, and, by extension, God and ultimately ourselves—sowing disharmony all the way.
Still, how do we get from the fragmentation and chaos of creation to the universal harmony of God? Compared to the harmony of creation as outlined by Philo, the creation of harmony as suggested by Rav Kook seems far more complicated. But maybe this is just an illusion. Maybe the creation of harmony is exactly as complex or as simple as the harmony of creation. Which is to say, maybe it is the same movement, a single gesture. Far be it from me to suggest how anyone could or should get from chaos to harmony; some days I can barely manage my own household affairs. Yet I can point to the fact that Philo and Rav Kook agree that the Law specifically exists in order to lead the observant Jew from the chaos of creation to the harmony of God.
I did not know that Philo and Rav Kook shared this vision when I decided to write about them. What initially drew me to this seemingly odd couple of Jewish thinkers, separated by one continent and two millennia, is their shared proclivity for digressive, personal, nonsystematic writing. As far as I know, we have no evidence to suggest that Rav Kook ever read Philo, and I am quite certain Philo never read Rav Kook.12 Yet these two unclassifiable Jewish philosophers share much in common, not least of which is the abiding centrality of Moses within Jewish life. While Philo locates the laws, as articulated by Moses, as a necessary partner to harmony and creation, my first assumption regarding Rav Kook was that he did not hold the laws in quite the same esteem. Needless to say, my first assumption proved incorrect.
In his essay “The Sage is More Important Than the Prophet,” Rav Kook weighs the relative merits of the Jewish prophet against those of the Jewish sage, finding that the prophet, while better able to “describe the evils of life and to protest against them vigorously,” is less capable than the sage of probing the “particular conditions that preserve life and safeguard it from even the most minor defects that are due to generate very destructive consequences.”13 Among these destructive consequences include the “slow negligence” of the performance of the commandments, leading to a “process of erosion, destroying the vessels in which is stored the exalted spirit.”14 Notice the key role of the performance of the commandments. When we fail to observe the laws, we erode our capacity for spirit. While Rav Kook does not come right out and say it, I imagine he would agree that our capacity to live as harmonious beings, in harmony with God, would be severely diminished as a result.
The prophet Moses, however, “discerned simultaneously the claims of general principles as well as of the exacting demands of the particulars.”15 This is because, as Rav Kook and Philo both point out, God revealed this perception to Moses “from mouth to mouth” (Numbers 12:8). Moses was prophet and sage, sage and prophet. But, as we know, there was never another like Moses. Moses was a singular occurrence. It is not given to even the most learned sages or visionary prophets to know the full details of both the particular and the universal simultaneously. Regarding our built-in limitations, Rav Kook leaves us with a tantalizing, if inscrutable, provocation: “At the end of the present epoch, when the light of prophecy will begin to have its revival, as we are promised, ‘I shall pour out My spirit on all flesh’ (Joel 3:1), there will develop a reaction, a pronounced disdain for the particulars.”16 This will continue, Rav Kook says, “until the radiance of prophecy will reemerge from its hiding and reveal itself not as an unripe fruit, but as the first fruits full of vitality and life,” thus bringing us back to the image of the self-regenerating seed that creates the plant that creates the fruit that produces the seed, forever and ever, Amen. “This transcending of one-sidedness,” says Rav Kook, “will vindicate the vision of unity expressed by the psalmist: ‘Mercy and truth have met, justice and peace have kissed, truth will rise out of the earth and mercy will show itself from heaven; the Lord will also bestow what is good and our earth will bring forth its bounty’ (Psalm 85:11).” Rav Kook concludes his essay with these words: “The soul of Moses will then reappear in the world.”17 In the margins of my text, I scribbled: What does this mean? How would we know? I do not know what this means, and I do not know how we would know. But if Philo can imagine Moses to have been a real person, alive in the world, and if Rav Kook can see secularism and atheism as necessary pieces in the larger movement toward God, then we can imagine the reappearance of Moses’s soul, generating and regenerating itself, through us, within us, again and again.
Shawn A. Weiss is a rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies.
1 All citations of Philo are from Philo, Volume 1, trans. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 1929).
2 The term “scriptural philosophy” is used by Harry Wolfson, “The Philonic God of Revelation and His Latter-Day Deniers,” Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays (Atheneum, 1965), 1, to describe Philo’s innovation, which is, vitally, “in contradistinction to pagan Greek philosophy.”
3 Harry A. Wolfson, “Philo Judaeus,” Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, ed. Isidore Twersky and George H. Williams (Harvard University Press, 1973), 61.
4 Wolfson, “Philo Judaeus,” 61.
5 Wolfson, “Philo Judaeus,” 61.
6 Wolfson, “Philo Judaeus,” 62.
7 Abraham Isaac Kook, “Moral Principles,” 135. All citations of Rav Kook’s work are from Abraham Isaac Kook, trans. Ben Zion Bokser (Paulist, 1978).
8 Abraham Isaac Kook, “Lights of Holiness,” 226.
9 Kook, “Lights,” 226.
10 Kook, “Lights,” 226–27.
11 Abraham Isaac Kook, “Works of Creation,” 260.
12 We do know that Rav Kook’s student Rabbi David Cohen, the Nazir of Jerusalem, quotes Philo extensively in his work Qol hanevuʾah. It seems highly likely, therefore, that Kook knew of Philo, even if he never read him.
13 Abraham Isaac Kook, “The Sage is More Important Than the Prophet,” 253.
14 Kook, “Sage,” 253.
15 Kook, “Sage,” 254.
16 Kook, “Sage,” 254.
17 Kook, “Sage,” 255.