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March 28th, 2024

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Master Plan of Creation

Rabbi Nosson Scherman

By Rabbi Nosson Scherman

Published Nov. 3, 2017

Master Plan of Creation

Beginning today, JWR starts an absolutely fascinating weekly series on the Book of Genesis. In it, we will mine "myths" to reveal timeless teachings.

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The well-planned building is built around a concept. The architect begins with an idea, and from that idea his plan emerges. The intricacies of construction may involve scores of contractors, hundreds of subcontractors, thousands of suppliers, tens of thousands of workers, millions of tools and parts and nails and screws.

There may be piping enough to stretch for miles, wiring enough to span a continent. But everything unfolds from that single concept.

How many people will recognize the central idea in the finished construction? Very few.

Most will know the location of elevators and corridors --- the ones they need for their own particular purposes. They come to work every day for years and never know where the pillars are that keep thousands of tons of rubble from crashing down upon them.

Architects may visit the structure and marvel at it, but laymen will wonder what there is to admire. The graceful strength of a classic suspension bridge can be an inspiration to engineers and designers, but the thousands of people who cross it daily will mutter about delays, strain to gain an extra few seconds, and never stop to think that they ride on a tribute to the human intellect.

To thoroughly understand a structure one must know its plan, but it takes much training and uncommon brilliance to look through thousands of pages of blueprints and decipher the single unifying concept out of which they all grew and which gives them all meaning. But even without the ability to find the architect's purpose, every intelligent person knows that there is a purpose to the plan, and that the voluminous material in the blueprints is there only to make it possible for the plan to take shape

FIRST AND LAST

In praising the holy Sabbath, the mystic and poet, Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz (D. 1580), says in his classic hymn Lechah Dodi, that "the end of deed is first in thought."

The Sabbath was the crowning feature of creation, but it was not created first. A home is built to provide living quarters for a family, but furnishings and interior decoration are the last things that go into it. A religious seminary is built to provide a study hall where the sounds of eternity will reverberate day and night, but bookstacks, desks, chairs, and students will enter only after the bulldozers and bricklayers have long since left.

The first thought of parents planning a home for their family is of a comfortable and wholesome apartment; and the first thought of the rabbinic sage seeking to perpetuate the study of Torah (bible) is of the study hall where his students can forge themselves onto the eternal chain. Nevertheless, before that final goal can be realized, there is a long list of tasks that seemingly have no relationship to the goal, but they are indispensable to its attainment: obtaining the land, engaging an architect, formulating a concept, reducing it to a blueprint, finding a builder, obtaining financing, and so on and so on. Finally, when all the work is done, that original dream -- a home, a study hall -- has taken shape.

"End of deed, first in thought" --- all intelligent people live their lives this way: they decide upon a goal and then work their way toward its fulfillment. The more accomplished the person, the more ambitious the goal, the more difficult and complex is the road to its attainment.

In human experience, however, it is all too common that, in the struggle to achieve their goals, people forget the end and throw themselves so mindlessly into the means that they acquire a home in order to live a more comfortable life, only to enslave themselves and their substance to the maintenance and never-ending beautification of the home that has become their master.

Or people attempt to gain power in order to help others, and descend to a continuous pursuit of ever more power and glory built upon the hapless shoulders of the erstwhile beneficiaries

THE LORD'S BLUEPRINT

The Divine, too, Created the world from a plan and for a purpose. His plan was the Torah (Bible) that preceded the world (Talmud, Shabbos 88b), and His purpose was that man find the meaning and the goal of creation in the Torah: He looked into the Torah and created the world (Midrash).

Torah was the blueprint of creation. It is commonly thought that, following the failure of the human race and the emergence of Abraham and his descendants as people worthy of bearing the privilege of becoming His chosen people, The Divine decided upon the commandments that He transmitted to the Jews through Moses. Nothing could be more wrong.

The Torah and its commandments were not designed in response to the demands and needs of earthly life. The Torah pre-existed earth; the universe as we know it was designed to conform to the requirements of the Torah.

Matzah (the unleavened crackers eaten on Passover) is a food that, by its nature, is prepared and baked in haste, without the slightest delay --- therefore, the Divine tailored the history of His people to conform to the nature of matzah.

They were exiled to Egypt and emerged only through a chain of circumstances that required them to leave the land of their captivity in such haste that their dough had no time to rise and form bread instead of matzah. True, we say that matzah is a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. But that, too, is ordained in the Torah that preceded not only the exile, but the very creation.

The events of the Egyptian exile and its aftermath are them- selves nothing more than the physical translation of the spiritual content of the Torah (Beis HaLevi).

It was this very argument that Moses advanced to the Heavenly angels when they angrily contended that man was too lowly and degraded to be given the holy gift of Torah. Moses answered that the Torah says, You shall not steal --- but the angels have no need or temptation to steal. The Torah commands, Honor your father and your mother --- but the angels have no parents. Surely Moses could not have meant that the Torah had no place in the higher spiritual spheres that we refer to as heaven --- the Torah existed before the creation and is surely not dependent on man's puny efforts or his earthbound intellect.

Indeed, it is clear that the angels study Torah on a level far beyond that of human beings. Instead, Moses was pointing to earth and man as the instruments selected by the Divine Architect for the fulfillment of the Torah's demands.

If He looked into the Torah and created the universe in consonance with its requirements, then the conclusion was inescapable that Torah had to descend to earth to enable man to fulfill the will of his Creator. Had the Divine wanted You shall not steal to refer only to its spiritual meaning, then he would not have created a physical world with the temptations of wealth and the larcenous instinct to which human beings are prey.

Had He wanted only angelic concepts of honor to parents, then He would not have brought into being flesh and blood parents and children with the blend of friction and dependence, resentment and love, that make the relationship at once difficult and beautiful and that make the commandment Honor your father and your mother a constant challenge to children and parent. Precisely because the universe was a translation of Torah into a material manifestation of His will, Moses was able to convince the angels that man, His handiwork, could not carry out his Creator's will without the Torah, which was not only the plan, but also the purpose of creation Repository of Light

FIRST AND LAST

Indicative of the august role of the Torah in enabling a man to find and realize his higher purpose is this interpretation of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritch, suc- cessor of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Chassidic movement, and himself a seminal figure in the spread of the Chassidic movement:

The Holy One, blessed is He, perceived that it was improper for [the wicked] to make use of the [primeval] light, so He hid it for the benefit of the righteous in the time to come (Rashi).

"Where did He hide the light?" asked Rabbi Dov Ber.

He answered: The great light of creation was the light of Torah. At first, the light was available to all, but the Divine saw that few people are worthy of enjoying it, so He clothed it in the Torah, and there it remains hidden.

We bemoan the lack of the primeval light that made the sun pale by its spiritual brilliance, and long for the promised day when it will glow for us again. But it is not gone. The light is there. It is available. It awaits the diligent, indefatigable efforts of the righteous to unearth it from between the lines and letters and wisdom of the Bible.

The righteous of the future -- all ages of man -- can find light in Torah, for Torah is its embodiment.

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Rabbi Nosson Scherman is, among many other life achievments, the general editor of ArtScroll, the world's most successful and influential publisher of Judaic titles.

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