First Moon Colony

There are many reasons to think the Bible does not know what science is. It is a book from thousands of years ago, it recounts many miraculous occurrences that flout the idea of fixed natural laws, and it seems to talk about the origins of life very differently than scientists do. This all adds up to the common opinion of our present era that real science and biblical religion are supposed to be definitionally opposed—which for many is reason enough to disregard all things biblical.

This is wrong.

Here are a few tips for how to read Genesis. Assume the book’s account of God is absolutely correct, which means He wrote it, as well as all other books and your genome. Assume God knows everything you know, everything you could know, and more. Assume God is the unfettered author of your life, world history, and the universe. Infer, therefore, that the Hebrew Bible—“Tanakh”—is unique not because its existence expresses the Creator’s will (since that’s true of everything there is) but rather because its content serves as the Creator’s official autobiography and a job description for His willing servants. Given all this, note that trying to prove its statements to be factually true or false is about as confused as trying to reach someone on the phone by dialing the license plate number on his car.

You don’t have to be an Albert Einstein or a Richard Feynman to know that plants need sun to grow. So when plants make their first appearance in Genesis “before” the sun does, even the most skeptical student of the text might conclude that he is not, in fact, perusing a simple chronology. If he manages, just for a moment, to forget how our post-biblical culture expects us to read biblical text, he might even notice that a basic message of the seven days of creation is that true statements about God are guaranteed to sound enigmatic in some way.

While this is an evident enough point to discuss with an interested 7-year-old Jewish day school student, it was lost on a great many Jewish atheist theoretical physicists during the last hundred years. Never has so much intelligence done so little to justify arrogance as when Feynman or Steve Weinberg mouthed off about theology. For all their genius, these Wicked Sons were never taught to read, and so, sadly, when it came to the subject of Eden or Abraham they applied their intellects to bludgeoning straw men and sniping at a heritage they did not even try to understand.

I too was once a Jewish atheist theoretical physicist, who, like many others, grew up worshipfully reading Feynman’s memoirs, hoping to understand “the universe” as profoundly as he and Weinberg and a dozen other Torah-rein 20th-century yidden had. However, through a series of providentially happy accidents, I managed eventually to get a glimpse past the smokescreen. Imagine my shock to discover that the most profound and free-ranging intellectual pursuit I had ever experienced—Torah study—had been distorted or even deliberately obscured from view by the pontifications of my childhood heroes. Weinberg once said, “[Scientific education] is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing, too!” Today I can retort that quantum field theory may be fun and useful, but it only ever amounts to playing around in one little sandbox according to a stultifyingly narrow set of mathematical rules. Maybe one day I will forgive Weinberg and Feynman for the way they stunted my understanding of the world and mankind’s condition in it, but I’ll have to avenge myself on them first.

The best revenge I can think of is to turn the eye of a physicist to righting the false trail laid out by Weinberg and others. Proper scientific education is favorable to proper religious belief, and vice versa, and it’s a good thing, too.

So let’s begin.

All of the usual arguments one hears for why Israel should exist where it does as the sovereign state of the Jews are easy to refute. Let’s look at three of the best known: history, security, and liberation.

Appeal to history: Jews are unquestionably the indigenous people of Judea, but how can the vast majority of an indigenous people leave their land for thousands of years, suddenly come back one day, and then claim, this land is ours by right? Say what you will about the legitimating force of historical ties, but the rule in this unique and unprecedented situation is far from obvious. Besides, the Jews themselves admit, in their own book, that they drove out the Canaanites who were indigenous to the land before them in order to take over the very same land. Why can’t someone else do the same to the Jews (as the Romans did) and cancel the Jewish nation’s claim in the same way?

Appeal to security: For centuries, Jews were the victims of violent persecution in diaspora, but can one say for sure that modern Israel is making them safer? It’s great to have an army that will stand up for you, but, since the Holocaust, more Jews have fallen victim to horrific violence within Israel than in any other country, and plenty are still attacked today the world round because of Israel’s founding. Can’t one argue that the establishment of the State of Israel has merely changed the reasons for violence against Jews without reducing the actual amount of violence?

Appeal to liberation: The Jews are a nation who have suffered thousands of years of bitter oppression, during which time they have longed for the chance to break free, stand up, and have a country of their own. Yet, is it not the case that Israel’s creation and continued existence necessitates oppressing another vulnerable, stateless people and destroying that people’s dreams of freedom and national self-determination? If so, how can Zionism be justified?

It may be distasteful to channel Edward Said, the KGB, and other eloquent scammers who were the first to attack Israel with arguments like those above, but it is necessary to start us off with the right point. As much as the nation of shyly suffocating poet activists that Said sold to his Western audiences never existed, as much as Israel actually is the main reason Jews around the world have been safer since World War II, as much as Jews maintained more connection to their land during millennia of exile than most Americans have to the town where their parents were born—it still needs to be granted that all defenses of Israel fail instantly when they appeal to abstract standards of fairness, utility, or pragmatism. Determining who was where first, calculating whose liberty was suppressed more for longer, or imagining how much more or less suffering the creation of a state has caused than had it not been created in the first place will never legitimate or delegitimate the State of Israel (or any other state for that matter). There is only one case for Israel that can weather every storm, and for that, we must go back to the beginning—to the beginning of the story and to the story of beginnings.

Genesis.

In the opening three days of creation we get light and dark, the heavens and the depths, green land and rolling seas. In other words: scenery. All the world’s a stage, but the actors won’t make their appearance until the last three days, in a parade of fish, birds, and beasts followed by one peculiarly liminal animal, unique for its ability to recognize the Creator by resting. Flanked on either side by stage and actors, the central (fourth) day is purely about time, about the months and years we count off watching the sun and the moon. The first divine commandment—an instruction to set the month by the moon—will not be given to the Israelite nation until well into Exodus, but here, we find it hiding in plain sight as the linchpin of Creation. The message at first seems disarmingly simple: The purpose of all that is is to enable humankind to find proper relationship with God through the observances He will teach them.

Moderns, however, might also notice the reference here to physics: It is no accident that contemplating the celestial bodies gave rise to virtually everything we now know about the quantitative, predictive science of nature; as long as people have been on earth, the sun and the moon have been the most unchangeably patterned and predictable thing in our observable world; more than anything, the heavens represent the potential for measurement and mathematics to illuminate the future. Here the Bible also seems to be telling us that at the center of Creation is an invitation to devise and discover physical laws that will help us understand and gain power over the world that God made. Thus, it establishes a consistent theme throughout the whole of the Torah, namely, that there is no fundamental separation to be made between natural, scientizable occurrences and the ones that have ritual or ethical significance; instead, these are two different accounts one must be willing to give of the same, single world.

This realization sheds new light on an oft-misunderstood comment relayed from the Talmudic era. Rabbi Yitzhak (Yalkut Shimoni 187:3) famously asks why we need Genesis at all because, praxis being what matters most, it seems plausible that the Torah might have simply begun with the first mitzvah, that is, with the commandment to set the lunar month. This proposal is ultimately rejected, however, because of a supposedly more basic function recognized in Genesis. The story of Creation establishes God’s ownership of the earth, and thereby entitles him to promise the Land of Israel to His people (the Jews).

To anyone who doesn’t already accept the Torah as authoritative, this sounds like a nonargument. Of course the Jews would say that their God promised them this or that land; but if you are not a Jew and you don’t put any stock in Jewish stories about a God who loves the Jews, what’s it to you? Why would you ever be persuaded that someone else’s disproven folklore can serve as a deed to his homeland?

The answer lies in understanding the intended use of biblical text. The sages were well aware that a good reading from the Torah scroll would likely not have convinced Nebuchadnezzar to halt his invading army’s advance; what this means is the message about ownership of the land is not so much for the enemies of Israel, but rather firstly for Israel herself, and it seems it may have been Rabbi Yitzhak’s intention to hint back to the dual reading we just gave to the fourth day of creation. Viewed through the lens of universal science, time is a blank slate of natural rhythms devoid of meaning. Genesis makes it axiomatic, however, that one purpose of these regular celestial oscillations is to set the holiday calendar so as to enable a specific form of religious particularism. And what applies to time applies to space as well: Do not imagine, says our sage, that it is possible to start playing this game without first delineating the board on which it is to be played. The mitzvot are for the nation of Israel, and that nation cannot hope to serve God properly without laying claim to the Land of Israel, which, again axiomatically, is the only place where full performance of that service can be carried out. Centuries of diaspora down the line from Titus, it comes easily even to most observant Jews today to think that herding sheep or crushing wine grapes cannot possibly be essential to something as presumably lofty and ethereal as bringing God’s message into the world, yet it so happens that the hundreds of mitzvot in the Torah connected to land and Temple were never color coded as optional bonus material. Whether because the ultimate goal is to weave the Divine Presence into agriculture and politics as much as into community life, or simply because the human instinct since Eden for possessive attachment to some physical territory is nearly as necessary for a fulfilled existence as food and sex, the Torah makes clear that the land is indispensable.

Accordingly, there is no such thing as a Jew having a contingent right to be in Tel Aviv because of universal judgments about history or circumstance. There is simply a particular Judaic imperative to live in and rule over the whole promised land, without apology for frustrating other national aspirations as we pursue our own. This sounds ungenerous, even inhumane by today’s moral fashions, but the Torah sees it as a crucial prerequisite for the rest: Only once the nation of Israel establishes the basic conditions for territorial existence will it have the minimal means necessary to help humanity learn more about God, justice, and kindness.

Which is all to say, for Jews, the land is not a point of contention to be argued, so much as it is a tool and method that must be used for accomplishing a particular mission. And the real remaining question Genesis begins to explore is: Once you accept the mission, how are you supposed to tell the method is working?

The first thing to get straight is the issue of authority. A 20th-century physicist looking to confirm his unexamined belief in Tanakh’s obsolescence will say: I can decide whether this book contains the truth by taking its claims and testing them. For example, it says here that the first human being was formed from dust somewhere near the Tigris River in Asia, yet here I have all this carbon dating evidence that the earliest humans evolved from apes in Africa. Must be bogus!

This has it upside down. Physics, like any other method of reasoning, only works on the basis of certain assumptions (for example: The perfectly reasonable assumption that the laws of nuclear physics determining the decay of carbon-14 nuclei do not ever vary based on time and place, which, though perfectly reasonable, is nonetheless an unprovable assumption). By the same token, the whole of the Torah is written to make sense only if one treats its verses like axioms, rather than as testable claims.

Sheer stupidity! Weinberg and Feynman would surely object. Why on earth would anyone submit to assuming a whole bunch of falsehoods are true? A scientist refuses to accept claims without evidence and argument that withstand falsification!

To answer our interlocutors in their own coin, it helps to think in a way that has become much more popular since machine learning got to be a big deal. Suppose you know the phase of the moon alternates periodically, but you don’t know how many days it takes to wax and wane. You write down an equation describing a periodic oscillation of moon brightness, and start by guessing the period of this oscillation at random (four seconds? four days? four years?). Most likely, your initial prediction for when the moon will be full or crescent will be bad. But by observing some durations of lunar cycles, you can begin to estimate the number of days much more accurately. Now your equation predicts the start of each lunar month nearly perfectly. Isn’t that neat?

What we have just described is the process of fitting the parameters of a model to the empirical evidence of reality. Clearly, getting the model to match the world involves looking at the world and dealing with what we observe there. However, we also have to give credit to our choice of the type of model. If we had started out with the idea that brightness increases at a constant rate over time forever, no amount of playing around with our estimate of that rate would get us a good prediction about the future, because, as we have all probably already observed, the brightness of the moon oscillates and the poorly chosen model would be incapable of matching that. The lesson is: A successful model needs both to be informed by empirical observations of the world and to be based on good assumptions about how the world works.

The Torah submits itself for consideration as a good set of modeling assumptions about the world we inhabit with the expectation that we read the text in combination with what else we already know about that world. The fitting of parameters happens when our own experience and knowledge force us to adjust our sense of what the text must mean in order to still have something true to say. For example, we already know from experience that plants need sunlight to grow; hold that in constellation with what we noted earlier about the order of the creation of plant life and the sun according to Genesis. Instead of assuming, prejudicially, that the fact that plants need sun to grow falsifies Genesis’ primitive cosmological chronology (perhaps even the whole of the Torah!), entertain the possibility that both Torah and your experience of the world are correct. Stop to ask yourself, why would the Torah choose to say explicitly, baldly, brazenly, in a fashion so puzzling to common sense, that the sun was created after plants? We have already shown how “all the world’s a stage” makes one good answer, but it’s not the only one. “Torah” means teaching, and this is a modest example of an opportunity given for learning if you are patient enough to use it correctly. By accepting the authority of the Torah and also the reality of the world as it presents itself (of which the Torah is a part), Torah can teach those who accept its gift something new about both.

At this point we can expect a rejoinder. As Feynman put it: “I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple.” In other words, we’re admitting these are all just stories that mean whatever we want them to mean and they aren’t literally true. If they aren’t accounts of what actually happened, then maybe here and there there’s some sage advice to be gleaned, but it seems we’ve just admitted that God is nothing more than a fairy tale without any real power. We’ve also conceded that the meaning of the Bible is arbitrary and that it is we alone who are the ones standing in judgment over the truth of whatever its text yields.

Suppose then that Weinberg piled on, adding that there’s no good reason to participate in the assumption that the text of Genesis contains any truth whatsoever. It may be that new meaning falls out when you measure its words against the world like a slide rule, but why do that? What could prove that the book teaches us correct things, even if we use the correct method to read and interpret it? As the real Steve Weinberg once opined, God “seems to be a terrible character.” Who’s to say listening to Him isn’t a bad idea?

We can deal with the first issue most quickly when we analyze a story below, but a brief comment should come before that. Most of the enlightened polemic against taking Tanakh seriously rests on the assumption that theological absolutism requires textual literalism. In other words, if you think that while you are stuck at the bottom of a mine shaft that it is true that there is a Ruler and Judge of all the Earth who hears your prayers and has the power to save you, then you must also believe that the universe sprang into being ex nihilo during a string of six chronologically sequential periods of 24 hours, as would have been measured by ticks on one of our clocks. You also must believe that a 600-year-old man (also measured in clock ticks) once herded untold thousands of animals onto a handmade wooden boat that did not then sink in a catastrophe of bestial mayhem once all the passengers were crammed aboard. Alternatively, if you want to say the words of Tanakh present us with riddles and there’s work that goes into figuring out what precisely the words might mean, well, that’s fine, but then you’re at best a deist and more likely some kind of closet agnostic who likes biblical stories but thinks that when train wrecks and cancer strike people unexpectedly, there’s no one running the show other than the cruel indifference of happenstance.

There is, however, a third way, exampled by the oral tradition and the Talmudic sages themselves. It turns out it is perfectly possible to trust that the world has an all-powerful and fully involved Creator and still maintain that the book He gave you speaks in puzzles. What could it possibly even mean for the “spirit of God [to literally] hover over the water”? The narratives of Tanakh are an endless provocation to examine and reexamine whether words mean what you think they do and whether a different interpretation can reveal new understandings of the message. Using the text this way is not at all inconsistent with claiming that God’s unrestrained hand is orchestrating the events of the world; it just leaves it to us to explain what difference to anything such orchestration makes.

This is the subtler question, to which we will return later on. Weinberg’s snide objection—that God seems like a cruel and senseless monster—is only one aspect of the general question of why anyone should keep faith with God, particularly if His existence is not a fact to be proven or disproven. What will get us on our way first is to hear Genesis explain why putting faith in science alone is not a viable alternative.

On the surface, the Torah seems deceptively uninterested in science, but our current proposal is that a modern person reading the book with methodologically proper awe should assume that the text is fully aware of what it is to reason scientifically about the predictability of the natural world; indeed, we have already noticed a hint in the account of the seven days of creation that astronomy and mathematical predictability may be pivotal to how the created world works. At the same time, we know not to expect the Torah to wink at us out of insecurity, solely for the purpose of proving it knows something we thought it might not. If the Torah is going to take up a subject, it will do so because treating that subject serves to teach the Lord’s would-be servants how to serve Him better. In that case, though, why would it bother to talk to us about science at all?

It is not until much later in Genesis, when Joseph, son of Jacob, is telling his dreams to his 11 brothers, that the sun and moon reappear prominently in the narrative. While in his first dream, 11 sheaves of grain bow to his sheaf, in Joseph’s second dream, he composes the same montage out of stars, except now a prostrated sun and moon are bowing down before him as well. Everyone thinks they know what the dreams mean because the brothers foretell Joseph ruling over them, and that indeed is what eventually happens. Joseph is sold down to Egypt as a slave, where he one day rises to royal status as the central planner of Pharaoh’s agricultural economy, and finds himself in position to feed his brothers during the famine he foresaw. However, precisely because of these later events, there is another interpretation of Joseph’s dreams that fits the details of the story equally well, and we are better primed to notice it now because of what we have learned about how Genesis regards the sun and the moon. Because they are predictable, we can use the celestial lights to tell time and create a calendar; and when they are first mentioned in the story of creation, the text suggests employing them to establish the timing of some regular festivals. Through the example of Joseph’s two dreams, though, we recognize another clear use of good timing: knowing when to plant and when to reap. Joseph is going to be a better grower of food than his brothers, and that may well be because he understands enough about the calendar to compose his own almanac. In the ancient world, careful astronomy begat successful agronomy, and that makes Joseph a kind of scientist.

It should be noted that, unlike Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Joseph is never described as hearing or speaking to God. His ability to predict the future is easy to roll into our notion of prophecy if we are not reading carefully, but by peppering Pharaoh’s dreams about crop futures with the number seven, the text is insisting that the predictability Joseph the dreamer picks up on is embedded in the normal fabric of creation itself, in the manner of discernible natural laws. For all we know, Joseph may have landed the job with Pharaoh by completing some half-baked theory of climatic oscillation which Egypt’s king was already obsessing over himself. And “lucky” for everyone, Joseph turns out not only to be a savvy quant, but also an enthusiastic crony capitalist who cuts deals with the state to buy low and sell high on a massive scale, for the supposed benefit of all.

While the biblical text is seemingly uninterested in how Joseph makes this prediction, or why it proves to be so stunningly accurate, it does have a lot to say about the policies pursued by government and the consequences of these policies for individual liberty. Joseph and Pharaoh hatch a plan to seize and hoard food in the short term so that it can be sold back to farmers during the lean years. To the ear of a child hearing the story for the first time, this sounds positively heroic; through an unlikely partnership, everyone in Egypt is saved from dying of hunger (although students of history familiar with early Soviet central planning may already be hatching an alternate theory as to where the famine came from). However, Genesis is ambivalent about this act of heroism. The narrative dwells ponderously on the main social outcome of the policy: Nearly everyone in Egypt has sold himself as a slave to Pharaoh to avoid starvation. Given that the ensuing four books of the Torah might reasonably be characterized as an uninterrupted tirade against Egyptian slavery, we can hardly feel happy with what Joseph’s ingenuity accomplishes in the long term.

We might also be reasonably troubled when we consider that we are not merely studying a history about Egypt 4,000 years ago. By reading the Torah as though it “knows everything” and noticing that this story takes up the subject of the role of science in crafting public policy, we are prompted to ask ourselves what predicting the future may have to do with mass enslavement. It is not too difficult to spot a relevant example. People did not use to know what carbon dioxide was, nor were they good at emitting planetarily large amounts of it; that seems to rule out the possibility that anyone ever worried about anthropogenic climate change before the industrial revolution. Surely, it all has the ring of historical novelty because monitoring greenhouse gas emissions is a brand new concept. And yet, if you listen to the deeper structure of contemporary arguments over CO2, insisting that society change its ways to avoid looming doom and disaster is the claim at the center of all discussions about carbon and climate. And Tanakh is telling us it has heard this kind of demand before.

The family history of Joseph and his brothers may indeed have played out just as described in antiquity, but the way Genesis recounts the events has been carefully crafted to teach us a general lesson about social contracts and god-king rulers. The caprice of nature is terrifying; changing weather patterns can mean the difference between plentiful food and widespread starvation; rising temperatures can flood lands and cause mass extinctions. With Joseph’s coaxing, Pharaoh said to his people: Do exactly what I say, and together, we can eliminate what frightens us about the inconstancy of our environment; obey the king, whose wise men understand what lies ahead. Accept enslavement by heeding all of the rules that government imposes on economic behavior, as these rules have been devised by the wise men to save society from destruction. Do this, and we will all survive together. That’s the deal. That’s the contract. That’s what legitimates Pharaoh’s rule and his state.

Is there really such a big difference between subjugating humankind to protect the food supply from unpredictable weather and doing the same in the belief we can become master of the weather? It turns out that one of these stories which Feynman thought “too simple” reaches across millennia and speaks directly to the dilemmas we always face whenever science and politics mix in the name of the collective good. Science can be used to produce more food or less greenhouse gas, but the danger in either case lies in the excessive power we grant to leaders out of unbounded fear of a scientist’s (sometimes quite accurate!) warning. What starts with treating the fate of society as a scientific problem that can be solved without relationship to God, ends with obeying the commands of the men we have put in God’s place.

We may now find it plausible that trusting in science alone will lead to an obviously bad result, but what evidence or argument is there that trusting in God can lead to a better one? Steve Weinberg thinks there is none, and his jabs at God are typical of Jewish atheist physicists. On the one hand, God is a disprovable fantasy and therefore a total waste of time. On the other hand, Weinberg can’t resist wasting his time crowing about how much he “doesn’t like God” because of the awful things He does in the Torah (such as flooding the entire world, commanding a father sacrifice his son, punishing people for failing to worship Him, etc.). Many go further than Weinberg, and refuse to believe God exists because He is so mean and unethical, as though belief is a gift to be granted only to a God that deserves it. What they all miss is that God is not a claim about the facts of the world to be proved or disproved, but rather is the focus for a method we are meant to use to interpret the events of our lives and the world.

The basic thesis of Genesis is that there is one God who is the author of everything. Instead of a pantheon of competing forces who collide to produce some sort of cosmically meaningless result, there is a single personality with unlimited knowledge and influence. Accept that single premise for the sake of argument, and ask: What does our empirical knowledge of the world reveal to us about this personality? Bear in mind, figuring out what other personalities are thinking is arguably one of the things we are best at as a species. On the basis of watching the behavior of others, hearing or reading their words, and understanding what it is to be a person with goals, desires, and emotions, we may know and anticipate what others are thinking, intending and doing, so that we may engage in dialogue and cooperate with each other. Why not apply this same faculty to the empirical data of the created world in its entirety, and try on that basis to make inferences about what an all-powerful, all-knowing God would have to be thinking in order for Him to be having the story unfold in the way He has apparently chosen to have it unfold? Indeed, our potential to take up this task may be part of what Genesis is talking about when it says we men and women are made b’tselem elohim (in the image of God).

The first thing to notice is that the idea of believing, or proving, or disbelieving, or disproving that God exists makes no sense here. We start with the data of the reality we observe, and we simply are asking what it allows us to know about God if we assume He is running the show. The existence of God is not a testable fact, it is a methodological commitment we make at the outset in order to start reasoning about experience with the helpful starting hints in Tanakh. Changing the data of reality would not change whether or not we think God exists, it would just change the personality we attribute to Him.

The second aspect here is that the real empirical world contains tremendous calamity, suffering, cruelty, wickedness, and unpredictability. Of course, it contains other things too, but our interest is in the fairness of it all. From hurricanes to tsunamis, from human trafficking rings to children with terminal cancer, from the Holocaust to Oct. 7, reality can be a horror known to provoke questions like, “How could God allow this to happen?” Remember, though, at this point we are still trying to be empirical and just are asking what the reality we observe tells us about who the God controlling everything is. Nothing we see in the world, no matter how horrible, can prove to us there isn’t a God. The questions that arise instead all center around whether Tanakh’s account of God’s standards, motivations, and ways is an accurate one, and whether or not there is any point in trying to serve Him.

The Lord is just. The Lord is merciful. Praise the Lord for He is good, His kindness is everlasting. Anyone with passing familiarity with biblical religion will have heard these kinds of refrains, many of which are lifted straight from Psalms. They sound like nice sentiments, and one would like to find it easy to believe them to be true, but it is not meant to be easy at all. The Bible’s detractors love to accuse God of being a horrible monster, yet it is a well-known fact, no less known than the fact that plants need the sun to grow, that real life in the real world is full of horrible monstrosities. It would be very odd indeed if Genesis put forward the thesis that God is in control of everything and yet hoped no one would notice that “everything” must also include those things that cause us anguish. The lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were full of violent family strife, infertility, loss of loved ones, kidnapping, and rape. Even for the most righteous of individuals, God reserves a measure of bitterness and tribulation. The difficulty man feels at accepting the notion that the world’s Creator is fundamentally decent is pushed so much to the fore that Abraham explicitly accuses God before the expected destruction of Sodom’s innocents saying halila lekha, it is a desecration that the Judge of all the earth shall not judge fairly! The text is keenly aware that the torment of the human condition is a huge reputational challenge for the Author of everything.

And yet, this is a problem the text does not attempt to conceal; on the contrary, it is eager to live with it. Arguing from first principles about whether God “exists” leads down a rabbit hole full of theo-rhetorical parlor tricks, in which we quickly lose sight of the fact that we never knew what we meant by His existing or not in the first place. By contrast, once we accept God as axiomatic, and we ask instead, “Who is God and what does He want?” we find ourselves in a vast territory in which a profound investigation has to happen as a journey unfolds over time, through iterations of choice, action, and reflection that use the Torah as a map and a compass. In this way, a recurring reader of the Torah may deepen his or her understanding of the text’s meaning, relevance, and reliability in light of life experience and history.

It would be a cruel perversity to insist on affirming God’s mercy at the burial of a child murdered in Kibbutz Be’eri, but there was considerable mercy in the way Hamas achieved less with its surprise attack than it might have if Hezbollah had devised to throw its full weight against the IDF on the same day. No one who ever beheld Jews slaughtered by Babylonians, Romans, or Germans should have looked on and called such wicked atrocities justice, but it has to be acknowledged that many of the horrors of exile appear as line items in the Torah, as if they were terms of the contract. We can always be forgiven for not yet understanding how everything Tanakh claims about the one God can be true at the same time, but we can rapidly come to appreciate that the claims are complicated, and the intricate argument there is to be had about their meaning and accuracy is a staircase that spirals upward, offering new heights of understanding as the reward for the investment of a lifetime of observance and study. Perhaps, more precisely, it should be represented not as a staircase, but as a tree that springs from a seed. As the psalmist intones, and the sages repeat to hail the moment of man’s creation: Emeth me’eretz titzmah. Truth shall grow from the ground.

B’reisheeth is the first Hebrew word of the Torah, and “in the beginning” is not a great translation of it. The word reisheeth is used frequently and consistently across the Torah to refer to sons as firstborns or to crops as first fruits, so a more accurate rendering of that most famous beginning would go something like, “In a first yield, God created the heavens and the earth.” The difference is a big one. A first fruit is a completed thing that took time to grow from a seed that came before it. What this means is that the narration does not start “in the beginning”; the Bible starts midstream—between seed and fruit, chicken and egg. To those familiar with the text, this notion will have the immediate ring of truth, since darkness and water are mentioned before the creative acts kick off. We do not hear where the water came from, we may surmise, because that simply is beside the point. The Torah focuses on what the presumed reader needs to know—as opposed to miscellaneous facts one might care to know—because its unswerving goal is to enable proper behavior.

Once later books like Exodus and Leviticus take up that task, the guidelines for upright behavior are laid out in laws, and it is clear that part of God’s message is “the land is mine.” He gives Canaan to the Israelites so that they may keep those laws with the understanding that continuing to rule the land is contingent upon how well the laws get kept. The formula is simple: If you think God does not want the Jews to possess the land, try to take it away from them and see if you succeed. The unmagical and highly testable empirical claim about how the world works is that if the Jews are keeping the laws of their covenant with God well enough, then no such attempt to pry the land away from them can succeed. If this is so, however, we should be newly unsure why Genesis/B’reisheeth needs to be there at all, even according to Rabbi Yitzhak’s comment about the lunar month. The Lord says all land is His during the process of legislation in Exodus, and instructs the Jews to take hold of the Land of Israel as part of the fulfillment of His commandments. He promises blessings if the commandments are kept and curses if they aren’t. This is a clear procedure with a well-defined means of testing whether it is working, so, what is the point of dozens of chapters of stories about feuds and births and a seafaring zoo which lead, only after much ado, to the receipt of laws?

The unavoidable answer seems to be that we need to know the story in order to figure out how to keep the laws, because the purpose of the laws is to help us find our place in the still unfolding story. Genesis presents itself as a narrative composed by one of its own principal characters (God) so that we get to hear about the lives of people who have dialogue and relationship with the narrative’s author. Getting in the habit of thinking about stories and what they mean, as though the omniscient and omnipotent author crafted them to have a point to readers and characters alike, is meant to train us to turn that honed skill back on our own lives, which are lived in a universe that has an omniscient and omnipotent Author with whom we are meant to have dialogue and relationship.

Authors do not cause things to happen in their stories and they are not responsible for moral wrongs committed in their stories. Authors tell stories, and within that construct, primary events in the world of the story cause secondary events to occur and characters in that world make choices. Choice and causation are concepts that immediately lose their meaning if one steps out of the construct of the story and looks at it all from the perspective of the author. So, by all means, forget every sophomoric disproof of free will that has ever been passed around in a freshman philosophy seminar or bandied about by 21st-century futurist false prophets; all such arguments succeed via the shell game of changing what free will means midsentence. God is writing a story, and the story is about you and about everything else that is, and in it, you are going to make choices, and some of them may present you with an opportunity to speak to Him, or even to hear His message for you in the details of the reality you perceive. This meaning could manifest like it did to Joseph—pungent and instantly recognizable—when his unwitting brothers brought a gift to him from his father of the same three spices he had smelled when slave traders carried him down to Egypt a lifetime earlier. Or it could hit home like a ram with its horns improbably tangled in the thicket, the unmistakable nudge that convinced Abraham that God wanted the animal, and not Isaac, to be a sacrifice.

When the Israelites are at last to enter the Land of Israel, they are commanded to remember the story they are a part of, and thus to go to the first place their forefather Abraham ever visited in Canaan. There they are meant to build plastered monuments inscribed with the laws on a “mountain of curse” that stands opposite a “mountain of blessing” across the valley. For every tribe on the mountain of blessing, there is a son of Jacob with a story wrapped up in the heroic moral choices of characters in Genesis. For every tribe on the curse mountain there is a son of Jacob whose choices either included sinning unrepentantly, or about whom no choice of any kind is recounted at all. The text wants to underline that the law understood to be a machine code is worth very little. The law on its own would not be enough because the law is just a torn corner of a treasure map that we piece together more fully by sifting all the data of life and history as we seek to know the Author. Reading from a scroll in Spain in 1491 that your border to the north will be Lebanon could seem to contain any number of meanings to a mystic, but by 1948 the Judge of all the earth had dropped His gavel on a preferred interpretation.

Curious fabulists and Jew-hating lunatics alike may be fascinated by conspiracy theories about the possible descent of some of today’s Israelites from Central Asian tribes that converted in medieval times, but wherever we present-day Israelis came from (and the list of places is delightfully long), we now make up a majority of people in this world cheeky enough to call themselves Jews, and since it is we whose army conquered the Tomb in Hebron, the City of David, and the Temple Mount in the most miraculously decisive military victory of the last century, any new would-be Goliaths who still feel like chortling at the suggestion that God is on our side are invited to step up and present a forehead. To be sure, we stumble, and for every person who sees in our defeats a measure of divine rebuke meant to drag us back from the brink of greater error, there will be hundreds who cry it’s merely proof we are doomed impostors whose evil misadventure is close to ending. Prognosticators of that latter sort will keep getting it wrong. They can fling their slogans and their missiles, they can roar in their quads and on the streets, but even some of them begin now to sense it is already too late to stop the new beginning. A seed has taken root in familiar soil, and the truth is growing from the ground.