Rabbi Dr Deborah Kahn-Harris

According to the Ramban, Rabbi Moses ben Nachman the 13^th Catalonian rabbi and commentator, in his introduction to the book of Genesis there is a mystical tradition, which states that the whole of the Torah is simply names of God. He explains that when the words of the Torah are divided in a different manner, they form different names of God. By way of example, Ramban says

בראש יתברא אלהים

For readers not familiar with Hebrew, Ramban is playing on the reading of the beginning of Gen 1:1, the very beginning of the Torah itself. He is saying that just as one can reorder these first three words of Torah, so, too, other words of Torah can be reordered.

Gen 1:1 more properly reads

בראשית ברא אלהים

Looking carefully, we can see that Ramban has taken the final two letters of the first word ( ית ) and appended them instead to the beginning of the second word, so instead of reading as we are accustomed to, we have created something with a subtle, but important difference in meaning.

The normal version of Gen 1:1 is variously translated as ‘In the beginning God created’ (as made famous by the King James translation of the Bible of 1611) or as ‘When God began to create’ (according to the most recent Jewish Publication Society translation of 1985). The distinction between these translations is already rather modest, but not insignificant – does our verse, and by extension the whole of the Torah, begin with a simple active statement or a subordinate clause. Are we to understand that the first thing God creates is the heaven and the earth, full stop, that is it? Or are we to understand that while God was busy creating the heavens and the earth, (verse 2) which by the way were void and formless with a darkness covering the surface and wind sweeping over them, while all that was going on (verse 3) God said, ’Let there be light’ and there was light. It’s the sort of thing Hebrew Bible scholars get vexed about. But does it really matter?

Minor differences in what words mean change the way we understand the messages that they impart. Does the book of Genesis actual start at the beginning, the very beginning of everything, or are we entering a story that has already begun. Does God begin by creating the heavens and earth or was God doing something else first and then, as God began creating the heavens and earth, God said something. Are we walking into the middle of a scene? But what would God have been doing before God created the heavens and earth? What else could there have been to do?

The rabbis always have an answer to these sorts of questions. According Genesis Rabbah 1:4 six things preceded the creation of the heavens and earth, including the Torah itself. It is a curious, self-referential sort of statement, which can tie a person’s head in knots trying to understand. Before the creation of the heavens and earth, the book in which will be recorded the creation of the heavens and earth will first, itself, be created. Is Gen 1 supposed to be some sort of outline or plan? Yet it is not a to do list with bullet points; it is a narrative of events that have happened.

Still if the notion that Torah is created before creation itself is difficult to wrap our heads around, Ramban’s example of dividing words differently is even more challenging. Ramban simply puts his example out there. He does not even try to explain it. The meaning of these transformed words, בראש יתברא אלהים, should, apparently, be clear to us.

בראש means much the same thing as בראשית – ‘at the head’ versus ‘at the first’ – but broadly the same sort of sentiment. אלהים, God, remains the same in both versions. The real transformation is of the verb ברא in Gen 1:1 to יתברא in Ramban’s reordering. ברא is ‘he created’, the third person masculine singular perfect of the simplest form of a Biblical Hebrew verb. יתברא, also the third person masculine singular from the same basic meaning of the verb, is, however, in a form of the verb that is reflexive, ‘he created himself’. ‘At the beginning God created God’s self.’

Embedded in the text itself, lies a deep, mystical answer to the most pressing spiritual question. ‘Where does God come from?’ ask the theologians and philosophers and poets and mystics and sociologists and neurologists and so many others. Does God arise from human consciousness or somewhere else? And here Ramban offers us the glimpse of an answer: God creates God’s self.

In the beginning, so much required creation – God, Torah, the world itself. If only we reorder the letters, form the words differently, we will find the answers to all the mysteries world of the world, no less of creation itself.

• Rabbi Dr Deborah Kahn-Harris is Principal of Leo Baeck College

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