Making Sense of the Sedra: Bereishit

Thailand’s Katanyou Wuttichaitanakorn recently won the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2022 competition. The 16-year-old’s winning entry (pictured) is a close-up of a Bryde’s whale and the baleen plates in its mouth which are used to filter food. You can even see a sardine flying through the air as it tries to escape being gobbled down by the great cetacean.

Started in 1964 by BBC Wildlife Magazine, Wildlife Photographer of the Year is one of the most prestigious competitions of its type in world photography and the competition is now organised by London’s Natural History Museum. This year’s event drew 38,575 entries from 93 countries and all the category winners, like Katanyou, highlight the incredible natural beauty of the world we live in and provide us with a unique snapshot of the wonders of creation.

It is the story we all learnt as children, in this week’s parsha, Bereishit – God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. But what they did not teach us is that before God created this world, He created a thousand hidden worlds, all of them swept away in the blink of an eye until He created this one and declared: “This one pleases me, those did not.”

It is little wonder we were not taught it, as it is a tradition contained in the mystical teachings of the Zohar. To even attempt to understand the depths of this idea, we first have to remember the Midrashic statement that there are seventy facets to the Torah, which highlights that there are multiple ways in which the Torah may be interpreted. Coupled with the fact that there are over 200 major commentaries on just the first word of the Torah alone, we realise that it would take us a lifetime to know them all.

However, what emerges is a greater appreciation of the complexity of the world and an acknowledgement of the different levels of design and incredible beauty that surround us.  Like the thousand hidden worlds, we may not be able to see them all but we sense that there is so much more to the universe than meets the eye.

The Torah is the blueprint of the world. As another Midrash teaches: “God looked into the Torah and created the world,” and the more we study it the more we discover the layers of meaning it contains and the greater understanding we have of our world and its Creator.

Captain Kirk may have said that space is the final frontier but certainly knowledge is the key to reaching the Divine.