Jul 17, 2018

more-than-oneness

Israeli scholar Avivah Gottleib Zornberg [outlines] her own interpretation of the creation story. Pointing to the first day of creation in the biblical version, when God “separated the light from the darkness,” she suggests that the first action attributed to God is one of decentralization, a process that continues in the following days as well. In other words, she explains in her insightful book on Genesis, from the beginning God busied himself breaking up his unitary and monolithic power into other centers. God’s work, she writes, is one of “increasing complexity,” of “primal disintegration.” Paraphrasing the great medieval rabbinic commentator Rashi, she continues, “the main business of that [first] day was the radical transformation of reality from the encompassing oneness of God to the possibility of more-than-one.”

Harvey Cox, How To Read The Bible