Psalms 33:6<\/a>), but that was bid’var adonai<\/i>, not ba’amar<\/i>, potentially at the Divine commandment, that is to say, at the will, rather than the utterance of the Divine. And if, as we read above, the world could have been created with a single word, surely it could have been created without any word at all!\nI think, and this is me here and not the commentaries, that we are told that the world was created with words in order to underline, for us, the importance of words, of the speech act. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but the world was created with words. And still is. Not only the Divine words, but human words create the world we live in. And not only by shaping the universe we perceive (which is very important) but by shaping the universe that actually exists whether we perceive it or not. The cities and towns we live in were created by words, the jobs we do, the bonds between us as people, as nations, as cultures. Not by words alone, but not without words, either. And the wrong words still make the world, they just make the world wrongly.\n
Now, having said that, there is clearly a difference between the way that we create the world every day and the way in which the Divine created the world at the Beginning, and still creates it every day. Which brings me back around to the First Utterance, which is not an utterance, or is only ambiguously an utterance. My feeling is that 1:1 is different from 1:3 and the rest of them, that there is some fundamental difference between saying that the Divine created the moon and that the Divine created the Heavens and the Earth. And that I am willing to believe that the rest of the Divine Utterances are appropriately analogous to our utterances in the same way that the Divine Arm or the Face of the Divine are—useful tools for human understanding—but that the First Utterance was not. That is we know that Divine Utterance was actually not made by expelling Divine Breath through Divine Vocal Folds and shaping it with a Divine Tongue and Divine Lips, making Divine Plosives and Divine Close-Mid Front Rounded Vowels; we express the idea of the Divine Utterance in a way that makes sense to humans, because we are humans, and that’s a good thing. But it seems to me that where the rest of the Divine Utterances are understandable through the somewhat distant metaphor of human speech, the First Utterance, made before the universe even existed, can’t even be understood metaphorically but stands outside our understanding entirely. Thus the lack of explicit metaphor in the text: we presumably join the story after let there be a Heaven and an Earth<\/i> occurred in whatever inexplicable and ineffable way that did occur.\n
Which, then, brings me to another response to the question: why ten utterances? Why not one? Because, by the cosmology I have come to above, there was the First and then the others that occurred within the Heavens and the Earth created by that First. Why not two, then? Because the nine that follow are smaller, more complex, more detailed than the First, and are subsidiary to it, to emphasize that difference between the Implied First and the Explicit Nine, and by extension, the rest of the ongoing Creation. This emphasizes our responsibility for the continuing Creation through speech while also underlining that we are not Creators but creators, that we create the world but did not Create the world, that our works are derivative works of the Great Work and should be entered into in the spirit of support rather than pride. This response only makes sense if we see the ten utterances above as One and Nine, of course, which I think is there in the text. The Sages have another answer, which we’ll get to in a separate note, as I think this one has gone on long enough.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which all of Israel have a share in the World to Come, as it is written: Your people are all righteous; they will inherit the Land forever; they are the branch of My planting, the work of My hands in which I take pride<\/i> (Isaiah 60:21).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-13873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture","tag-pirkeavot"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13873"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19435,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13873\/revisions\/19435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}