I want to start with a confession. I am terrible at putting together flat-pack furniture. You know the kind I mean, from those stores that require you to assemble the products you buy, like IKEA in the US and in Europe, or Mr Price Home and Decofurn Furniture here in South Africa. You visit the store or the website and you fall in love with a beautiful, sleek bookshelf. It looks so simple, so elegant. Then you get home with the box. You open it, and a cascade of wooden planks, mysterious plastic bits, and a bag containing approximately one million screws spills out. And then there’s the instruction manual. It’s all diagrams. No words. Just a series of pictures of a strangely serene-looking cartoon person performing impossible acts of engineering with a single Allen key.
This manual is the "how." It tells us, step-by-step, how to connect panel A to dowel B. It’s technical, precise, and utterly devoid of poetry. It does not, at any point, explain why we are building this bookshelf. It doesn't tell us about the dream of having a place for our books, about creating a home, about the warmth of a room filled with stories. The "how" is the instructions; the "why" is the home.
My frustration with a furniture manual is one thing, but our tradition has a much older, and far more profound, version of this very idea. A teaching from our sages in the Midrash, in Bereshit Rabbah, imagines how God created the world. It says that just as a human king would not build a palace from his own head, but would consult blueprints and plans, so too did God. The Midrash asks: what was God's blueprint? And it answers: "הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מַבִּיט בַּתּוֹרָה וּבוֹרֵא אֶת הָעוֹלָם" – "The Holy One, Blessed be [God], looked into the Torah and created the world."[1] For our Sages, the Torah was God’s instruction manual. It was the architectural plan for reality. I would like to offer a different take in today’s drashah: the Torah wasn’t the blueprint, it was the project brochure: back to our furniture assembly metaphor, it did not contain the image of how to put the pieces together, it gave meaning to a life in which that bookshelf was a part of. The tension between those who see Torah as blueprint or project brochure is not new and it has not yet been completely overcome.
And every year, when we turn back the scroll to the beginning, to Parashat B'reshit, we are back to that polemic. We read the opening words: "בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ" – "When God began to create heaven and earth,"[2] and for many of us, a tension immediately arises. We hold the Torah’s story in one hand, and in the other, we hold the story we learned in school: the Big Bang, the 13.8 billion years of cosmic expansion, evolution, natural selection.
One story speaks of six days. The other speaks of billions of years. One speaks of divine pronouncements—"Let there be light!"—and the other speaks of quantum fluctuations and genetic mutations. It can feel like we’re being asked to choose. It can feel like a battle, a war between science and faith.
But what if it isn’t a war at all? What if, like the furniture assembly manual and the dream of a home, they aren’t even trying to tell the same story? What if one is obsessed with the "how," and the other is dedicated to the "why?" As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks beautifully put it: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”[3] Just as science is the wrong tool to tell us what our purpose is, religion is the wrong tool to tell us how the universe was created.
The idea that science and religion are locked in a mortal combat is, as the Brazilian Jewish physicist Marcelo Gleiser, who teaches at Dartmouth College, puts it, "a fabricated war."[4] It’s a drama that we’ve created. Now, let’s be clear. There are sincere, deeply religious people who absolutely reject this idea. They believe the biblical narrative must be read as a literal scientific record. For them, the world was created in six 24-hour days, just a few thousand years ago. In this view, any evidence to the contrary—like dinosaur fossils and rocks that appear to be millions of years old—must be explained away. Some even go so far as to suggest that God may have planted those fossils to test our faith.[5] That is a path of faith. But it is not our path.
Our tradition has a long, proud history of embracing reason alongside faith. Science, at its best, is a magnificent, humbling, and awe-inspiring project. Its mission, to use Gleiser’s words, is to "explain the unknown with the known." It observes, it measures, it gathers data, and it builds a story of how the universe works. But religion’s mission is different. It seeks to "explain the unknown with the unknowable."[6] It addresses the questions that can’t be put in a test tube or observed through a telescope.
John Polkinghorne, who was both a brilliant quantum physicist and an Anglican priest, offers a beautiful analogy. He asks us to imagine a beautiful painting. A chemist could come along and analyze it. They could tell you the precise chemical composition of every pigment, the molecular structure of the canvas. They would give you a perfect, factual, and complete description of the painting's physical properties. But, as Polkinghorne says, they "would have missed the point of the painting.”[7] They could tell you how the painting is made, but they couldn't tell you why it is beautiful, why it moves your soul, what it means.
The Torah, in the opening chapter of Genesis, is not a scientific textbook. To read it as one is, with all due respect, to miss the point of the painting. Our sages understood this long before the Big Bang was a glimmer in an astronomer's eye. Maimonides, the great Rambam, writing over 800 years ago, insisted that the Torah was not a physics textbook. He argued that if a literal reading of the text contradicted established rational proof, then the Torah must be interpreted metaphorically.[8] For him, the question was never "Is the science right or is the Torah right?" The question was, "What is the Torah trying to teach us about God, about ourselves, and about the meaning of this world?"
So, what is the "why" of B'reshit?
First, it’s a radical declaration against a world of pagan chaos. The world of our ancestors was filled with capricious, warring gods who treated humanity as their playthings. The sun was a god. The moon was a god. The sea was a terrifying deity. Into this world, the Torah speaks a revolutionary message: there is one God, one source of everything, and the universe is not chaotic—it is orderly, intentional, and purposeful. The sun and moon are not gods to be worshipped; they are lamps, placed in the sky to give light. They have a job to do. The world is fundamentally, as God declares seven times, tov—it is good.
Second, it gives humanity a unique and dignified role. We are not cosmic accidents, not just clever apes clinging to a rock hurtling through space. The Torah tells us we are created B'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. And that statement applies to every single human being, without exception. This isn’t just a beautiful poetic idea; it is a profound ethical demand. It gives us an immense responsibility for how we treat other people. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: "You cannot worship God and then look at a human being, created by God in God's own image, as if he or she were an animal.”[9] But our purpose is not just ethical, it is spiritual. B'tzelem Elohim means we are partners with God in creation, the part of the universe that can look back in wonder, ask "why?".
But even this comes with a "shadow side," as Polkinghorne calls it. The very processes that allow for freedom and novelty in the universe also allow for brokenness and pain. He explains that if God created a world with the freedom to "make itself"—a beautiful description of evolution—then that same system allows for things to go wrong. The same process of genetic mutation that allows for incredible diversity and adaptation is the same process that can lead to cancer. The same tectonic plates whose movement replenishes the surface of our planet can also slip and cause devastating earthquakes. This doesn’t make God incompetent; it is the necessary cost of a world with genuine freedom, a world that is not a divine puppet show.[10]
And finally, at the end of this biblical Creation story, we get an additional "why". After six "days" of creative work, God rests. God creates Shabbat. Think about this. A star doesn't stop shining to appreciate its own light. A galaxy doesn't pause its spinning to reflect on its beauty. Only humanity, created in the image of God, is invited to stop, to rest, to bless, and to infuse the universe with holiness and in meaning. Shabbat adds new layers of “why” — we stop to celebrate that we are partners with God in the creation of the world. It is the moment we stop tinkering with the "how" of the world and simply experience its "why"—its goodness, its beauty, its sacredness.
The story of the 13.8-billion-year unfolding of the cosmos is an incredible story. It is a scientific poem of immense grandeur, and we should embrace it and teach it to our children. It fills me with awe. But it doesn't tell me why I am here. It doesn't tell me how to live. It doesn't tell me what my purpose is. It can’t. It’s the wrong tool for the job.
For that, we turn to our story, to B'reshit. We are not at war with science. We are in a dialogue with it. We bring our awe at the "how" and join it with our sacred story of "why." Because, as Marcelo Gleiser says, at their core, both the scientist and the person of faith are driven by the same impulse: a deep "relationship of wonder with the unknown," and a profound desire "to better understand who we are."
May this Shabbat give us the space to marvel at both stories, to see the intricate genius of the "how" all around us, and to feel, deep in our souls, the purpose and the meaning of "why."
Shabbat Shalom.
[1] Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 1:1.
[2] Genesis 1:1.
[3] Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), 2.
[4] https://www.fronteiras.com/leia/exibir/21-ideias-marcelo-gleiser-e-a-complementaridade-entre-religiao-e-ciencia
[5] This refers to the "Omphalos hypothesis," famously proposed by Philip Henry Gosse in Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (London: John Van Voorst, 1857), which argued that the fossil record was created by God to give the earth the appearance of age.
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24N0pE6H-W8
[7] https://open.spotify.com/episode/46AgVZTyYny0zJYA1PQL9W
[8] Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Part 2, Chapter 25.
[9] Abraham Joshua Heschel, "Religion and Race," in The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 86.
[10] https://open.spotify.com/episode/46AgVZTyYny0zJYA1PQL9W
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24N0pE6H-W8
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