Beginning Hebrew students in Israel experience many humorous moments encountering the Hebrew language.  One of my favorites is a story a classmate told of picking grapefruit on a kibbutz.  My friend was surrounded by fallen grapefruit in disarray and was asked by a supervisor how things were going.  Resorting to his childhood biblical Hebrew, he sought the word for chaos and remember the story of this week’s Torah portion, Bereshit, where the universe is described as chaotic.  “Everything is Tohu Va’Vohu,” my friend said, turning to verse one of the Creation Story “….and the  universe was unformed and void….”  Everyone on the kibbutz burst into laughter, since this phrase “tohu va’vohu” is rarely used in modern Hebrew.  My friend’s faux pas became a kibbutz legend and my friend the laughingstock of that kibbutz for the rest of his stay.

This story comes to mind, though, as I reflect on the lessons of our Torah portion in light of recent events, both local and global.  The primordial chaos of the universe reported to us in the opening verses of Torah are quickly transformed into an orderly, sensible Creation.  That is, until humanity appears on the scene, and then chaos seems to reign once again.  

Order rules the universe for the six days of creation, yet the creation of human beings brings an unpredictable messiness to God’s plan.  How ironic.  God cannot complete the work of creation without us, and with us, the creation becomes complicated and messy.

That, of course, may be the point.  The Torah seems to teach us that before Creation, things were a mess.  With Creation, order became possible, but with us in creation, once again things are a mess.  What, then, is the point?

The point is that we are necessary, from God’s point of view.  Essential, in fact.  As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, taught, “God is in need of man.”   

The irony is that without us, the world would not be in need of ordering, for the chaos is often the work of our hands.  We take the beautiful resources of creation and threaten to destroy them through our irresponsible behaviors of pollution, selfishness and neglect.  We take the incredible blessing of humanity and treat it callously, in the cruel and abusive ways in which we exploit our fellow human beings, through oppression, neglect, disregard, racism and more.

Our tradition teaches us that we are God’s partners in completing the work of creation.  We are necessary precisely because we are at least in part responsible.  As the rabbis teach in the Mishnah, “while it is not our duty to complete the task, neither are we free to desist from it.”

Completing creation and repairing the damage we have done is not easy.  Yet it is one of the most important tasks of our existence.  All around us, chaos seems to reign.  The power to bring order lies not only with God.  The power lies in our hands.

Rabbi James M. Bennett serves Congregation Shaare Emeth and is a member of the St. Louis Rabbinical Association.