Good? Good!
Dear friends,
If you were a biblical translator but your Hebrew was hit or miss you might translate the sixth and seventh verses of the Torah as follows:
God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was %$*!, and God separated the light from the darkness.
Somehow you never caught the meaning of one of those words, and you couldn’t quite make out from the context what “the light was,” so you left it rather vague.
A few verses later you might do something similar when that word reappears:
God called the dry land Earth and called the gathering of waters Seas. And God saw that this was %$*!.
Still the meaning of this word could go in various directions. Any of these words and many others could logically replace %$*!: excellent, terrible, funny, right, wrong, ugly, beautiful, lacking, perfect.
The next two appearances don’t give you much indication as to the meaning of the word, so when it appears for a fifth time in verse 21 you again translate:
God created the great sea monsters, and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was $%*!.
%$*! could again indicate that God is pleased or displeased with these creatures, surprised by them or not, and so on.
The seventh and final appearance in the first chapter you translate:
And God saw all that had been made and found it very %$*!.
When we step back from the translations that have been handed down to us, or from our knowledge of Hebrew, we might get a different understanding of the text. This same Hebrew word, Tov, which appears seven times in the opening chapter can be ripe with mystery.
Unfortunately for our imaginations and playfulness, all translators agree that the word Tov means “good” in English. Every day of creation other than the second, God pauses to inspect the work at least once, and finds it good. In the end God finds it all “very good.”
Fortunately, though, this gives us an opportunity to explore what we might mean when we use the word “good.”
Light, we are told, is good. The earth and the seas, that’s good. Vegetation is good, the planets and the stars are good, sea creatures, birds, land animals, they’re all good (note that the creation of humans is not called good, the jury is still out on that one..) And the totality of it all, we call that very good.
When expounding on this chapter's "good," the rabbis don’t tend to contrast it with evil. We seem to be in a different category of goodness. We see this later in the parashah, when we are told that Eve saw that the fruit on the tree of knowledge was “good for eating.” We understand from the story that it was, morally speaking, very bad for eating. So, by “good” Eve must mean something closer to edible, physically appropriate for human consumption.
This is closer to the rabbinic understanding of these verses. When God uses the word Tov, according to Nachmanides, she means “That which God desires its eternal existence.” Or: “that god chose its existence,” in Sforno’s words. What “God wants” and what exists are virtually inseparable in rabbinic thought. In other words, we call something good if it exists in harmony with the rest of existence. “Good” denotes ontology, existence, “is-ness.” Its opposite in this sense is not bad or evil, though it may seem like it to us, since our instinct is toward life, toward existence, rather than toward ceasing to be. In Maimonides’ words: “darkness and evil are lackings,” meaning they have no positive property but simply denote the lack of light and good.
Good, the rabbis suggest is the positive content of the world, a piece of the totality. When we feel good, we are at peace with the world as it is, and our small but significant place within it.
Sitting in the Sukkah last week I felt good. Although many things are out of whack in my life and in the world, the breeze, the rain and the sun made everything cohere. I sensed it all to be as it should. Though my mind was abuzz, my heart was quiet. The words on my lips seemed softer, their edges less sharp, their meaning more mysterious. For a moment I looked around and saw that it was all very good.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha