The Thirteen Articles of Faith established by the Rambam are grounded in faith and belief and therefore are difficult to prove intellectually. The first four deal with the existence of God, His being the Primary Cause of all, His absolute unity and transcendence of any corporeality, and His eternity.
Part of that belief is that Creation was yesh meyayin/ex nihilo – something novel emerging out of preceding total non-existence. What is not clearly borne out is the manner of creation, which can be thought of in one of two ways: a) a one-time occurrence, which transformed the non-existential “state” into a henceforth novel existential state standing “on its own” by virtue of the Godly energy given it at the point of creation or (b) a process to be constantly sustained, to the point that should the divine sustaining force be removed, everything would revert to its original non-existent “state.”
Creation is the greatest miracle of all because by definition a miracle changes the usual course of nature, and there is no greater change than the change from non-existence to existence. Regarding miracles, we find two types:
- The miracle that brings about a change that need not be sustained once it occurs. Example: when Moshe’s hand turned leprous, it was a one-time full change from non-leprous to leprous. Another miracle was needed to generate the next change from leprous to non-leprous.
- The miracle that brings about a change that must be maintained, otherwise it automatically would revert to its original state. Example: the plague of blood. There was no radical change from water to blood, for if there had been such a change all the cisterns of blood would have had to be emptied and refilled with water once the plague stopped. No such thing is recorded in the Torah. Even during the plague, what was blood to the Egyptians was water to the Jews. It obviously was water in some continuously miraculous blood-state for the Egyptians.
Regarding the miracle of Creation, there does not appear to be clear indication as to whether it was a one-time shift or an ongoing process.
Midrash Tehillim seems to indicate it was the second type. On the verse (Tehillim 119:89) “Forever, oh God, does Your spoken word stand in the heavens,” the Midrash Shochar Tov interprets: “Your [initial] Word [at the point of Creation, through which creation was activated] stands continually in the heavens.” This indicates that the created state indeed requires a constant sustaining force. As God desires intellectual man not to be overwhelmed by the supra-rational, this makes sense: once creation occurred and things were in place, it follows that some changes of nature would involve a one-time procedure while others would need to be sustained.
But the total novelty of the shift from non-existence to existence, it stands to reason, has to be sustained. However, since God is certainly not limited to any logical reasoning, we need additional Torah proofs that Creation is not merely a one-time shift but is constantly sustained.
Tanya (Shaar HaYichud chapter 2) finds it in the episode of Krias Yam-Suf (the splitting of the Red Sea), where the verse states: “God made the sea ‘move about’ through a mighty eastern wind the whole night and He set the sea into dry ground, and the waters split” (Exodus 14:21).
While this splitting could have been accomplished as a one-time procedure, the Torah states clearly it was maintained continually the whole night by the force of the wind, and that eventually (Exodus 14:27) “the sea returned [automatically] toward morning to its original position” – once the sustaining wind ceased blowing. The same applies even more so to the radical novel change of creation: it, too, must be sustained by a constant divine power at work, without which things will tend to revert to non-existence.
Why did God choose “continuous creation” over one-time creation? The Midrash Tanchuma (Naso: 16) states a reason for creation: “God desired to have a dwelling place within the lower spheres.” This approach enables us to explain why God opted to continuously sustain the created state: By doing so He is indeed within the world, with a continuous dwelling therein.
If, instead, God had opted not to constantly re-create but to have His creation continue on its own by virtue of the original energy He invested in it, it wouldn’t be a dwelling in the full sense of the word. God prefers to remain constantly involved within His world through re-creation.
When one recognizes and accepts this truth of existence and the deep connection present between the Creator and the created, especially between Him and His chosen nation, one will easily rely fully on God and look forward to the fulfillment of all the prophecies spelled out in the Torah regarding the fulfillment of His promise to “send a redeemer to their [Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov’s] children’s children” – voiced three times daily in the Shemoneh Esrei –speedily in our days.
This was written in honor of Gimmel Tammuz, the yahrzeit of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who elucidated so many of these profound concepts.