Listening
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Genesis 1:1-2 NASB
Deep– Before anything else, let’s translate these verses without the theological influence of Western science. When we do, something incredibly important emerges.
In the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth, when the earth was desolate and void and darkness was upon the face of the murmuring deep and God’s spirit hovered over the face of the water, God said, “Let there be light.” (translation by Rashi)
Notice the fundamental change in this thought. God speaks separation into the chaos. His word causes the orderly world to emerge from the murmuring deep. Because of our Western theological tradition of creation ex nihilo, we read these two verses as two distinct ideas, but ancient cosmology might not see it that way. God acts upon and into the primal deep. What is there before God brings about the separation of order is the wonder and astonishment of emptiness. The vast, impenetrable nothingness that underlies all reality. The tōhû, “the appalling nature of reality—is echoed in the word tĕhôm. Normally translated ‘the deep’—the dark, watery mass that God’s words transfigure—tĕhôm is, in the evocative version cited by Frosh, rendered ‘the murmuring deep.’ . . . humming, murmuring, cooing, groaning, tumult, music, restlessness, stirring, panic.”[1] Tĕhôm is what you don’t hear when you stop listening. Paul describes it as creation’s agony. Science names it CMB, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, the “white noise” of the Big Bang. It pervades everything! Underneath it all is the whispering of the nothing.
“On the basis of this translation, Frosh draws on Žižek and Lingis to suggest that God’s speech interrupts a primal noise: ‘the first creative act is therefore to create silence—it is not that silence is broken, but silence itself breaks, interrupts, the continuous murmur of the Real, thus opening a clearing in which words can be spoken.’” Silence makes life possible! Without it, all is absorbed into the black hole of tĕhôm. Heidegger noticed this in a study about the “clearing” in Being.[2] Heady stuff for ordinary mortals. But perhaps not. Perhaps the biblical account of Genesis 1 is a divine encounter with the most fundamental elements of our created universe. Perhaps God speaks a place to be into an undifferentiated maelstrom of indecipherable hum.
Don’t see what you think about this. Stop listening—and feel what is there. Something. Something you can’t quite hear. Something distant, disturbing, disquieting. Something that wakes you in the middle of the night, but you don’t know what it is. Something that frightens little children in the dark. Something scratching at the edge of cemeteries. Something laden with death—and death is a sound—a sound of nothing. Sometimes we feel what that non-sound is like when we hear the absence of someone we loved.
Perhaps there is a great deal more to the opening of Genesis than arguments about evolution.
Are you listening?
Topical Index: tōhû, emptiness, tĕhôm, deep, murmuring, death, separation, silence, Genesis 1:1-2
[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, p. xx.
Even in this silence I hear the song about the sound of silence!
Skip for me Silence is the door I have to open to get to the place where everything is “ Still”. There and there alone is where I can truly listen and understand why He says “ be stilll and know that I am God”. When not in that place most of what I hear are my own thoughts battling the noise of all the “ voices” of his crazy world .
Learning daily that I need to open that door more often.
As a lifelong drummer, I have always been fascinated by
the silence in-between the musical notes.
The absence of sound is always there! And it is profoundly
necessary for each musical note to be distinguished and
resoundingly heard. Whether I was playing with a big band,
a rock group or even now in church, I am forever captivated
by the silence.
And I agree with Maddie. God invites us into the stillness, into the
silence, where He is best known to us.
Rich please email me regarding Skip in Sarasota in December- cannot find your email
Happy to. What’s your e-mail?
rather than post it here, I have sent it to you by email
Skip, is the second quote: “On the basis of this translation…” from the [1] footnote?
In the night, I wrote: “The voice of God, is it my heartbeat in my ears?”
And this morning: “I see movement in the solid surfaces. A vibration that must always be there, but is imperceptible unless I am in this incredible openness, heightenedly alert. It comes and goes, surfaces and goes deep. I do not “command”/control this vision I am allowed. It is a gift to me. And the tone that rises aurally — it surfaces and goes deep. The whispering of the “no thing” that was never nothing; another ancient truth lost.”
And here we are, AGT… “what that non-sound is like when we hear the absence of someone we loved.” We know that non-sound.
Yes, on the basis of Frosh’s translation.
Was it a caesura? Or a fermata over a rest? Which rest? Perhaps a fermata over a caesura, thereby the entire heavenly host felt the silence. Then || only then || “Yehi!”
“The white parchment around the letters is an integral part of the Torah; without it, the Torah scroll is disqualified. It is in the silence of the reading, the white fire, where emotion, truth, and wisdom can take root.” Rav Kook
“It is in the vulnerable, quiet spaces that orators demonstrate their skill. Without some fragile silence in our stories, our relationships, and our lives, we just hide in a chaotic din.” Jhos Singer
Black spaces are equally important. We live in VERY rural New Brunswick Canada on the edge of hydro service, out of sight and sound of our two and only neighbours, street lights and traffic, except for the Salmon River and our own babbling brook. On a moonless clear night the sight and sound of blackness is blinding and deafening and total and the space in which we regale under a celestial bouquet.
I’m certainly having a big bang in my heart and mind this morning, which started In my time with God early this morning and then into today’s word. No words, yet so many words!
Romans 11:33–34.
I believe the past two days’ posts have left me with an exploded head or a huge buzz-cut. (*went closely over my head) I don’t know which but me wee brain (said with Scottish accent) Just. Could. Not. Handle. This.
Silence IS deafening…..at least right now.
Perhaps you could articulate a bit about why you think it is too much. Then we could dialogue. If you’re feeling this way, I am sure others are too.
“Stop listening—and feel what is there. Something. Something you can’t quite hear. Something distant, disturbing, disquieting. Something that wakes you in the middle of the night, but you don’t know what it is. Something that frightens little children in the dark. Something scratching at the edge of cemeteries. Something laden with death—and death is a sound—a sound of nothing. Sometimes we feel what that non-sound is like when we hear the absence of someone we loved.”
It FEELS speculative and makes me FEEL very unsafe, as you pointed out, because of the middle-o’-the-night DISTURBING FEAR…. This gives me no counsel or peace but makes me, inside of my paradigm, fearful – even TREMBLE… and… now that I am writing it down…. It makes me wonder if THIS is what Sinai felt like… however, there was TREMENDOUS sound. Maybe that is the white loudness that after a while turns to numbing silence.
See, now I have gone completely dark. Let me go to yesterday’s and comment there.
But this is precisely where God resides. Did you think He was just a rational cognition machine in the sky? No one in the Tanakh is only rational. In fact, most of them are non-rational in their encounters with God. I am suggesting that the Bible is NOT a theological textbook but rather an attempt (!) to put into language the experience of God, and the discovery that language is inadequate to capture our feelings. Trauma, with God, is preverbal.
Maybe that is why phobias are so hard to treat. Some research suggests that the emotional part of our brain (amygdala) is triggered before cognitive (cerebellum) in a phobia. But most research and treatment focuses on cognitive. The emotional makes sense because most phobias start in childhood. Children are not rational thinkers. So the trauma is ingrained “emotionally” not cognitively. And it plays out into adulthood.
I relate more to a black hole than I do CMB noise. But I did have a very bizarre dream the other night about the “devil” quite weird.
In solemn plainsong, the vertical episema marks the ictus.
shall we compose a harmonious chorus to teach those who exited the ark?
I have experienced the noise of chaos for most of my life. It is incessant, like prairie wind. I felt like I was forever on the end of a whip: driven from behind by the reaction to what got in front of me unawares. I was always one step behind reality, playing catch-up. That, folks, is the dilemma of being a slave. My thoughts were not my own; my moments were not designed by me; my relationships were never what I wanted them to be, and God and I could never meet without either the trauma of dealing with the sin between us, or the need that had driven me to desperation, or the blind dumbness that kept me from feeling His presence. We never met as friends!
Deliverance, y’all, is real. Sin is a slave driver. The script is written in the stone of the past that can never be ‘paid’ for no matter how hard you ‘do good’. Repentance from all that is not God leaves space: real space in the soul. Every time I repented for following the wrong script or for believing fear, or performance, or listening to accusation, or any of the other scripts inserted into my life through the open doors of that past, I would experience a profound silence; a psychic silence. I could hear myself think: I could hear the present around me; I could hear the true voice of God instead of what I had been tricked into thinking His voice was. The timing somehow got corrected. There was space to think, dance, say something I spent time to think of. All new spaces for me. Freedom is space: space to choose; act instead of react; respond to where someone else actually is right then, or plan for a future that is based on faith instead of on reactions to the past. The present is powerful!
Space is created by connection. Disconnected folks have no space to exist. Death, too, is where space/time collapses. Love holds the space/time necessary for faith to operate in, open. Sin scrambles the order of that space. Righteousness restores it. We are called to be co-creators of that order: to hold open the space for the Spirit of God to work. May we all determine to be place-holders for love today!