The first sentence of the Torah, BRAShYTh BRA ALHYM ET HShAMYM VET HAyRTz
(בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ׃ - pozn.a.c.) has been long translated in the King James Bible as "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." The word BRAShYTh is, indeed, held to have some relationship to the idea of a beginning, although proposed translations have changed since the days of King James. Modern alternatives include "When the beginning" or "With beginning". The second word, BRA, does mean created. And of course, ALHYM means "the Gods"
(resp."Vyssi"; oznacenie sa pouziva i pre anjelske rady sveta formacie, teda אצרה - pozn.a.c.). What about BRA ALHYM? In some languages, the subject normally precedes the verb, while others are more flexible. Traditional translations simply assume flexible verb/subject sequence and assume the BRA ALHYM really means "God (or, the Gods) created" But in a portion of the Zohar, the sequence is read more strictly: BRA ALHYM means "created the Gods." So BRAShYTh BRA ALHYM now means, "With beginning created the Gods." Just a bit more linguistic smoothing give us the following translation of Genesis 1:1: "With beginning, __ created the Gods, the heavens and the earth." Who created the Gods? It's never stated. It's not knowable.
This is a very radical proposition: That which most in the Judeo-Chrisitan world thought of as the supreme being, the prime creator, the source, is no such thing. Instead, Elohim is something that was created by someone/something else. This is a theme we'll come back to later in the
Tree of Life (link podla a.c.). For now, it would be a good idea to start getting comfortable with these ideas: You cannot conceive the true God. No human mind can do that, and no human language can describe it. The best we can do is conceive of aspects of the true God. Qabalists often refer to the prime source/creator as AYN SVPh (ain soph)
(אין סף - pozn.a.c.) which means "without limit" or "limitless" or "infinite." (The "King" described by the Zohar as making the first engravings in the supernal purity is held to refer to as AYN SVPh.)
Back to the infinite light. Notice that the creative expressions are in the future tense. I will do this. Let us do this. Always in the future. But this infinite light is, by the very quality of its infinity, beyond time. It always was. It is. It will always be. And yet, it's always looking ahead. "I will...." Rabbi David Cooper, in God is a Verb (Riverhead Books, ISBN 1-57322-055-8
- pozn.autor), explains that God isn't a static thing that launched creation and then stayed behind at the starting line. God is a process of never-ending creation. God isn't a noun; it's a verb; the idea of "God-ing."
