Parashat Bereshit

October 16, 2025

Saul Zebovitz, Middle School Engineering & Design, Mishnah/Gemara, Tanakh, and Tefilah Teacher

A big sign on the wall of my Middle School makerspace classroom reads “ITERATION.” It’s a key component of the work we do in Engineering and Design: make something, test it out, and make changes to improve it. Then, keep doing that over and over until it’s as good as it can be.

In Bereshit, this week’s parashah, the Torah tells a story of “ruach Elohim” (“God’s spirit,” “a wind from God,” or perhaps “a great wind”) sweeping over chaotic waters, and then God bringing order, step by step. God works through an iterative process here: First, light is created. But it seems this is not enough – the light has nowhere to go, and nothing to illuminate. So God creates an open space within the water for the light to be, with some dry land. That’s better, but the light still isn’t really doing anything. So on the third day, we get plants, which need the light – the beginnings of a system of interacting parts. This continues until, by the end of the Torah’s six days, we have an entire world, in all its complexity, built iteratively.
The midrash provides an even broader and more interesting take on iterative creation. In Bereshit Rabbah 3:7, we read: Rabbi Abahu said,” …God continuously created worlds and destroyed them, until God created the current one.”

So not only was the world created in an iterative process, but the very existence of this world is itself the culmination of a much larger sequence.

What were the problems with these earlier worlds that caused them to be unsatisfactory? Some sources hold that the existence of humanity makes this world viable, as without humans, there can be no purpose, for there is no one to carry out a purpose or to keep mitzvot. In this view, the problem with previous worlds was that God had not yet come up with the idea of creating humans – a discussion that is played out in chapter 1, vv. 26-27, after which God declares the world “very good.”

Another view is that previous iterations of the world were governed by a principle of strict din (justice) – namely, justice without the mediating force of rachamim (mercy). In such a world, even minor sins are subject to severe punishment, and the world cannot stand (Bereshit Rabbah 12:15).  

All of these interpretations, and in fact the text of Parashat Bereshit itself, have in common this idea of iteration. As I teach my Middle School engineering students, any iterative process rests on three key tenets:
  1. The world has not yet reached its ideal state. There is more work that can be done, more areas that can be improved.
  2. There is something to learn from every failure. Each instance of imperfection in the world is an opportunity to study it closely, and every problem can suggest its own solution with enough close study and creative thinking.
  3. It is never too late. Since iteration is an ongoing process, there is always a chance to make more improvements and to make the world better.

As we restart the annual cycle of Torah reading (another iteration!), I plan to keep these three tenets in mind, especially keeping in mind the further teaching that we – humanity – are God’s partners in ongoing creation. We create a new world every day, and there is always a chance to make this iteration better than the last one.