The World Was Created For the Sake of Israel

The Torah does not begin with a commandment. This bothered the rabbis. If the Torah is first and foremost a legal document, the record of what God requires of Israel, why does it open with a narrative about the creation of the world? What does the formation of light and dark and sea and land and animals have to do with the laws of Passover or the prohibition against murder?

Rashi, in the eleventh century, preserved an old rabbinic answer: the Torah begins with creation because if the nations of the world ever claim that Israel stole the land of Canaan, Israel can point to the opening of the Torah and say that God created everything, and gave to whom God wished, and it was God's will to give the land to Israel. The creation narrative establishes the Creator's property rights before the legal record of the covenant begins.

But there is an older and deeper answer, one that goes further than property rights.

The Reading of Bereshit That Changes Everything

Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, section 2, compiled in thirteenth-century Frankfurt from much earlier sources, preserves a teaching from Rabbi Yehuda bar Shalom that examines the Hebrew of the first word of Genesis with unusual precision. The word is Bereshit: in the beginning. Rabbi Yehuda notices that the word could have been formed differently. It could have said mereishit, meaning "from the very beginning" or "from before the beginning." The letter mem instead of bet would have produced a slightly different meaning.

But the Torah chose bet. Why?

Rabbi Yehuda's answer draws on a verse from Jeremiah (2:3): "Israel is holy to the Lord, the first of His produce." In biblical Hebrew, the word for "first" is reishit, the same root as Bereshit. The Torah's opening word, Bereshit, in the merit of the reishit, in the merit of the "first," refers not to temporal primacy but to Israel, which is called the reishit of God's produce.

The world was created in the merit of Israel. Bereshit bara Elohim: "In the merit of the reishit, God created." The creation narrative is the creation's reason, encoded in its opening word.

The 3,205 texts of the midrash-aggadah collection return to this theme repeatedly, reading the opening chapters of Genesis as a meditation on purpose: why the world was made, for whose sake, and what obligations follow from that purpose.

What It Means to Be the Reishit

The term reishit in Biblical Hebrew carries several overlapping meanings. It is the first of a sequence. It is the best of a category. And in the context of agricultural offerings, it is the first-fruits dedicated to God, the portion set aside before the rest is used, the portion that belongs to the divine before the human benefit begins.

Israel as the reishit of God's produce is therefore not merely first in time but first in dedication: the portion of humanity set aside for divine service before the rest of humanity proceeds with its own purposes. This is both a privilege and a definition of function. The first-fruits of the harvest were not given back to the farmer. They were consecrated. Being the reishit means being the portion that belongs to God rather than the portion that belongs to itself.

The Legends of the Jews develops this by tracing the patriarchs as the individuals through whom the quality of Israel-as-reishit was formed and transmitted. Jacob especially, whose name was changed to Israel, is the figure who consolidated the identity that would be inherited by the twelve tribes. His life, from the struggle in the womb with Esau to the wrestling with the angel at the Jabbok, was the process by which the reishit was shaped into a people capable of receiving Torah.

The Messiah and Torah as the Other Two Firsts

Yalkut Shimoni's passage on Bereshit goes further. The rabbis identified not just Israel but also the Torah and the Messiah as reishit. All three carry this designation: Proverbs describes wisdom (understood as Torah) as "the beginning of God's way," the first of God's works. The Psalms verse about the king on whom God sets the divine firstborn title is read as a reference to the messianic figure. And Israel carries the Jeremiah verse already cited.

Three reishitot, three firsts, all prior to creation in some sense, all the purposes for which the world was made. This is a rich theological claim: the world is not self-sufficient or self-explanatory. It was made for something. The Torah is the blueprint of what the world is meant to be. Israel is the people charged with enacting that blueprint. The Messiah is the moment when the enactment reaches completion.

The kabbalistic tradition, from the Zohar of thirteenth-century Castile through the Lurianic school, built its entire cosmological system on this insight. Creation was not a neutral event. It was a purposive act with a specific goal, and the goal involves the repair of a world that needs repair. The Zohar describes creation as beginning with a flash of divine light that shattered the vessels designed to contain it, scattering sparks of divine consciousness throughout the material world. The purpose of Israel, Torah, and eventually the Messiah is to gather those scattered sparks back to their source. Bereshit, the first word, already contains the entire story of tikkun olam, the repair of the world.

Does This Teaching Teach Privilege or Responsibility?

The claim that the world was created in the merit of Israel sounds, to a modern ear, like a claim to privilege: we are special, the world exists for our sake, our interests are primary. The rabbinic tradition understood it very differently.

First-fruits are not kept by the farmer. The reishit is the portion that goes to the Temple, that serves a purpose beyond the farmer's own consumption. To be the reishit means to be the portion that serves the whole rather than itself. The world was created in Israel's merit not so that Israel could exploit the world but so that Israel could fulfill the function for which it was set aside: Torah study, commandment observance, and the maintenance of the relationship between heaven and earth that the covenant established.

The Mekhilta, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus associated with the school of Rabbi Ishmael, understands Sinai as the moment when the reishit function was formalized. Before Sinai, Israel was the people set aside in potential. After Sinai, the function was activated by the concrete obligations of Torah. The merit that made the world possible became the program that makes the world's continuation meaningful.

Jacob at the Center of the Story

Jacob is the patriarch whose story most directly enacts the tension between privilege and responsibility that the reishit teaching describes. He was the one chosen over Esau before birth. He received the birthright and the blessing. He dreamed of the ladder between heaven and earth at Bethel and was promised that his descendants would fill the land.

And then he worked fourteen years for the wives he was promised. He was deceived by Laban the way he had deceived his father. He lost a son to the treachery of his other sons. He mourned for Joseph for twenty-two years. The man for whose merit the world was created suffered like a man for whose merit nothing had been arranged in advance.

Yalkut Shimoni's teaching is not unaware of this irony. The reishit is not protected from difficulty. It is charged with a purpose that the difficulty serves. Jacob's suffering, the tradition insists, was the process by which the man became equal to the name Israel, worthy to be the ancestor of the people through whom the world's purpose would be enacted. The world was created in the merit of what Jacob would become, not in the merit of what he already was when the story of his life began.