All the beauty, all the challenges... could it have been any other way?

The rabbis of old certainly pondered this. They wrestled with the very notion of creation, asking whether this world was God's first try, or if it was, well, let's just say a more refined model.

In Bereshit Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic interpretations of the Book of Genesis, we find a fascinating discussion about this very question. It all starts with the verse: "God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31).

Rabbi Tanhuma opens the discussion with a quote from Ecclesiastes (3:11): "He made everything beautiful in its time." He then declares, "The world was created at its proper time; the world was not fit to be created before then." It's a bold statement, isn't it? It suggests a cosmic sense of timing, that everything unfolded exactly as it should.

But Rabbi Abbahu takes things a step further. He proposes something truly : "From here we learn that the Holy One blessed be He continuously created worlds and destroyed them, until He created the current ones, and said: This one pleases me, those did not please Me."

Whoa. Let that sink in. The idea that God experimented, iterated, even destroyed previous versions of reality before settling on this one? It's a radical concept. Imagine the possibilities! What were those other worlds like? What went wrong?

Rabbi Pinḥas even points to the very verse we started with as evidence. "God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good" – this, he says, means "this pleases me, those did not please Me." The word "behold" (hinneh in Hebrew) implies a new and improved situation, something that hadn't existed before.

So, is this world the result of divine trial and error? The rabbis don’t give us a definitive answer. But they invite us to consider the possibility. : the imperfections we see, the struggles we face... are they simply remnants of earlier, less-perfected worlds? Or are they integral parts of this world's unique and ultimately "very good" design?

Perhaps the most profound takeaway is this: the rabbis aren’t afraid to ask the big questions. They aren’t afraid to imagine possibilities that challenge our assumptions. And by doing so, they invite us to engage with the text, with our tradition, and with the very nature of existence in a deeper, more meaningful way.