Let My People Know

"The world is sustained by the continuous 'saying' of the same Ten Utterances forever"

 

Divine Providence is not a general expression for a total state of affairs. 

It is something very definite that belongs to every created thing in the universe. 

Not only does Providence manifest on a grand scale; it is just as evident in the most insignificant event that occurs to a blade of grass, to a worm. 

It is all connected, of course, with the power of the letters, signs, and symbols of the Torah — which, incidentally, have always been greatly misunderstood.

The error stems from an incorrect comparison with the human concept of creating or making. 

It is stated that God made the heaven and the earth, and we say that man also makes things. 

The fundamental problem, then, concerns the concept of Creation, of making the world. 

In philosophical thought known as "Deism," the Creator makes the world and leaves it to go by itself. 

To be sure, even in the Bible there are a few instances when God seems to have abandoned the world to its own devices.

However, this is not the problem here, nor whether it is blasphemy or not, because the whole image of a world abandoned by its Creator is based on a false analogy. 

The difference between human creativity and Divine creativity is not a matter of who is doing the creating, but of the essence of the created thing and the act of creation.

For example —let us take a living creature that has already matured and been made whole. 

At the same time, the body has to renew itself continuously; there has to be ever additional creation for the body to remain alive.

This points to the difference between the completion of a design and the process of creation. 

The process of creation is continuous; at the same time it follows a pattern of growth, of individual completion and disintegration. 

The world is sustained by the continuous "saying" of the same Ten Utterances forever. 

The work of man is actually secondary and external; he merely alters the shape of the original substance, whereas the Divine action is that of making something come into being where nothing at all existed.

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz


From The Sustaining Utterance, p. 26, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz