Avot 5:1: Order has a Moral Quality

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, July 3, 2006

A    With Ten words the world was created.
B    But God could have created the world with one word!
C    a'    Rather, to extract payment from the wicked who destroy the world
C    b'    And to give a fitting reward to the righteous who sustain the world that was created with ten words.

This Mishnah is structured, like many others, in three parts, or "gates," called bavot.
In the first gate, or bava, we are told that God used ten utterances to make the world.
At first glance, an omnipotent God could have applied Divine economy and have gotten the job done with one world. The extra attention reveals Divine concern for how the world is made and how the world will be treated by those who will inhabit and work the world.

For the Greek mind, ethics is part of philosophy and not religion. God "said" "let there be light," and the light came into being. The word used for "word" is ma'amar" which stems from a root in Arabic and Aramaic meaning "command." The Commander of Kuwait is the Emir! Actually, God commanded the world into being, giving the world a moral as well as physical mandate. God arranges the physical world and requires of humanity that it abide by the moral law. We make or break our world. Morality is not merely polite table talk, it is personal and God takes morality personally. We sustain the world by acting well, and we foul our nest when we do not live our lives in concert with God. The detail and attention that God put into the world is our signal that our words and deeds, our plans and aspirations, our house and our community, reflect the will and purpose that God put into the natural order and Wrote in our Torah.

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