In the beginning, Elohim created the heavens and the earth.
So commences the scroll of scrolls, the Tanakh's primal utterance, etched not in mere ink but in the very architecture of existence. Yale University, that bastion of New Haven's shadowed spires, stood as a latter day Sinai amid the frostbitten winds of January 2011. The air hung heavy with the residue of recession, a ghost of '08 still clawing at America's vitals, shuttering factories, swelling breadlines, whispering of voids yet unfilled. Students huddled in wool coats, their breaths clouding like fleeting prayers, as they filed into the lecture hall of Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. Dim fluorescents buzzed overhead, casting long shadows over oak paneled walls inscribed with forgotten Latin maxima.
Professor Eugenius Halden, Eugene to those who dared familiarity, paced the podium like a sentinel at the world's edge. At forty two, he cut a lean figure, sharp jaw shadowed by a perpetual five o'clock stubble, wire rimmed glasses perched on a nose inherited from Lithuanian rabbis long dust. His tweed jacket strained at the elbows, frayed from years rubbing against ancient folios. A skeptical American Jew, Eugene bore no yarmulke, no overt piety. His faith was a scalpel, dissecting texts for truths that endured Wall Street's follies and Washington's hollow promises. He taught linguistics, but his lectures veered into theology's wilder thickets, Kabbalah's hidden geometries, Tanakh's seismic names, drawing crowds weary of Keynesian sermons and Fox News bluster.
"Bereshit bara Elohim," Eugene intoned, his voice resonant, rolling the Hebrew like thunder over Sinai. He scrawled it on the chalkboard, בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים. "Not 'In the beginning God created,' as your King James renders it so tidily. No. The Hebrew fractures open. 'In a beginninging', bereshit, a primordial head, a rosh of all potentialities, 'bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'aretz.' Elohim created the heavens and the earth."
The hall stirred, ninety souls scribbling furiously. A young woman in the front row, laptop aglow, raised her hand.
"Professor Halden, Elohim's plural." Chairs creaked as heads turned. "Why does the Creator speak in multiples? Is God a committee?"
Laughter rippled, but Eugene's eyes gleamed, unamused. He leaned forward, palms splayed on the podium. "Not a committee, Ms. Ramirez, but majesty incarnate. Elohim, el, the ancient Semitic root for 'strong one,' compounded with im, the plural of intensity. Like seraphim or cherubim, it's pluralis majestatis, absolute power refracted through infinite facets. Genesis 1:1 isn't polytheism's nursery rhyme. It's monotheism armored in multiplicity. One God, wielding the force of legions. The Zohar calls it the ten sefirot, emanations from Ein Sof's infinite contraction, tzimtzum, birthing form from void."
He paused, scanning faces, Ivy Leaguers adrift in Obama's hope faded America, Occupy whispers already fermenting in Zucotti Park's shadow. "Consider the verb, bara. Creation ex nihilo, not from clay or chaos, but from nothingness. Elohim alone wields it, never for man, only for divine rupture. Plural, yes, because one voice suffices not for heavens and earth. It's power as plurality, the Creator as cosmic parliament, decreeing light from tohu va'bohu."
A burly undergrad in a Red Sox cap grunted from the back. "Sounds like corporate speak, Prof. Elohim LLC, outsourcing the universe. What about the recession? If God's plural power built this, why's my dad's factory rusting in Ohio?"
Eugene's lips twitched, a half smile, philosopher's edge honed by Borowitz's reforms and Buber's dialogues. "Fair thrust, Mr. Kowalski. Job asked as much amid his ashes. Why El's strength permits the whirlwind? Kabbalah whispers of shevirat ha kelim, the breaking of vessels, where divine light overflows, shatters sefirot, scatters holy sparks into our profane husk. The 2008 crash? A ripple, perhaps, in that grand fracture. Order from void yields to void from order. But Elohim persists. 'Let there be light', yehi or, and light was."
He gestured to a slide, flickering projector casting Genesis 1 in Hebrew, English glosses beneath. The class leaned in, oblivious to the hall's lights flickering once, subtly, like an eyelid twitch in the Infinite.
Outside, New Haven's dusk bled into night. Snow flurries danced past leaded windows, veiling the Green where protesters chanted against bailouts. Eugene delved deeper, voice rising like a psalmist. "Elohim's not YHWH yet. That personal Name, the Tetragrammaton, emerges later, in covenant's intimacy. Here, in Bereshit, it's the Creator unbound, structuring chaos. Psalm 74:13. 'You divided the sea by your strength. You broke the heads of the sea monsters in the waters.' Leviathan lurks even then, tannin, the coiling dragon of primordial depths, symbol of tohu, the formless waste."
A murmur. A girl with a Star of David necklace scribbled notes. Eugene caught her eye. "Yes, Ms. Levin, Sarah, isn't it? From the linguistics MA program? Leviathan's no fairy tale. Job 41 paints him. Scales as shields, fire from nostrils, hearts like stone. Chaos embodied, yet under Elohim's rein. Plural power crushes plural heads."
Sarah Levin nodded, her dark curls framing keen eyes. Poster child for Hurwitz scholarship, she was Kabbalah's quiet devotee amid Yale's secular grind. "But Professor, if Elohim's absolute, why tolerate the Beast? Isn't chaos the sitra achra, the other side, qlippoth shells perverting sefirot?"
Eugene arched a brow. "Precisely the theodicy's barb. Zohar's answer, chaos as forge, testing free will in tzimtzum's shadow. Without Leviathan's whisper, no true light. Ehyeh, 'I Am That I Am', affirms being amid becoming, but the void tempts inversion."
The clock ticked 4:17 PM. Eugene wrapped, chalk dust on his cuffs. "Read Genesis 1 to 2, Zohar Bereshit 15a. Ponder this. If Elohim's plurality births worlds, what fractures summon the unraveling? Class dismissed."
Students surged out, boots thudding on linoleum, debating in clusters. "Plural God? Wild." "Recession as Kabbalah? Halden's trippin'." Eugene gathered notes, mind adrift on gematria's whispers, bereshit equaling 913, a numeral pregnant with worlds.
Sarah lingered, backpack slung. "Professor, that Leviathan bit, spot on. Ever feel it stirring? Like the economy's not just numbers, but something biblical."
Eugene chuckled, dry as autumn leaves. "Poetic, Sarah. But texts are texts. Still, in 2011's gloom, who knows? Even HaShem hides in the margins."
She smiled, departing. Alone, Eugene powered down the projector. The hall emptied, echoes fading.
Then, without warning, the world hiccuped.
Lights guttered, once, twice, plunging Sterling into Stygian black. No storm raged outside. Snow fell serene. Gasps echoed from stragglers in the corridor. Emergency reds bloomed faint, casting crimson on bookshelves. Eugene's heart quickened, an atavistic prickle. Not a surge, not a fuse, too synchronized, rippling from the podium outward like a sefirot pulse inverted.
In the gloom, his mind flashed to Sefer Yetzirah, letters as atoms, names as levers. Elohim's plurality, invoked not an hour past. Power's echo?
Backup generators hummed alive after an eternal thirty seconds, fluorescents wheezing back. But the air tasted charged, metallic, as if oceans stirred far below Connecticut's bedrock. Whispers filtered from the Green, phones dead, ATMs frozen, a citywide stutter amid recession's chill.
Eugene stepped into twilight, breath fogging. New Haven's lamps flickered in sympathy, a chorus of faltering stars. Distant, from Long Island Sound's direction, a low rumble, not thunder, but something vaster, uncoiling. Waves lapping harbors with unnatural insistence, fishermen later swearing they heard hissing.
He shook it off, trudging to his office amid gothic arches. Papers on tzimtzum awaited, but sleep evaded that night. Dreams came, seven heads breaching Manhattan's skyline, mouths agape with starfire, mocking "Bereshit" in a voice of abyssal mirth.
In the morning, news murmured of unexplained outages, Yale to Bridgeport, Hudson ripples reported. No cause found. Occupy seeds sprouted in murmurs. Eugene sipped coffee, staring at Genesis on his desk.
Elohim's beginning held. But what endings coiled beneath?
And lo, the fracture widened.