Relative to the first day, the second day of creation seems kind of uneventful. All God does is to create an expanse – a space – in the middle of the waters. The writing is dry and practical and straightforward. It explains the purpose of the expanse: to separate the waters above from the waters below. The cosmology of the ancient Hebrews was simple: we live in a bubble or dome of air, surrounded above and below by water. It’s a precarious, vulnerable predicament at best. All you’d have to do to destroy our whole world would be to open up a couple cracks in the dome and the entire primeval watery abyss would come crashing in. Game over.
This is exactly what happens in the flood story a little later in Genesis. God decides to scrap the whole project and start over because humans have, shall we say, underperformed. The text says, “All the fountains of the great deep burst open and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And the rain was upon the earth.” I hate to admit it, but that really cheesy movie about Noah and the ark that came out last year got it exactly right in how they portrayed it: There were massive fountains spraying up from the waters below and torrents coming down from the waters above. Huge storms and rising waters. (But I don’t think they had those rock monster creatures in the Bible. Whatever.) After the flood God makes a promise to Noah to never let the waters in to destroy the world like that again. The sign of that promise is the rainbow.
So we’re living in this fragile space with water all around us. In English it’s usually “expanse” or “dome” or often “firmament” (even though no one seems to know exactly what a firmament is). The Hebrew word is rakiya. The creative act on the second day is God makes a rakiya. And rakiya comes from the verb raka, which means “to beat or spread out,” as in the process of hammering a lump of metal until it becomes a thin sheet. So that makes it sound like rakiya doesn’t refer to a space at all but just to a thin, flat sheet that separates the waters above from the waters below. But we know that can’t be right because everything that follows in the text assumes that there’s an actual space in which things can happen.
So maybe it refers not to the space itself and not to a flat sheet, but to the thin edge of a space – that which holds the space and keeps the waters out. It was, in fact, actually thought of as a kind of solid dome over the sky. It was believed that when birds flew, their wings would graze the top of it. When it was dark out, the sun was passing behind it. And a famous woodcut from an anonymous European artist in the 18th century – you can see it in your order of service – shows a man, having travelled all the way to edge of the flat earth to where it intersects with the rakiya sticking his head out through it and gazing into the vast beyond.
Picture a bubble. The thin film that forms its spherical edge could be a rakiya. When you think about a bubble, the essence of it is not the air inside it – it’s the tension of the fragile skin that surrounds it. The skin makes that space by separating the inside from the outside. The tension between what’s pushing out and what’s pushing in makes the bubble round. The verb raka seems to include the sense of that tension. It’s hammering, and beating and expanding. It’s the continual effort of creating and sustaining that edge. And in the case of the creation story, the edge has to be just right – too thin and it breaks and the floods come, too thick and no rain can get in and everything dies. Because rain – nourishing, life-giving rain – in this story, comes through small holes in the rakiya that God opens up and then closes. The rakiya is not static or impermeable. It takes careful maintenance and constant reshaping. The rakiya is the living, breathing form of that ongoing effort.
We know that effort well from our own lives. When we want to make space for anything – for more time with our children, space to make art or music, space to meditate or pray or exercise, space to plan our next career move, space for a Sabbath practice, space for a relationship, space to be alone – it takes intentional effort. We have to create that bubble of space, with the effort of hammering and shaping and stretching out its edge and then sustaining it. There is tension from all the other demands of our life that want to come flooding in and will come flooding in if we let them. Or think about our bodies. Our bodies have a boundary and it’s usually – hopefully – up to us to determine how permeable we want that boundary to be. What do we allow to cross and not cross that boundary in the form of food and media and people in our lives? Especially in our frenzied modern culture everything wants to come crashing in and it will if we let it. But on the other hand, if we have too thick and rigid a boundary, we cut ourselves off from life. We reject others, we don’t take in new ideas, we don’t risk new experiences, we don’t let in love. If we cut off the nourishing rain from outside, what’s inside us will wither. We must tend carefully to the rakiya around our time and our bodies.
We can also think of this Biblical cosmology as a macrocosm of our own psychic world: the primordial waters that threaten to flood are our own subconscious passions. In Freudian terms, they are our “id.” They are the chaotic, primal forces in the universe; the anarchic oceans of creativity; our own preverbal drives and hungers and dreams. They loom just outside of our nice, domesticated “ego” and “superego” bubble of order and reasonableness. Like the primordial soup at the very beginning, these waters within us contain the entire universe of possibility. All that we could be. Let it all in and we self-destruct, unable to hold down a job or maintain relationships. We all know people like that – people whose lives implode whether because of drugs or mental illness or sometimes just personalities that can’t say no to the chaos of the world and their own hungers.
But. Try to keep the primeval waters out entirely – make our internal boundaries too thick, never let it rain – and our own souls become arid and brittle. We won’t risk wading into the deep waters. We anaesthetize ourselves. We hold back from saying what’s in our heart. We become so afraid of losing control that we lose our love of life. We also probably know people like this – people who walk around seeming hollow and withered, tired with the strain of denying themselves. And maybe there’s a little bit of each of us in each of these archetypes.
Who knows if the ancient people who told and retold the creation myth had this in mind? Who knows if the Biblical author was aware of the layers of possible meaning in the text? They may very well have been – I tend to think that they were. But if not, does this story have any use for us? This primitive notion of a hammered-thin rakiya around our planet that somehow keeps the cosmic chaos out and allows us to breathe? Actually it turns out we have something like that. It’s called our atmosphere. It’s what makes our sky blue and makes rainbows appear. You might think that our atmosphere is not that thin, but in fact if you made our earth the size of a regular classroom globe, our atmosphere would be the thickness of a couple coats of paint. That’s it. Our rakiya is a real thing. And it’s a fragile thing and a crucial thing, without which we’d all be dead, just as it suggests in Genesis.
On a global environmental level – oy – do we have issues with our rakiya. Starting with the hole in the ozone layer, which thankfully is shrinking now, but where the rakiya was too porous; it was letting in dangerous rays from the soup of the outer cosmos. And of course now our rakiya is bloated with greenhouse gasses – it’s too thick, too impermeable, trapping heat in and wrecking havoc on our climate. That’s what global warming is: it’s a rakiya malfunction. A little too thin and we have trouble, a little too thick and we have trouble. Let too much in and we have trouble, let too little out and we have trouble. It’s such a delicate, subtle thing. We are indeed precarious in this bubble of inhabitable space.
And we’re not attending to it. We’re being careless with the balance nature has given us. We are not doing enough to maintain the health of our rakiya up there. In the Genesis flood story, humans had behaved badly and God destroyed them by means of the rakiya. With the sign of the rainbow, God promised to never do that again. But in an ironic twist of fate, in our world, God isn’t even necessary as the agent of destruction. Through our actions, we are destroying our rakiya directly. And the storms are beginning and the torrential rains are starting to fall and the waters are rising from underneath as the icebergs melt.
If on the first day we said that God created time, on the second day God created space. Collectively, between the two days, there was now an opening where there hadn’t been one before in which the world as we know it could bloom. Before that, when everything was formless and void and dark and swampy and undifferentiated, nothing could breathe, nothing could evolve, nothing could happen. All possibility of all things became real once there was a structure to hold open the area in which they could flourish.
So maybe the great teaching encoded in these ancient sentences about the second day of creation is that forming a rakiya is a foundational practice for each of us. It’s necessary for us to be able to live a dynamic and rich life and even for us to live at all. You can believe or not believe that God did this in creating our world, but it is clear that it’s up to us to do it in our own lives and to sustain it for our planet. When we give ourselves the gift of space and time, even with all the hard work it takes to sustain it, our whole world can bloom within it. And then sometimes, like the man in the wood carving, we need to travel to the end of the earth and break through the rakiya to gaze into the great abyss beyond.
It’s up to us to carefully tend the porous boundaries within ourselves; between ourselves and the world; between our world and the wider cosmos. It’s up to us to keep the promise of the rainbow. And when we get it right – when we find that perfect balance between permeability and firmness, resistance and surrender – it’s that yin-yang spot of bliss. Perhaps this is why at the end of the description of the second day, the text says, “And God called the rakiya “Heaven.” And it was morning and it was evening, a second day.”