To understand how chaos-and the questions chaos raises-affects your daily life, consider the seemingly simple matter of your heart. Traditional science treats it as if it were a pump beating like clockwork, whose complicated cycles can be broken down into a number of simple waves of standard shapes. Real hearts are far more puzzling. Your heartbeat is triggered by signals from your brain, but the actual rhythmic contractions are the result of a democratic vote by millions of muscle fibers, all agreeing to contract in synchrony. Such a system is obviously far from clockwork. The rhythm of your heartbeat continually varies by tiny measurable amounts. It’s not a variability imposed from the outside; even when your body is at rest, your heartbeat fluctuates. It is caused by chaotic internal dynamics …
DISCOVER; “Does Chaos Rule the Universe?” page 57, November 1992
Is this not what the second verse of the Torah teaches us, that the so-called natural state of creation is not order, but chaos? Is this not the reason why modern-day physics has discovered a universe in a state of entropy, a world in which mankind more easily drifts towards war and destruction than towards peace and brotherhood?
The midrash defines the chaos of the second verse in terms of specific exiles the Jewish people would have to endure. Null, says the midrash, refers to the Babylonian exile (423 - 371 B.C.E.); void refers to the Median exile (371 - 356 B.C.E.); darkness to the Greek exile (318 - 138 B.C.E.), and the face of the deep, to the last exile of Rome (approx. 63 B.C.E. until present day). (The spirit of G-d alludes to the Messianic period at the end of days.)
In one verse we are given a description of the natural state of existence and a historical overview of how that condition will affect the world, and more specifically, the Jewish people. In either case, it is not a pretty picture, and history bears witness to the veracity of the verse’s prophetic vision. The exiles have come to pass, war is rampant, destruction and corruption constantly rear their ugly heads, and somehow, the Jew always seems to bear the brunt of world chaos.
The only question is why must it be that way? The answer to that question is the subject of the third verse,
G-d said, “Let there be Light!” And there was Light.
The light created in the third verse was the response to the chaos and darkness created in the second verse. Light, therefore symbolizes the antidote to darkness and chaos, which, according to the Torah; is a light that can only result from a positive, moral, conscious act of will. G-d created a world in chaos so that He could then bring order to it through the medium of a supernal light.
Likewise, life itself can be like an intellectually dark “room” within which each individual must navigate to the best of his or her ability. Though we live in a world well lit by the light of the sun at day, and the light of the moon at night, often, we still grope in intellectual darkness. Even on subtle levels, chaos reigns in our lives.
However, that is where our role begins. For, just as G-d did on the first day of creation, we have to use our powerful free will to reduce the chaos of intellectual blindness. We have to take the world in chaos, and create order, and maintain that order. To fail to do so, the Torah warns, is to let creation and society drift back to its more natural state: chaos.
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When you lie you commit sin. A lie is a lie.God is not capable of lying. It would contradict his Word.