Parah-Pitgamim Kaddishin
Our sages teach us that the Torah was created two thousand years before the world (Bereishit Rabbah 8:2). This is difficult to understand, since the Torah contains the accounts of many events that happened after creation. How then, can the Torah speak of creation, Adam and Eve, Noah, the holy Patriarchs, and all the other stories recorded in the Torah? All these things had not yet happened when the Torah was written.
This is even more difficult to understand when we realize that death only came into existence as a result of Adam’s sin. If Adam had not sinned, death would not exist.
Before Adam sinned, however, he had absolute free will. This being so, how can the concept of death appear in the Torah written before creation? How can the Torah state that a particular individual died? How can we find such passages as in this week’s portion of Parah, “When a man dies in a tent (Numbers 19:14),” which encompasses numerous laws?
This is all very difficult to understand; when the Torah was written, man had not yet sinned. Even though, “all is foreseen,” still, “free will is given (Avot 3:15).”
Actually, when the Torah was first created, it was a mixture of letters. The letters of the Torah were not yet combined into words as they are now.
Whenever anything then happened in the world, these letters were combined, and the words were recombined to form the account.
This was true of the account of creation, and the story of Adam and Eve. The letters combined with each other, forming the words that told this story. Similarly, when an individual died, a combination of letters was formed, saying that he had died. The same was true of the rest of the Torah.
As soon as an event took place, a combination was immediately formed, corresponding to that event. If a different event had taken place, the letters would have combined differently. The Torah is God’s wisdom, and it has no end. (Rabbi Yehoshua Avraham of Zitamar; Geulat Yisrael, Pitgamim Kaddishin)
iAttach-Amidah-Da’at: Pray for the ability to always approach Torah study with this awareness of God’s Wisdom, and to uncover the mysteries hidden in the combinations of the letters.