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For me, the first chapter of Breishit—which opens both this week’s parshah and the Torah itself—is perhaps the most nostalgic text in our tradition. I can still remember learning to write the letters of the Hebrew alphabet by tracing its opening verses onto large sheets of butcher paper in my kindergarten classroom. Indeed, wistfulness seems built into the very structure of the text, which has the comfortingly repetitive rhythm of a children’s book. God declares that some aspect of the world—light, the sea, living creatures—should come into being, and then “it was so”; after each act of creation, God sees “that it was good.” Time, too, is marked with lilting reiteration: “And there was evening and there was morning, a first day,” “there was evening and there was morning, a second day,” and so on. Plus, because these verses are always chanted early in the autumn, at the start of the Jewish year and the academic calendar, when I listen to them at synagogue, I naturally find myself thinking back on wherever I was when I heard them the previous fall and all the ones prior, the words of the present ringing with the past years’ creation stories.

This may be why I feel some trepidation as we draw closer to Breishit—because, for the only time I can recall, last year, I didn’t hear these opening verses chanted; they were read on Simchat Torah morning, October 7th, and with air raid sirens and loud explosions sounding over my apartment in Jerusalem, I stayed home. Every year going forward, when we read the beginning of Breishit on Simchat Torah (and the parshah as a whole on the Shabbat that follows), these words of creation that once invited warm retrospection will evoke a dark anniversary and all the horror that followed. How, I’ve asked myself again and again, can we approach a text about world creation after a year marked by such terrible destruction?

For many exegetes, a closer look at this text reveals that it is actually just as concerned with destruction as creation. According to multiple rabbinic midrashim, prior to creating our world, God was “building worlds and destroying them,” explaining that while the final version “pleases me, those did not.” The sages offer a variety of textual justifications for this imagined prehistory. For instance, one midrash argues that the use of the past tense in the phrase “it was evening”—which appears in the description of the first days of creation, before God makes the celestial bodies by which we measure time—suggests that “there had [already] been an order to time” lingering from prior worlds; another commentator contends, based on parallel biblical citations, that because the word “hinei” (“behold”)—as in God’s refrain “behold, it was good”—is generally used in the context of a shift from a previous state of existence, there must have been earlier worlds that lacked this goodness. Regardless of the particular reasoning, this view raises a number of questions, both moral and metaphysical. So it’s hardly surprising that many commentators have tried to explain away the claims of these midrashim or rejected their very premise. The Hasidic text the Beer Mayim Chayim puts it bluntly: “This makes no sense!” For if God knows the future, why could God not have made a world that was divinely acceptable from the outset?

There is a strand of traditional texts that responds to such objections by explaining that destruction is necessary because it produces the possibility of achieving something even greater. As the Mussar teacher known as the Alter of Slabodka, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, argues, “Spiritual achievements that entail world creation come after descent and destruction, that is, the building of worlds through their destruction.” He gives the example of Adam, who, according to the Talmud, sinned and was expelled from paradise on the very day he was created, humanity’s return to the Garden of Eden henceforth prevented by a “fiery ever-turning sword.” “Was this not the destruction of the world?” asks the Alter of Slabodka. However, he notes, “after this destruction, repair also came.” He cites a rabbinic midrash that says that after Adam sinned, God showed him his future descendants, and Adam noticed that King David’s life was granted only three hours. So he asked God to give the future king 70 of his own allotted 1,000 years. “Behold, it was the years of Adam’s life after he sinned that brought forth the entire existence of David, from which sprouted the kingdom of the House of David and which will bring about the future Messiah, who will bring redemption to the world,” the Alter of Slabodka writes. This, he proclaims, “is the way of the world: The Holy Blessed One creates worlds and destroys them, and from their destruction, a better and more exalted and more elevated world is established.” I remember learning this text some years ago and finding it compelling. But as I write this now, hours after looking at pictures of Gazan children burned alive in their tents from fires ignited by Israeli bombings, texts about the redemptive possibilities of destruction ring hollow.

The rabbis of the Izhbitza Hasidic dynasty, however, offer an understanding of creation not as superseding past destruction but rather as being persistently shaped by it. The current world, teaches Rabbi Yaakov Leiner, the second Izhbitzer rebbe, is created “from the cries of the destroyed worlds.” Our world has endured not because it is loftier than previous ones but because it contains the pain of all that came before it. To explain this, he draws upon a verse in our parshah that notes that before rain existed, “a spring [ed] would well up from the ground and water the surface of the earth.” A rabbinic tradition reads the somewhat esoteric word “ed” as its near-homophone “eid,” meaning “disaster.” Thus, the Izhbitzer Rebbe explains, “through the crying out and brokenness of the destroyed worlds, an awakening arose . . . for by means of its cries, arose the desire to build the world anew.” He further interprets the verse by drawing on a kabbalistic idea that reads “ed,” which shares its two letters with the first two letters of God’s name “Adonai,” as the destroyed worlds calling out to God, unable even to get the whole name out. Taken together, it is this destruction, crying brokenly for God, that “waters the surface of the earth,” somehow sustaining our world.

This interpretation helps explain why God’s final draft is still so full of devastation. Indeed, in the later chapters of our parshah, we learn that the world’s first brothers are also the first case of fratricide, and our parshah’s penultimate verse features God declaring a plan to “blot out from the earth humankind whom I created—humans together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.” I take some strange comfort in the Izhbitzer Rebbe’s cosmological expression of the idea that past ruination continues to mold our collective existence, which might suggest a way of understanding annihilated worlds not as the collateral damage of redemption but as precious life to which we must hold ourselves accountable. And so this year, when I hear the first verses of Breishit being chanted, as Israel’s razing of Gaza and Lebanon continues, I will think not only of all the other years prior to this one, but also of all the worlds we’ve lost. I will pray that the cries left behind by the innumerable obliterated universes will inform the new world we must make—that these screams and groans will not fade away, but will guide our efforts to destroy the world that made such destruction possible.