Bereshith and the First Commandment

"I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."

This, the first commandment to Israel is not given in the form of an grammatical imperative. What does this fact say to us?

It is as if one said to his child, “I am your father!” From this the child ought to understand the implied meaning to be, “Believe in me! Obey me!” And from this chosen form of expression the child would be elevated much higher than if it were necessary for the father to say, “Believe in me! Obey me!” directly. For this direct expression would convey an element of rebuke and an implication that the child could not understand its relationship to the father naturally if reminded. This is the situation in the case of the giving of the Torah to Israel with the first commandment. In the case of the creation of the world. It was also not fitting that G-d should immediately command creation to come to be with a direct imperative, which would have had an overtone element of rebuke due to the lack of a gentle, soft form of expression.

Thus it is that just as the first imperative to Israel is, as it were, a hidden imperative, so the first imperative to the world to come to exist out of nothing is, as it were, a hidden imperative: Bereshith... In this form the commandment to heavens and earth to come to be is given like the statement of the fact that G-d created them. This is in the manner of a father saying, as it were in a statement of fact, to his child, "I am your father!" Heaven and earth were to understand themselves to be created from this statement of G-d creating them and being their Creator and obediently come forth and exist through the hearing of this statement.