7. The Biblical story of Creation expresses the perfect harmony between God’s purpose and His work in the words, “And behold, it was good” spoken at the end of each day’s Creation, and “behold, it was very good” at the completion of the whole. A world created by God must serve the highest good, while, on the contrary, a world without God would prove to be “the worst of all possible worlds,” as Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, quite correctly concludes from his premises. The world-view of Judaism, which regards the entire economy of life as the realization of the all-encompassing plan of an all-wise Creator, is accordingly an energizing optimism, or, more precisely, meliorism. This view is voiced by the rabbis in many significant utterances, such as the maxim of R. Akiba, “Whatsoever the Merciful One does, is for the good,”(427) or that of his teacher, Nahum of Gimzo, “This, too, is for the good.”(428) His disciple, R. Meir, inferred from the Biblical verse, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good,” that “death, too, is good.”(429) Others considered that suffering and even sin are included in this verse, because every apparent evil is necessary that we may struggle and overcome it for the final victory of the good.(430) As an ancient Midrash says: “God is called a God of faith and faithfulness, because it was His faith in the world that caused Him to bring it into existence.”(431) Chapter XXV. Creation As the Act of God 1. “Thus shall ye say unto them: The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, these shall perish from the earth, and from under the heavens. He that hath made the earth by His power, that hath established the world by His wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by His understanding ... the Lord God is the true God.”(432) With this declaration of war against heathenism, the prophet drew the line, once for all, between the uncreated, transcendent God and the created, perishable universe. It is true that Plato spoke of primordial and eternal matter and Aristotle of an eternally rotating celestial sphere, and that even Biblical exegetes, such as Ibn Ezra,(433) inferred from the Creation story the existence of primeval chaotic matter. Yet, on the whole, the Jewish idea of God has demanded the assumption that even this primitive matter was created by God, or, as most thinkers have phrased it, that God created the world _out of nothing_. This doctrine was voiced as early as the Maccabean period in the appeal made by the heroic mother to the youngest of her seven sons.(434) In the same spirit R. Gamaliel II scornfully rejects the suggestion of a heretic that God used primeval substances already extant in creating the world.(435)