b-r-a — to create
ב.ר.א (bara) is the verb of Genesis 1:1 — creation by God, never by a craftsman. It does not mean "to choose"; that is a different root that looks similar in transliteration.
The word family
Every word below is built on ב.ר.א. Same three letters, different vowels and prefixes.
In the Hebrew Bible the subject of this verb is always God. A carpenter makes; only God bara.
From בָּרִיא (bari), "healthy, sound" — a second sense of the same letters, meaning well-formed rather than made from nothing.
In the text
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ
B'reshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim v'et ha-aretz
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֹשֶׁךְ
yotzer or u-vore choshech
Forming light and creating darkness.
Roots this gets confused with
These look close in transliteration and are not close in Hebrew.
This is the actual root for "choose". Transliterated loosely as "bahar", it looks one letter off from "bara" in English — but the ח is a throat consonant that never appears in ב.ר.א.
Means to sift, sort out, make clear. Shares the first two letters with ב.ר.א and gets folded into it by weak dictionaries.
What I tell students about this root
If a lookup tool told you bara means "choose", it collapsed three roots that only resemble each other once you strip the Hebrew letters away. In Hebrew they are not close: bara is ב-ר-א, "choose" is ב-ח-ר, and "select, sift, clarify" is ב-ר-ר. Different middle letter, different meaning, different verb entirely. The instinct behind the question is a good one though — Genesis 1:1 really is making a claim by choosing this verb over יָצַר (formed) or עָשָׂה (made), both of which the same chapter uses a few verses later. The claim is not that God chose the world. It is that this making has no raw material and no human parallel.