Light of Genesis
With a beginning, God created
heaven and earth. The earth was without form and empty, with darkness
on the face of the depths, but God's spirit moved on the water's
surface. God said, There shall be light,
and lightness became
manifest. God saw that the lightness was good and God divided between
the lightness and the darkness. God named the lightness Day and the
darkness he named night. It was evening and it was morning, one day.
(Genesis 1:1-5.)
The verb describing the action of creation is ברא, a creation out of nothing. Rabbi Hirsch explains that ברא
means bringing something into reality which hitherto had only existed inwardly in the mind. It is creating something purely out of one's mind and will and out of nothing else.
Ibn Ezra provides an additional dimension to this explanation. He says that
The meaning of ברא is to cut or set a boundary. The intelligent person will understand what I am alluding to.
Create, as used in this first verse of Genesis, means that God set a boundary, a limit, and contracted himself, His Light, to within this limit thereby making possible the manifestation of something whose consciousness can be directed to independent existence. In this way, that consciousness would not be absorbed and nullified in its Source.
The first aspect of this contraction creation was heaven and earth: heaven referring to the spiritual dimension of existence, soul, and earth referring to the physical dimension of existence, time and space. The earth aspect of creation was without form and empty. This means everything was mixed up and had no purpose. The moment anything is in a way that is not fully connected to God, it is mixed up. It has no Holy purpose. That which is mixed up is dark. God's bringing into existence darkness is what is known in cosmology as the big bang. From this we learn that God created darkness. This darkness is known in the writings of the sages as fire, a primordial fire, (Nachmanides, Rambam) and associated with the Sefirah Gevurah, Strength. As a light it is hidden.
God's spirit moving refers to the exponential expansion phase
immediately after the big bang. Water means in a fluid plasma. Then God
gave a purpose, a form, to that darkness which was made to become
manifest. There was an awakening. This is what
There shall be light
accomplished. Existentially, purpose can
only exist in a context that contains non-purpose. For purpose is form
that arises out of from that which is mixed up. God distinguished between
that whose function was purpose and that whose function was non-purpose.
Purpose was good. God divided between purpose, which is lightness, and
that which is mixed up, which is darkness. God named the lightness day
and the darkness he named night. The day begins with darkness and ends
in lightness. The fabric is One functioning unit.
Consistent with the Torah's description that the earth aspect of creation was without form and, therefore, dark, we read in Isaiah
[I am the One who] forms lightness and creates darkness. (Isaiah 45:7)Isaiah is telling us that the darkness was created and the light was formed.
This is echoed in Job
He reveals deep mysteries from the darkness, and brings the deep darkness out into the light. (Job 12:22)
Rabbeinu Bachya explains that the directive Let there be light means that
the previously hidden light became manifest. The fact that the Torah did not report(Torah Commentary by Rabbi Bachya Ben Asher, Vol 1, p 21.)so it came to beis a hint that the light was not something new, [and therefore formed not created] the only thing new was its visibility.
This motivates us to explore the key word God creates against the key word darkness and the key word God forms against the key word lightness. Using our standard protocol, the probability that a text from the ELS random placement text population would produce as compact combined results as we observed from the Torah text for these two pairs is 45.5/1,000.
