Davar Torah: Parshas Breishis (Genesis)

I'm going to paint you a picture of what there was before creation.

It was all God. Just God. Him and His goodness.

He lived alone with all His good, and had no one to give His good to.

So He created us little humans to give us His good.

Then He began with the whole, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth."

And later gave the Torah to the Jewish people as a gift. And through the Torah we are able to understand the reality of the world around us. Just like how God created a world where math has laws, science has laws, and physics has laws, He created a world that has spiritual laws. Lets try and understand one of his spiritual laws from the Torah...

Regarding the process of creation, he writes:

"And GOD said, 'Let there be LIGHT (אור).'

And there was LIGHT (אור)."

Whatever God wants, God gets. God wanted light, so He got light.

Then,

"GOD saw that the LIGHT (אור) was GOOD (טוב),

and split between the LIGHT (אור) and the DARKNESS (חשך)."

So now we have GOD, LIGHT, GOOD and DARKNESS.

What do we know about GOD?

He spoke light into existence. Words are powerful.

He also saw the light. God sees.

What do we know about LIGHT?

Light is a spectrum. Too much light, and you go blind. Medium light, and it's justtt right. Little light, and you can't see anything. Take away light completely and you have DARK.

He also saw that the light was GOOD,

so I'm going to assume that the absence of light is NOT SO GOOD.

Lets do some basic math to understand the picture being painted:

LIGHT = GOOD

and

DARKNESS = NOT SO GOOD

Written next in the Torah is:

"God called the LIGHT DAY (יום) and the DARKNESS he called NIGHT (לילה)."

Now:

LIGHT = DAY

and

DARKNESS = NIGHT

Which makes sense. It's light during the daytime and it's dark during the nighttime. Pashut.

Now lets do a simple math formula, if a = b and b = c, then a = c

We can conclude:

if GOOD =  LIGHT and LIGHT = DAY then

GOOD = DAY

and

if NOT SO GOOD = DARKNESS and DARKNESS = NIGHT then

NOT SO GOOD = NIGHT

But how does this make sense? I love night time. Sometimes I eat ice cream at night. Night seems pretty good! And sometimes during the day I have to do things I don't always feel like doing. That doesn't feel go good.

Lets keep reading....

"And there was EVENING (ערב), and then there was MORNING (בקר): DAY (יום) ONE (אחד)."

Still confused. I'm trying to paint a picture in my head, but it's very ethereal and not grounded. Life as a jew is all about bringing the spiritual down into the physical world. We love lofty things, but they don't do us any good if they're stuck floating around up there while we are living down here on Earth!

Lets turn to our rabbis of yesterday who live on today through their writings.

One of our most famous commentators of the 5 books of Moses is: The Ramban.

On the sentence were stuck at:

"And there was EVENING (ערב) and the there was MORNING (בקר): DAY (יום) ONE (אחד)."

He comments:

The beginning of the NIGHT is called EVENING (ערב) because shapes get MIXED UP (שיתערבו) in it, and the beginning of the DAY is called MORNING (בקר) because a person can DISTINGUISH (שיבקר) between them (the shapes).

Here's a side note: Hebrew is integral to understanding this on a deeper level. It's the only language created by God. Because of this, there are spiritual truths encoded within the words. Note how the word for EVENING has the same root word as MIXED UP. This is because in the evening the outline of all objects start to get mixed up with everything else. If you drop pencil outside at night on a field, it's way hard to find it than if you were to drop it in that same spot in the morning. And the word for MORNING has the same root word as DISTINGUISH. This is because in the morning an object becomes distinguishable.

The word morning literally means to distinguish and the word evening literally means mixed up.

So now Ramban just taught us 4 new things!

1) The beginning of the NIGHT is called EVENING

2) In the EVENING shapes get MIXED UP

3) The beginning of the DAY is called MORNING

4) In the MORNING things are DISTINGUISHABLE

With this info, we just discovered:

NIGHT = EVENING and EVENING = MIXED UP

DAY = MORNING and MORNING = DISTINGUISHABLE

Lets do the formula again: if a = b and b = c then a = c,

if NIGHT = EVENING and EVENING = MIXED UP then

NIGHT = MIXED UP

and

if DAY = MORNING and MORNING = DISTINGUISHABLE then

DAY =DISTINGUISHABLE

So now we know from the Torah that:

GOOD = DAY and

NOT SO GOOD = NIGHT

and from the Ramban:

DAY =DISTINGUISHABLE and

NIGHT = MIXED UP

If we combine these two ideas we get something incredible.

Lets do the formula:

if GOOD = DAY and DAY =DISTINGUISHABLE then

GOOD = DISTINGUISHABLE

and

if NOT SO GOOD = NIGHT and NIGHT = MIXED UP then

NOT SO GOOD = MIXED UP

Wow.

Spiritual truth # 1 that we learn from the Torah is:

Things are GOOD when we can DISTINGUISH them,

or in other words when they are CLEAR.

Things are NOT SO GOOD when they are all MIXED UP,

or in other words when they are NOT CLEAR.

When I have a CLEAR purpose, a CLEAR goal, a CLEAR mission, I KNOW exactly what I'm living for:

That's GOOD

If my goals are NOT SO CLEAR, if I'm CONFUSED with what's left and with what's right, when I'm in a state of I DON'T KNOW:

That's NOT SO GOOD

This reminds me of when I used to lead outdoor camping trips. Most of the time things were GOOD. We arrived at our campsite 2-3 hours before sundown while it was still DAY. We would set up our tents, chill, hop in the lake, make dinner, clean up dinner, make a campfire as the sun sets, laugh, sing, dance, tell stories, then go to bed. Geshmak.

But sometimes things didn't go as planned.

One time I lead 13 ten year olds on a 3 day river paddling trip. No matter how hard I tried to teach them, they could not figure out how to paddle! It took us so long to get to our campsite that when we got there it was already starting to get DARK. We all still had to set up tents, make dinner, eat dinner, and clean up dinner, all the while it was NIGHT. The darkness of the EVENING caused everything to get all MIXED UP. By then all the bugs had come out and were swarming us, kids were crying, I had to run off and console them. It was difficult because we could barely see, things were NOT SO CLEAR. Things were NOT SO GOOD.

So now, from the Torah with help of Ramban we have CLARITY on definitions, which is GOOD.

But I want to take it further.

Lets connect this idea with our national mantra as the Jewish people:

Shema Yisrael.

These are the sentences we just learned:

"And God said, 'Let there be LIGHT (אור).' And there was LIGHT (אור). God saw that the LIGHT (אור) was GOOD (טוב), and split between the LIGHT (אור) and the DARKNESS (חשך). God called the LIGHT DAY (יום) and the DARKNESS he called NIGHT (לילה). And there was EVENING (ערב) and the there was MORNING (בקר): DAY (יום) ONE (אחד)."

I find it interesting that the Torah repeats the word DAY.

We already know DAY = LIGHT  =MORNIG = DISTINGUISHABLE = GOOD = CLEAR

But now the Torah is saying that all of these events:

1) God speaking light into existence, 2) seeing that the light was good, 3) differentiating it from darkness, 4) calling light day and darkness night, 5) having evening then having morning.

Happened during DAY.

And these events contain:

DARK = NIGHT = EVENING = MIXED UP = NOT SO GOOD = UNCLEAR

Which gives us a new equation that:

DAY = DARK = NIGHT = EVENING = MIXED UP = NOT SO GOOD = UNCLEAR

This doesn't seem to make sense,

Lets think about DAY a little more. What do I know about DAY?

One DAY lasts 24 hours, which is comprised of two parts: The NIGHT and the DAY.

So now we have:

NIGHT = DAY

Now the math we tried earlier works!

DAY = NIGHT = DARK = EVENING = MIXED UP = NOT SO GOOD = UNCLEAR

But if that's true then this also has to be true:

LIGHT  =MORNIG = DISTINGUISHABLE = GOOD = CLEAR = DARK = NIGHT = EVENING = MIXED UP = NOT SO GOOD = UNCLEAR

Every word is now equal to its opposite! It's a paradox. It doesn't make sense.

This is CONFUSION, and NOT SO GOOD because it's NOT SO CLEAR.

The answer is found in the last word of our paragraph:

"And God said, 'Let there be LIGHT (אור).' And there was LIGHT (אור). God saw that the LIGHT (אור) was GOOD (טוב), and split between the LIGHT (אור) and the DARKNESS (חשך). God called the LIGHT DAY (יום) and the DARKNESS he called NIGHT (לילה). And there was EVENING (ערב) and the there was MORNING (בקר): DAY (יום) ONE (אחד)."

The Torah tells us DAY is ONE.

DAY = ONE

There's another thing that we say is ONE:

GOD

We say this in the Shema:

Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad

Which translates to:

Hear O Israel, Hashem is Our God, Hashem is ONE.

When we say Shema we recognize that GOD is ONE meaning,

Everything that happens to us throughout the span of a 24 hour day, comes from GOD.

Maybe some part of the day is DARK, it's are UNCLEAR, we are CONFUSED, it seems NOT SO GOOD. But even when it's NIGHT out, we have a mitzvah to recite the SHEMA.

The Shema is a statement of our CLARITY that GOD gave us a DAY that includes NIGHT.

So now it all makes sense:

ONE = DAY = LIGHT  =MORNIG = DISTINGUISHABLE = GOOD = CLEAR = DARK = NIGHT = EVENING = MIXED UP = NOT SO GOOD = UNCLEAR

It's all ONE, it's all from GOD.

When we recite Shema, we fulfill our mission as the Jewish people in this world.

We choose to recognize GOD.

We choose to see everything as ultimate GOOD.

Sometimes we say:

"Hashem I don't know why you did this"

"Hashem my tiny human mind is so confused about how this is good, because all I see is the not so good."

It's in these moments we need CLARITY in ONE thing:

All DARK is just hidden LIGHT waiting to be revealed through the recitation of the Shema.

שמע ישראל י–ה–ו–ה אלקינו י–ה–ו–ה אחד