Rabbi Janine's Messages

Dear Community,

When did God create light? According to the Torah, the answer may not be as simple as it seems.

In Genesis (Bereisheet), the very first act of creation is light:

God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

Day One. 

But then, after a few more days of creating the world, on the fourth day we read:

God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for the set times—the days and the years;

and they shall serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth.” And it was so.

God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night, and the stars.

And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth,
to dominate the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.

It would seem that God made light which was separate from the dark (Day One). Then on Day Four God made the lights in the sky, including the stars and the moon. That would be the peshat, the simple or literal interpretation. But what fun would it be to stop at the simple interpretation? This is where the rabbis like to create a d’rash or a teaching. So much of what we know about Judaism comes from the imaginations of the rabbis who take Torah and, using Hebrew word play or metaphor or just creative leaps, make meaning from the text. 

There’s a kabbalistic teaching about the different days when light was created. The teaching goes that the light from the first day of creation was so powerful God had to store it away. This means that the light we know is actually the light from the fourth day of creation. We’ve never even seen the full power of the light from the first day. 

Where did God store away the first light? Our teaching explains that God stored it away to be used for Olam Habah, the world to come. Olam Habah is a messianic concept of a perfect world.

Even though the World to Come isn't here (yet), Shabbat is so holy that it is considered "a taste of Olam Habah." According to our d’rash, Shabbat is a time when some of that powerful, holy light from the first day of creation is pulled from it's hiding place and brought toward us. We can attract this holy light towards us when we light our Shabbat candles bringing the light of Shabbat into our homes. 

May this Shabbat be filled with light. 

Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Janine Jankovitz