What an abundance this year! Almost any other year, we get just a few days (or less) from Simchat Torah to the Shabbat of Bereisheet. But when things come out as they did this year, we get almost a full week to study it and think about it.
And what an abundance of study guides! We were blessed to hear R’ David Fohrman on consecutive Sunday nights discuss the six days of creation. Then, on Tuesday night, R’ Zvi Grumet, speaking from Yerushalayim via Zoom, echoed or amplified so many of R’ Fohrman’s points. They both emphasized that the Torah is not trying to engage in a discussion at any level of scientific sophistication about the beginning of the universe. Further, they both emphasized the sense of order that this presentation of the six days of creation strives to reveal.
This last point, about order, is central to the Torah’s account. R’ Yaakov Kaminetzky, ztz’l, used to point out that the generations before the Torah was received posited that the structure of a day had the evening following the day. This is the way many people experience a day, and it is not without support in the Torah -- after all, our Davening is structured with the morning as the beginning of the day. I want to present what we can glean from the first chapter of Bereisheet on precisely these points -- morning as a beginning and as end.
R’ Kaminetzky’s observation means that the Torah was presenting a novel approach when it announced that the day in fact followed the night -- Vahee Erev Vahee Boker. But it would be wrong to say that that novel approach uprooted the previous assumption.
For example, our Davening was not changed. The Gemora asserts that Avraham taught us about Shacharit, Yitzchok about Mincha, and Yaakov about Maariv. It learns this from the Davening episodes in their lives, which took place during these periods of the day. Avraham embodies the dawn of Jewish existence, and so his association with Shacharit means that it is first.
Furthermore, our donning of Tefillin in the morning also marks it as the beginning of the day. Of the four Torah quotations contained in Tefillin, two of them feature the sanctification of the first born and the exodus from Egypt. Tefillin are thus about beginnings, and our wearing them strictly by day -- there is a prohibition to wear them at night -- associates them with the primacy of the day. Ideally, we don them even before the sun rises, so that they will herald the dawning of the day. Indeed, because the Exodus was a one-time event, and not everyone gets a chance to handle the sanctification of the firstborn, only Tefillin offers us a daily opportunity to capture this sense of beginning.
So if the day still does in some sense begin in the morning, what does the Torah add in asserting that it also should be seen as beginning at night? The Torah’s sequence holds a crucial lesson about the process of Creation. This is evident in the two words that close each of the six days. “Erev” does not mean “night.” It means twilight, the time when there is a mixture of light and darkness. And Boker does not mean “day.” It means discernment, discrimination, the type of lucidity that morning affords to living things. This is precisely the opposite of the confusion implicit in “Erev.”
What the Torah declares by putting morning after evening is that a Creation “day” is a process of movement from confusion to clarity. This is associated with the six days of Creation because each day represents a process in which Hashem manipulates masses of unformed matter -- He divides, arranges, sculpts, and “calls,” all while judging His process as “good.” By the end of each day, what was unrecognizable is fashioned into the striking order we discern today. Again, the Torah is not trying to “account” for what we see today. The Torah is trying to show the process that we must know: Hashem’s creation not only followed a certain order; Creation was about creating and arranging an order out of chaos. And how do these two paths interact? Clearly, we experience the daytime as the beginning yet the Torah reveals that truly the evening comes first. I submit that now we can understand why the human experience of the day follows a different path. Once Hashem’s Creation presented mankind with an order, it became our job to pick up at precisely the point at which Hashem left off. Hashem presented us with an order, fashioned out of the confusion of the evening, and it was mankind's task to discern that order, to discern the Hand behind that order, and to proceed into the light of day in a way that would embody this understanding of the order. That is what it means to carry the Creation forward, which is our job every day. Only with Avraham did that discovery take place. Following that, his first command from Hashem will be to go, to carry forward, and he will be commanded in Bris Mila to improve on what he was given. Avraham’s model is there for each of us to carry forward each morning.
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