Let There Be LightShabbat shalom. I am Dick Goldberg— and I have a suggestion for you.
If you are considering offering a d’var here at minyan Dorshei Derekh, sign up well in advance.
Not just because Rabbi Debrah Cohen, who manages the list of darshanim, would appreciate that but also...
Because it can mean, as it happened with me in connection with this d’var, you really get to mull.
You know, we often think of mulling as making things thick or cloudy— as in mulled cider or wine.
I’m talking about mulling that leads to clarity. Hold on to that: clarity.
Indeed, once I signed up to talk about B’reishit, I found myself awash in ideas about “In the beginning.”
How important beginnings are.
How exciting they can be. The day you are born. Which is to say, the day the whole world is born for you. Your first word. Your first step.
Think of all the promise inherent in those beginnings.
But beginnings can also be frightening. Your first day of school, your first day of a new job, the wedding night.
How the seeds that will grow into the full blossom can be there— there at the beginning.
I thought about the parshah on long walks, in the shower—I do my best thinking in water—pools, tubs, lakes and oceans, that sort of thing.
I thought about the parshah during our services—yes, while others are talking or praying.
When I rose up and when I lay down.
And then it came to me... I didn’t want to talk about “iIn the beginning.” I didn’t want to talk about the first thing God did—create heaven and earth.
I wanted to talk about what came next: “Let there be light.”
That I think is the primary advantage of mulling—reflection— it has the potential to get you where you need to go.
A process in which you fire up the synapses in your brain, shed some internal light on what you have within, and get not necessarily where you thought you would end up.
A process that is infused not only with creativity but also with light, and which led me to...
“Let there be light.” As I said earlier, clarity.
Think about it. When God began to create heaven and earth— the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep—let’s stop there.
Unformed, void, darkness, deep, I think you could say both impossibly frightening and unfathomable.
I can just imagine God—surveying so much dark nothingness — saying to themself, “Geeze, Louise, what am I going to do about this?”
Sit here and mope? Curse the darkness? Give up on this whole enterprise?
No, instead, they said, “Let there be light.”
Never mind, why was God talking to themself—and no, I don’t buy that they were talking to angels as some would have it.
No. I think God looked at the situation to the extent that they could see in all that darkness and recognized this as a problem. A big one.
And what does God—or the magnificence of the universe—which is how I view god—do? What do they do to fill in that emptiness?
Call forth light... enabling vision.
Create light... which fosters the aforementioned clarity.
Give us light... which is the difference between night and day.
Devise light... that reveals magnificence—magnificence— which not only is my word for:
1. What God is— but also
2. The process God undertakes for the next week and ever after, as well as
3. What God calls into being:
The magnificence of the separation of the waters,
The magnificence of the creation of the sky, the magnificence of the gathering of land, vegetation, fruit, the advent of time, the sun and the stars, humanity—magnificence indeed (actually, I’m not so sure about humanity).
I like the way our own Rabbi Sheila Weinberg captures this magnificence in a passage we recite almost every Shabbat:
“Who are holy beings?
They are beloved, clear of mind, and courageous.
Their will and God’s are one.
Raising their voices in constant gratitude, they marvel at every detail of life.
Granting each other loving permission to be exactly who they are.
When we listen for their sweet voices, we can hear the echo within our own souls....”
Isn’t that delicious?
I can just see God after creating the world and all that dwells within, well, beaming with... De-light. Pun intended.
Consider: where would be without light?
Unable to see for those of us fortunate enough to be sighted —unable to see and fully appreciate the magnificence.
But—and this is even more important, without the internal light—the light within...
Lost. Unenlightened—as in uneducated and unevolved.
Sad. With a permanent case of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Morose.
---
Part two. Another key aspect of my exploration of the parshah usually is to see whether I have a personal connection to it.
If I’m going to speak about it, does it speak—or has it already—spoken to me?
Do I have a personal connection to “Let there be light?”
Oy!
Here it is:
In 1958, when I was 11 and living with my family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, we trekked to Philadelphia for our annual summer visit to see my grandmother and other family here.
We got off the train—yes, the train— at the North Philadelphia Train Station at Broad and Glenwood and eventually made our way to Atlantic City.
To the boardwalk.
Where a very chubby, stage-struck pre-teen boy was taken to see “Dancing Waters” – a sound, water, and light show. Swaying and yes— dancing fountains of water moved to music—probably something shmaltzy like Strauss waltzes— as rainbowed colored lights—lights—kissed the delicate sprays emanating from the stage floor, fly space and wings.
It was gorgeous. It was thrilling. It was kitsch. And I loved it. Every kitschy minute.
So much so that when I returned to Winston-Salem and started trying to figure out how I was going to raise spending money for camp—I went to Camp Blue Star, where a lot of bourgeois Jewish kids in the south went—I decided that I would create my own Dancing Waters show, charge folks to attend, and use the resulting proceeds to buy my stash of sodas, candy bars and comic books.
I decided that in my version of the show I would substitute narration for music.
What should be my text? Genesis! I was planning on inviting the rabbi and figured he’d love it. I was also at that time—age 11—fantasizing about becoming a rabbi, but that’s another story for another time.
Flash forward to opening night.
Our backyard was rigged with hoses connected to spigots.
The hoses snaked this way and that. Y splitters allowed for more hoses. Some were draped over tree limbs, bushes and lawn furniture, ending in sprinklers, nozzles, and sprayers.
I was stationed, seated in my bathing suit, behind a two-foot high plywood barrier so that the audience wouldn’t see the narrator—I would be... A “disembodied voice.”
My bible was on my lap, open to B’reishit—in English-- covered by Saran Wrap to keep the pages from getting wet.
The stage crew took their positions at the aforementioned spigots—my mother at the backyard spigot, my father in the front, my sister at the outdoor light panel.
My sister turned off the patio lights, plunging into darkness the area where the rabbi and other audience members were seated facing the backyard, where I and all my paraphernalia were.
...the audience chatter ceased.
I waited a long dramatic moment then intoned, “In the beginning...” And my mother turned on her spigot. A delicate spray of droplets arose from a perforated hose on the ground.
And as the waters swayed and danced, I continued: “God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
And God said, “Let there be light!”
Another dramatic pause. The proverbial calm before the storm....
“Let there be light” I said again.
The audience’s eagerness to see how light would manifest itself as water was palpable.
“Let there be light” I repeated, a hint of concern creeping into my voice.
And... And... And we all just sat there. Fidgeting. Nervously.
Nada. Not a drop. Nothing.
Then finally my mother yelled, “Milton, let there be light!”
My dad finally heard, turned on his spigot, the water raced through the hose— and the sprinklers dangling above my head came alive, spinning, swirling, and yes, dancing!
My sister flipped on the backyard lights for the full effect.
Showtime!
And in that very moment, I bagged the idea of becoming a rabbi and decided I need to pursue a life in the theatre.
All because of light. And the very dramatic, very unexpected way it had almost not—then manifested itself in my show.
Which is to say, my creation. My beginning.
I’ll leave it to the Freudian and other therapists in the room to sort out the absent, unhearing impotent father; the dominating, powerful mother who comes to the rescue, and the other Oedipal dimensions of the story.
The point for me was that the manifestation of light—preceded by a grace note of anxiety-ridden inaction— was climactic, transformative, and life-changing....
"But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? / it is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” Light is love.
"How far that little candle throws his beams!/ So shines a good deed in a naughty world” says Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Light is goodness.
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness,” said Desmond Tutu. Light is hope.
“I will hold you in the light,” say our Quaker friends. In your time of need, I will call God's love, wisdom, and peace to surround you. Light is empowering, nurturing, and wonderfully, wonderfully good.
We get that from our tradition too—that wonderful connection between light and goodness. What does it say after each of their creations? “And God saw that it was good.”
And once all is complete, what does God say? “It is very good.” When you have many things, each saying a variation of the same essence in its own way, and they’re all in harmony, then it’s beautiful, very good. The ultimate light.
The biblical scholar and noted translator rabbi Nachum Sarna—who several of us in this room encountered at Brandeis— wrote that “light banishes the ancient pagan notion of inherent, primordial evil, a cosmos built on a mythological brew of fates and evil forces. In the biblical view, creation” he said, “is infused with divine goodness.”
The Lubavitcher rebbe— Menachem Mendel Schneerson — goes one step further, proposing that God means both light and darkness have the potential for goodness. “All the world — even the darkness — should become a source of light and wisdom,” He said.
In our tradition, rather than the physical light from celestial bodies, the initial light on the first day is seen as the fundamental energy from which all matter and energy—including the later-created sun, moon, and stars—would form. The force that in my lexicon is itself God.
You might also think of light as fairy or pixie dust— the magical, glittering substance used by Tinker Bell to achieve flight for herself and Peter and Wendy. Because indeed, light is also magic.
This light that God calls forth is primordial light, incredibly powerful, universe-filling light. And what does our tradition call on us to do?
Sit there and enjoy the show?
No, bring more light into the world by performing mitzvot.
Indeed, we are commanded to do that. The word "mitzvah" comes from the root "Tzav," meaning "to command".
Rashi, in his commentary on the Talmud says that “Without light, there can be no peace.” Light also enables peace.
Indeed, the creation of light, as part of the creation of the world, in our tradition, is considered to be a continuous process, renewed daily.
Every day god bestows light on the world and its inhabitants.
It’s there. A truly renewable source of energy. And we certainly need as much light as we can get in these dark times, no?
Light. Not kings.
But what do we do with that light? That is the question....
What do we do with that light?
Indeed, that’s the last of the three I’d like you to discuss:
The first two being:
What is light to you?
Then... Where do you need more light?
And then...
What are you doing with yours?
1. What is light to you?
2. Where do you need more?
3. What are you doing with yours?
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