Dick Goldberg's Davar Torah - Bereshit

Let There Be Light

Shabbat 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?

Parshat Bereshit - by Rabbi Ellen Bernstein - 2023/5784

Bereshit, Genesis I, by Rabbi Ellen Bernstein www.ellenbernstein.org

Friends,

I want to apologize first for not giving a d’var related to the tragedy in the Middle East. Bereshit comes around just once a year and I’ve been waiting 2 years to give this d’var, since the slot was already taken last year. However, wrapped up in this d’var—but perhaps not so explicit—is the resilience of the natural world, so I hope that in this time of great sorrow, she can whisper some measure of comfort to you.

My decision to take Judaism seriously and my entire career in the field of religion and ecology is a result of my first encounter with Genesis 1 as a young adult. In college in the 70’s, I studied in one of the first environmental studies programs in the US at Berkeley. Science seemed like only part of an answer to our environmental crisis, so I also embarked on a spiritual search that led me to studying the parsha with a friend; Having no prior relationship with the text, I was stunned to find such an elegant environmental manifesto in this very first chapter of the Bible.

In case you have never studied this chapter before—a brief overview. God creates light on the first day, divides up air and water on the second; earth and trees appear on the third, stars and planets on the 4th, swimmers and flyers on the 5th, land animals and people on the 6th ; and on the 7th, God rested, creating Shabbat. In an elegant design the habitats/elements of air and water on day 2 and earth on day 3, give rise to their inhabitants--the air creatures and water creatures on day 5, and land creatures on day 6. If you plot out the creations of the days, you will see this simple and orderly design.

Goodness

Significantly, God sees everything that comes into being as “good.” In Genesis 1, the goodness of the biodiverse world is the pre-eminent value. Each creature is inherently valuable—each has value in and of itself—whether or not we humans deem it useful or valuable. The rabbi, philosopher, physician Maimonides, writing in the twelfth century, said that the goodness of all the creatures is a testament to their intrinsic value. Each organism has integrity, each contributes to the whole and is required for the whole. The world is built on the foundation of the goodness of the creatures, without which it could not exist.

This alone is a fundamental ecological idea, but there are several more that permeate the text.

The centrality/agency/meaning of Earth: Eretz

Go to Gen I.11; The idea that the Earth is alive in some way—is a second fundamental ecological idea in Genesis 1. Many environmentalists argue that our environmental problems are rooted in our haphazard treatment of the earth. Since we don’t regard the earth as alive or life giving, we can innocently exploit and pollute her with no thought of the damage we may be inflicting or the consequences of our lifestyles. The scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulies understood earth as a self-regulating living system and called this idea the Gaia hypothesis—after the Greek goddess of earth, Gaia, mother of all life. This was considered a radical idea in its time about 50 years ago. And yet Genesis I portrays the earth as the mother of life, generating life, centuries before Lovelock, but most of us don’t recognize the aliveness of earth in the Bible, just like we don’t recognize the aliveness of earth beneath our feet. The construction of the Hebrew in verse 1:11 points to her lifegiving nature. On the third day, the text proclaims, “Let the earth bring forth vegetation.” The earth here has agency; she partners with God in the “bringing forth.” The earth has the ability to grow the creatures that will inhabit her. She is prolific. She is alive. We see this unusual construction again on the sixth day when the earth partners with God to bring forth animals. The 12th century rabbinic commentator Nachmanides recognized the aliveness of the earth, stating that the very word for earth, eretz, suggests a force that causes growth.

Its worth noting as well that the word eretz occurs 10 times in the creation story—a kind of magic number—again highlighting her significance.

Sustainability

Third, the ecological idea of sustainability or flourishing appears over and over throughout Genesis 1. Sustainability is communicated in several ways—first, through the attention to seeds, or zera, given on the 3rd day in Genesis 1:11-12. Most people familiar with the creation story will tell you the third day is all about the trees and vegetation, and while all this green growth is incredibly significant, what is actually emphasized on day 3 is the word zera or seed. Zera, in various forms, is repeated 6 times in these 2 verses, telling us to pay attention; seeds are significant. The plants will seed seeds and fruit trees will make fruit with seeds in them. Seeds are, after all, the way that life is able to sustain and diversify itself from one generation to the next; This is what the biblical author seems most eager to convey on the 3rd day.

Sustainability is also communicated through the phrase “after its kind” used repeatedly throughout Genesis 1 after almost every creature is created, pointing again to the biblical regard that life must be able to perpetuate itself.

The concept of blessing is another way in which the sustainability—the perpetuation of the species line—is articulated in Genesis 1. Most people assume that the Torah’s first blessing was given to humans—but in fact it is given to the fish and the birds. Take a look at verse 1:22 . God blesses the flyers and swimmers with the ability to be fruitful and multiply.

With so many references the idea of living beings reproducing themselves, it’s clear that the biblical author was concerned—perhaps first and foremost—with the perpetuation of life on earth. The first creation story concludes with Genesis 2:3, and those of you who are facile with the Hebrew should be able to find a clue that this whole story ends with yet another declaration of the significance of sustainably. We can come back to this later if we have time.

Very Goodness=Kol

One more ecological idea that I want to mention today comes at the conclusion of the 6th day. While on all other days, God sees each creation as good, on the sixth day, God makes a proclamation that God’s creation is “very good,” tov maod. Without looking at the text, what category of creation do you imagine is called “very good”—or lets’ say, what would most people who have not studied the text say?

Verse I:31 clearly declares: And God saw everything –kol—that God had made and behold it was very good. Each individual creation was called good and now all the creatures, everything altogether is deemed “very good.” The repetition of the two-letter word kol or everything seven times in verses 29 and 30 evinces the importance of all the creatures, all together. There is a sense of indivisibility of all the creatures involved as one living breathing whole. Every organism is bound up in the life of every other organism.

Commentators and many readers of the text have long presumed that the designation of “very goodness” on the sixth day referred to the human creatures who were created on this day. They assumed that humanity was the crown of creation, and that the creation was established solely for people to use for their own benefit. Such an assumption leads to a utilitarian and anthropocentric stance towards the world. Curiously, human creatures, unlike all the other animals, do not receive the designation of “tov.” From the beginning, the biblical author was circumspect about humanity. Indeed, the midrash teaches that God consulted with the angels to determine whether or not to even create human beings. (Bereshit Rabbah 8:8).

There’s more I can say about Genesis 1’s ecological vocabulary (I wrote a whole book on it 20 years ago: The Splendor of Creation) but I want to make sure to leave plenty of time for a discussion of humanity’s role Genesis 1:28. Perhaps—if you are familiar with the text, you will recall that when humanity was created—last after all the rest—God gives them mastery over the earth and dominion over the other creatures. Read Gen 1:28.

In 1969, the historian Lynn White wrote a famous article in Science Magazine, “The Historical Root of the Ecologic Crisis,” blaming the Bible and the Judao-Christian tradition for our environmental crisis: He claimed that God’s giving humanity dominion meant that God gave humanity a mandate to dominate and exploit nature. This has become a very common reading in liberal and environmentalist circles, including among environmentalist rabbis.

For example: The esteemed Israeli soil scientist and irrigation expert, Daniel Hillel, (author of The Natural History of the Bible and many other books) referring to Genesis I:28 wrote, “His [the human’s] manifest destiny is to be an omnipotent master over nature, which from the outset, was created for his gratification. He is endowed with the power and right to dominate the creatures toward whom he has no obligation.”

There are legitimate reasons that so many people are suspicious of Genesis 1.28. The idea of dominion as domination has endured a long and dark history that has led to terrible suffering and disastrous consequences. The verse was appropriated by the pope in 1493 to justify the Doctrine of Discovery and legitimize the confiscation of native lands everywhere. Tragically, this ideology persists.

Lynn White’s assumption that the Bible—and the idea of dominion—was responsible for the environmental crisis had a profound effect on a whole generation of environmentalists and their students and it had a profound effect on me. It caused me to question how Judaism understood our relationship with the natural world. Yet once I began studying the parasha with a friend, I realized pretty quickly that those who argue that dominion means domination take the verse out of context, paying no attention to the verses that precede or follow this one. Many of them are biased against the Bible to begin with.

If you read the context of this chapter, as we have been doing, you might ask, as the farmer poet Wendell Berry did, “Why would God want to give humanity a mandate to exploit nature after God worked so intentionally to create such a beautiful world”— a world that could sustain itself on its own in perpetuity, without any interference from people?

The Bible itself hints that dominion is not given to people arbitrarily. It appears that dominion is conditional as it certainly is later in the Bible. Dominion is given and can be taken away. The Hebrew word for dominion, RDH, points to this conditionality. Since Hebrew words are built on a system of three-letter roots, and one root can lend itself to multiple meanings, sometimes even a word and its opposite share the same three-letter root.

In certain grammatical forms (in the imperative form and the plural imperfect for 2nd and 3rd person) RDH looks exactly like another Hebrew word, YRD “to go down.” When RDH appears in one of these ambiguous forms as it does in Genesis 1:26, you must determine the word’s meaning by its context. Rashi, the foremost medieval rabbinic commentator, points out the wordplay inherent in this 3-letter root and explains that if we consciously embody God’s image, if we stand up-right and rule responsibly with wisdom and compassion, we will RDH, have dominion over, the creatures, insuring a world of harmony; but if we are deny our responsibility to the creation and thoughtlessly take advantage of our position and the creation, we will YRD, go down below the other creatures and bring ruin to ourselves and the world.[1] If we upend the blessing to further selfish goals, the blessing becomes a curse. If dominion becomes domination, then we are no longer worthy of the role we have been bestowed. We lose our kinship with God, and we lose our kinship with earth.

Significantly dominion is bestowed as part of a two-fold blessing or bracha. The word bracha in Hebrew is related to the word beracha, a pond of water. A blessing is enlivening and regenerative, like an oasis in the desert. The blessing in verse 1:28 is for both fruitfulness and dominion. It lays the foundation for the two basic necessities of life. Fruitfulness promises generativity of the body and dominion—through the human creature’s benevolent rule—promises generativity of the earth and its creatures. Barrenness of body and barrenness of land (famine) would be the greatest threats to the Israelite people, while fruitfulness in both would be the greatest gift. The two-fold blessing for fertility and land reverberates through the Torah in the promise that God makes to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the Israelites.

Notably the verses that follows add further context to the meaning of dominion. Immediately after God grants dominion to the human creature, God assigns the seed plants for food for the humans, and the leafy greens for the animals. Dominion, then, ensures that not just people, but that animals too, can eat and thrive. Notably, dominion over the animals does not include the right to eat them.

Some of the rabbinic sages, read dominion allegorically and suggested that people must have dominion over their own desires, and master the tendency towards gluttony. Dominion over the earth first requires dominion over our selves. Seventy years ago, the great environmentalist Rachel Carson eloquently wrote "We, in this generation, must come to terms with nature. We're challenged as [hu]mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."

There’s much more to say about all of this and I’m happy to refer you to resources if you are interested.

I want to conclude by saying that I always had this idea that Genesis I is an overture to the whole bible. You know the book, “Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten,” That’s how I feel about Genesis I.

I always intuited that if Genesis 1 offered such a profound ecology, that these ideas must—like invisible mycelia--undergird the whole Torah, but I had never heard any Jews talk about a creation theology before—Creation theology isn’t even a thing in the Jewish world. If anything, the very language of creation is off-putting to most people I know. Mentioning creation theology in certain circles, and people assume you are a fundamentalist. There are many reasons that these ideas haven’t found their way into contemporary Jewish thought, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Questions for discussion:

Are there certain ideas in Torah that you recognized as an adult that have caused you to change your mind about something? In other words, have you had an insight from the Torah as an adult that caused you to change your mind and your behaviors?

Is there a time when you changed your mind to take a new position on something? Want caused you to change your mind?

How are you influenced by ideas? In what way do they affect your life?








































[1] Rashi, Commentary on Genesis I:26