Ask someone to quote the opening of the Bible, and chances are the words that come to mind are among the most famous ever written: “Let there be light.”
But that is not where Creation begins.
Before the light, the Torah gives us a very different picture: “The earth was chaos and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of G-d hovered over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). Only afterward does G-d say, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3).
If G-d can summon light with a word, why begin with darkness? Why does the Bible’s first description of the world give us chaos, emptiness and an abyss?
The opening verses describe the creation of the universe. But Jewish tradition also hears something deeply human in them. The story of how G-d creates a world can teach us something about what happens when our own world seems to come apart.
Most of us know something about tohu va-vohu—“chaos and void.”
A plan collapses. A relationship changes. Something we counted on disappears, and suddenly the landscape of our life no longer looks familiar.
Our instinct is to call such moments endings.
Genesis asks us to look again.
There is a detail in the second verse easily missed because the darkness gets all the attention. Before G-d says a word about light, while the world is still chaotic and empty, “the spirit of G-d hovered over the face of the waters.”
G-d does not arrive when the light appears.
He is already there in the darkness.
When life becomes confused, we can interpret our inability to see G-d’s purpose as evidence that there is no purpose to see. We assume that because we cannot see what comes next, nothing is taking shape.
But darkness tells us only that we cannot see.
It does not tell us that G-d is absent.
Here Chassidic teaching takes us deeper. The Baal Shem Tov taught that Creation is not merely something G-d did long ago. At every moment, G-d continues to sustain the world and bring it into being. Genesis therefore describes not only what happened then, but something about what G-d is doing now.
First there is darkness. G-d is already present within it. Then comes light.
The ancient rabbis taught that the first light of Creation was more than ordinary illumination. They spoke of a primordial “Hidden Light,” associated with a deeper kind of seeing—the ability to perceive beyond what is immediately visible.
That gives “Let there be light” another dimension.
Sometimes the light we need is not the removal of everything painful or uncertain. The diagnosis may not change. The person we miss may not return. A question may remain unanswered.
Light can also mean discovering that darkness was never the same thing as abandonment.
This is not a promise that every painful experience will reveal its purpose. Torah asks something more difficult: not to mistake what we can see at this moment for everything G-d is doing.
We encounter a fragment of life and call it chaos.
G-d may still be creating.
Before Abraham, before Moses, before nearly everything we associate with the Bible, G-d teaches us how to stand before a world we cannot yet understand.
The darkness is real.
So is the hovering presence of G-d.
And then comes light.
We tend to call chaos an ending because we cannot yet see what comes next.
The Torah has another word for it.
Beginning.
I wish you a good week and Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yonatan Hambourger
y@TasteofTorah.org
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