The First Day

Right at the very start, God made everything: the sky above and the ground under your feet. Nothing here made itself.

Why does a book of mitzvot open with a creation story rather than with a mitzvah? Rashi asks exactly that, and answers that the world needs an owner before it can have laws. If the world simply happened, nobody may tell you what to do in it. If it was made, the One who made it may.

Rashi opens with the question of why a book of commandments begins with creation, answering in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak that the account establishes whose world this is. He also argues on grammatical grounds that בְּרֵאשִׁית stands in the construct state, so the verse reads as “in the beginning of God’s creating” rather than as a bare chronological report. Ramban disagrees sharply: בָּרָא, he holds, denotes bringing something out of nothing, a sense no other Hebrew verb carries, and the Torah does intend here to teach that the world had a beginning. The dispute is not academic. On Rashi’s reading the opening is a prologue about ownership; on Ramban’s it is a doctrine about origins.

The world was still a dark, empty muddle with water everywhere. God’s wind moved gently over the water, the way a bird waits above its nest.

Note what the world is not: it is not evil, it is unfinished. תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ means empty and shapeless, raw material waiting for someone to do something with it. Rashi pictures the hovering as a dove brooding over her nest, close but not yet acting. Most things worth having look like this at the start, including you at fourteen.

תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ describes confusion and emptiness rather than wickedness: raw stuff, not yet formed. Rashi reads מְרַחֶפֶת through the image of a dove hovering over her nest, brooding rather than acting, and the same verb describes an eagle over its young in Devarim 32:11. A plainer reading takes רוּחַ in its ordinary sense of a mighty wind moving across the water. Either way the verse deliberately withholds the first act: for one whole verse there is only dark water and something poised above it. The Torah wants us to feel the pause before the speaking begins.

God said two words, “let there be light”, and light was there. No hands, no tools, no waiting. Just speaking.

Why speech, of all things? God could have made the world any way at all, and the Torah chooses saying. Pirkei Avot counts ten utterances by which the world was made. If the universe was built out of words, then the words you use on people are not merely descriptions of a situation. They are part of what makes it.

The command and the outcome are almost the same sound: יְהִי אוֹר, וַיְהִי אוֹר. Nothing intervenes between the word and the thing, and Pirkei Avot speaks of the ten utterances by which the world was made. The light of the first day precedes the sun and moon of the fourth, a difficulty the commentators face directly; Rashi holds that the luminaries were in fact made on the first day and only fixed in the firmament on the fourth. What the verse establishes above all is that creation here is not craftsmanship or struggle against matter, but speech that meets no resistance.

God looked at the light and saw that it was good. Then He gave the light its own place and the dark its own place, so that they would not run into each other.

The first thing in the whole Torah to be called good is light, and the very next thing God does is draw a line. Separating is not a failure to include everything; it is an act of creation in its own right. It is the same root as הַבְדָּלָה on Saturday night. Deciding what belongs where, and what does not belong together, is how a mess becomes a world.

Rashi, following the midrash, reads the seeing and the separating together: God saw that the light was good and that it was not fitting for the wicked to use it, so He stored it away for the righteous in time to come. A plainer reading takes כִּי־טוֹב to mean that the light was fit for the purpose it was made to serve, an approach several commentators favour, so that טוֹב here is functional rather than moral. Either way the verse pairs judgement with division: to call something good is already to distinguish it from what it is not. The root ב-ד-ל will carry a great deal of weight later, in the separations of holy from ordinary and permitted from forbidden.

God gave them names: the light is called day, and the dark is called night. Evening came, then morning came, and that was the first day of the world.

Read the last two words carefully: not “the first day” but “one day”. Rashi explains that God was still alone in His world, so the day is counted as one rather than ranked as first. And notice the order, evening before morning, which is why Shabbat begins on Friday night. In the Torah’s reckoning, a thing that starts in darkness is still a full day.

Naming completes the act of separation: what has been divided is now fixed by a name, and naming in Tanakh belongs to the one with authority over the thing named. On יוֹם אֶחָד Rashi notes the oddity that the other days are ordinals, שֵׁנִי, שְׁלִישִׁי, while this one is a cardinal, and explains that the Holy One was alone, יָחִיד, in His world, the angels not yet created. A grammatical reading answers more simply that Hebrew often counts the first item with the cardinal. The clause וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר, taken halachically, gives us a day that begins at nightfall, which is why every Shabbat and yom tov opens in the evening.