Ari Levisohn: Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha … diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

Welcome to Parshat Terumah, the famously unexciting parsha about the details of building the mishkan (tabernacle).  Ok, you got me. We have a really cool episode this week. You see, Rabbi Fohrman has some incredible material on the mishkan that almost no one has ever heard. We've previously only featured it as a five hour long series buried deep on our website, and that is really a shame, because this is some of the most profound material Rabbi Fohrman has ever taught.  He answers one of the biggest questions facing any 21st century believer: How do we reconcile the first chapter of Genesis with everything we know about modern science and the Big Bang? Turns out, the mishkan  holds the key to the answer. So I did some snooping around and found a recording of a live lecture version Rabbi Fohrman gave a few years ago and -- through the magic of editing -- condensed it into a nice manageable size. Rabbi Fohrman throws around more Hebrew terms than we usually use on Into the Verse, so we have included a glossary in the episode description. Rabbi Fohrman is going to get to the Big Bang and eventually the mishkan soon enough, but he is going to start out by pointing out how it's not just modern science that makes reading Genesis hard. Even if you knew nothing about science at all and you just opened up Genesis One and started reading carefully, there are some things that just don't make sense. It makes us wonder, what if we are reading the story the wrong way. Here is Rabbi Fohrman. 

Rabbi David Fohrman: Imagine you're living in the Dark ages,  you're living in the Middle Ages, you know nothing about the theory of relativity, you know nothing about the big Bang, you know nothing about anything. All you know is the science that is evident to your eye, and you read the Six Days of Creation. What questions jump out at you? Even if you're living in the 13th century, you're still bothered by this. So how was light created before the sun? What was that about? Right? Question one. Here's another really strange thing. When does vegetation get created? Basically, Day three. Okay. When does the sun get created? Basically day four. Do you see the problem here? Right? Even if I'm living in the 13th century, I know enough that trees without the sun you know, not so much. How do those trees make it for a whole day without the sun, right? How exactly do you have trees surviving without the sun? Another problem, where did all the water come from? Right? Look at the second pasuk , especially the way Rashi reads the second pasuk:

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

(Genesis 1:1)

Now, Rashi reads the "ו" there as when , so you read it like this, “ וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ,” in the beginning of God's creating heaven on earth when the world was formless and void. When, “וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם,” when there was darkness upon the face of the deep, when “וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃,” when the spirit of God hovered over the waters, then the very first thing that happened, Rashi says, is  “וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר.” 

So the very first creation is light, but it's strange because according to Rashi, we don't really get a picture of what we say in Latin is creation ex Nihilo. It's not really a picture of creation of something from nothing there. The Torah starts the story with something, right? What's the something? And it's a very strange view of something. What's the something? Everything was very chaotic. It was very dark, but something was there. Water.  “וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃.” 

Where did all the water come from? Generally speaking, everything that happens, God creates, with the exception of one thing, water. Water is pre-existent. So that's another question that would bother you. Where did all the water come from? One final question, which I think is a basic question in the story. Give me the top ten reasons why are you happy that there's a sun?  Reason number one, why you're happy that there's a sun - heat. It's not fun living in you know minus 234 kelvin. It also provides light, which is the basis of all life in the world. There are others:  gravity, but basically heat and light. Listen to the Torah's description of why it's so amazing to have the sun:

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֗ים יְהִ֤י מְאֹרֹת֙ בִּרְקִ֣יעַ הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם

Let there be these heavenly luminaries. 

You know what they're good for?

לְהַבְדִּ֕יל בֵּ֥ין הַיּ֖וֹם וּבֵ֣ין הַלָּ֑יְלָה וְהָי֤וּ לְאֹתֹת֙ וּלְמ֣וֹעֲדִ֔ים וּלְיָמִ֖ים וְשָׁנִֽים׃

to separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for the set times—the days and the years;

(Genesis 1:14)

How are you going to have festivals without a calendar? You're never going to know when to have your festivals? You know what a sun is good for calendar making. It's amazing. You're going to count the days, you're going to be able to count the weeks, you're going to be able to count the months.

And you're going to love it, right? That's why I like the sun?! So I have a calendar. What about heat? What about light? So these I think are some very basic, profound questions about the text that you don't have to be a great chacham (wise person)  living in 2018 to ask. It just doesn't seem to make sense.

So just to review: how vegetation was created before the sun. This strange picture of pre-creation according to Rashi, what's it all about? Where did all the water come from? And the sun and the moon and the stars, especially the sun as a calendar making device seems very strange.How come water was never created? Okay, how are we going to approach answers to these questions?

So today I want to approach just as a predicate, as a basic starting point, that in two very important ways, what we're going to try to do is shift our perspective on the story to try to answer it. 

The Torah is a Guidebook

 There's one sort of simple way of answering any science versus Torah apparent contradiction, and that is by seeking the question of genre. Mortimer Adler wrote a book called How to Read a Book. In this book, he talks about the issue of genre. He says, before you read a book, any book,  you have to ask, what genre is the book? What kind of book is it? If you're reading a chemistry textbook and you  think you're reading a poetry book, you're going to be in trouble. Vice versa. If you're reading poetry and you think you're reading chemistry, right, it's a problem. 

What genre is the Torah? That's a very difficult question to ask. Because before you start learning, you have to understand what genre of the book you're looking at.

So you could say, well, there's  a lot of stories in the Torah. It's a history book, right? But you know, there's a lot of laws for a history book. What are all those laws doing there? You say, oh no, I'm sorry. It's actually a legal treatise. But there's a lot of stories for a legal treatise. What are all the stories doing there?

Yeah, you're right, you know . Maybe it's a philosophy book because there's some philosophy in there, but there sure are a lot of story laws and stories for a philosophy book. So what, what genre really, is it? Where would you put it in the library?

So I want to suggest that possibly the genre is what the name Torah suggests.

A guidebook, it's there to guide you, it's there to guide a person and a nation in building a relationship with God and a relationship with those around them. It's a guidebook. That means that everything in the book is going to be filtered through the lens of a guidebook. So everything I tell them, I'm going to tell them from that perspective.

So for example, when Chazal(our sages)  say , ein mukdam u’meuchar b’Torah, you can't count on chronology in the Torah. That wouldn't make sense for a history book, but it could make sense for a guidebook, right? If I can teach you more by twisting around events and putting two things together because the themes are similar, and I want you to see a pattern in what's happening over an age, and I twist the chronology that could make sense to guide you. So therefore, science will tell one story and the story of creation will look different in the Torah.

This is the beginning of an approach to dealing with the issues of science and Torah, how they relate to each other. But I still might have a question back to you if you suggested this, approach to me, and the question I would have back to you is, okay, I get it, the Torah is a guidebook.

But if it's going to talk about creation and creation actually happened, it was an event in time, right? So there has to be some way in which the Torah is relating to events as they actually happened. You have to, you can tell me, okay, the Torah is telling it to me differently. It's a guidebook, but show me how what the Torah is talking about at all corresponds in some way to the scientific story. How  do these two things even relate to each other? Your guidebook perspective and your scientific perspective. And I think that's a legitimate question. So I want to propose today an approach towards that question.

The approach is this, if the Torah is a guidebook, then one of the things that follows from that is that the Torah is going to place human beings at sort of the center of things. It's talking to us. One of the differences between science and a guidebook is that science doesn't consider humanity as the center.

It's just objective. It's just, show me what's there. There's this huge universe and you guys are just a few living beings on the third rock from a sun and a pretty ordinary galaxy among a hundred billion galaxies. That's science's story. From the Torah's perspective, we really are the center. What that means is that the Torah will use to put this in fancy words, the Torah will create an exaggerated and anthropocentric perspective. We will be at the center more than science will allow for the first perspective switch. I'd like to suggest that if you look at the Torah, you can switch perspectives. If you can somehow say, okay, that's the Torah, talking to human beings, trying to guide them.

But if I could factor out the human element as it were from the Torah stories, maybe I could arrive at science's story. Could you say, okay, here's your guidebook perspective. This is the way humans would see it. Let me factor out the guidance. Would I arrive at something that approaches science?

So that's one perspective switch I want to try with you today.

Torah as Guidebook, Torah as History Book

Here's the second prospective switch. You know that one of the tools that people like myself and others will use is intertextuality. Connections between texts, language patterns in certain texts that seem to resonate with other texts, almost as if a Torah story is commented upon by another story that's parallel to it, A story B. These intertexts, these commentaries are very helpful. It's almost like the Torah is the original commentary upon itself. Even before Rashi, even before the Ramban, even before the Seforno, there was the Torah sort of commenting on itself through these parallel texts. When the Torah creates these parallel texts, almost like saying Story B maps onto story A and story B will explain, help explain story A to you.

The Mishkan in Relation to Creation

The question is, is there one of these texts for creation? I want to suggest that the text might just be the construction of the mishkan. Here's why. There's a strange halacha. All of our Shemirat Shabbat depends upon this . The fact that all of the 39 melachot (forbidden  labor on Sabbath)  derived from where?  Melechet Hamishkan (construction of the tabernacle). Why is that? Why should it be that the template of all things for the melacha that we avoid on Shabbat, has to do with this thing that has nothing to do with it, which is how human beings once constructed the mishkan. What in the world does that have to do with keeping Shabbat?

Conceptually, there's gotta be some link, in other words, the whole basis of your spiritual avoda (labor)  in Shabbos you know , seven days a week, relies on this truth that the mishkan is the template for melacha.  Why should it be that way? Let me suggest a possible rationale.

Think about creation and think about the mishkan. What did God do in creation? We think of creation as something from nothing. First there was nothing, and then there was something. That's our perspective. Think about it from God's perspective for a moment. What would God think if you said first there was nothing and then God created something and then there was something, what would God think of that?

He'd be kind of offended, right? Because first there was him, right? So first he would say, no, no, you got actually entirely wrong. God would say, first there was everything. Okay. There was just me and I was living in my world and I was doing just fine. It was amazing, right? Then you guys came along and here's how you guys came along.

I had to actually, and this is the kabbalistic doctrine of tzitzum (contraction). I had to contract myself somehow to make room for you guys. I had to actually create this little artificial apartment in everything called the universe, okay? And I had to create all these nifty things like space and time and laws of physics and everything.

Not because I needed any of that guys. For you guys, okay? Because I don't need space, I don't need time, I don't need gravity. I don't need any of those laws. If you really think about it, God keeping all the laws of physics, really God is the first keeper of laws. We're the second keeper of laws. God keeps human laws, we keep divine laws. 

So God creates this little apartment and then he creates this human being in his image, a creator just like him.To reciprocate, to do exactly for God what he did for us, what we do as creators is we take our everything, what we perceive as everything which is our universe, and we create this little apartment for the being that we love. And we say, okay, we're going to create a little apartment for you, God, that's going to work according to your rules.

And in that apartment, we're going to observe all these rules that have nothing to do with human beings that are really Godly rules. Rules like kodesh, and rules of tumah and tahara. We don't know what that is. You know what that is. It makes you comfortable. We're going to try to make you comfortable in our world.

We're going to make you an apartment just like you made us an apartment. That's what God says to do. And at the very end of that, God says, oh, great human beings. Here's what I want you to do. You are builders just like me. When I built, I rested. You should rest too. After you build, you should rest just like me.

How did I rest? Well, after I built, what did I do? I rested from all the melacha that I did in creating the apartment, my apartment for you. So when you rest, You too should rest from all the melacha that you do to create the apartment. The apartment that you're creating for me.  You begin to see how the construction of the mishkan might just be parallel to the construction of the universe. They're both constructions of an apartment, right? One's God constructing our apartment, and the other is is us constructing God's apartment.

Might those two texts be connected to each other? I think they are. And what I want to suggest to you today is that the questions we have asked about creation can be answered by the story of the creation of the mishkan. Similarly, there are questions that you might have looking at the creation of the mishkan, where you might find answers for that. In the story of creation, these two texts will answer each other, will complete each other, as it were.

So what I want to do with you now is stop for a moment and go back to the mishkan and now ask a few questions about the mishkan, just sort of basic questions about the mishkan and how Chazal understand it and, and see if creation might help us understand those questions.

Strange Details Regarding the Mishkan

Here's some strange things about the mishkan. In a bunch of weird places in the mishkan, you have an ornamental, ornamental device known as the kruvim (cherubs). So everyone knows they're on the ark, right? But that's not the only place that they are. They're actually in two other places as well. If you look carefully at the text in Terumah, you'll find that images of the kruvim are actually woven into the parochet (curtain), which is the curtain that divides the Kodesh (sanctuary) from the Kodesh HaKedoshim (innermost sanctuary), and they're also woven into the yeriot, so the curtains that cover the mishkan.

So the first question I have to you is what's the meaning of that? Why are there kruvim in the mishkan and why of all places should they be there ? Question number one.

Question number two: you look at the aron(ark). and Chazal say there's a problem because if you do the math with the dimensions, it doesn't add up. Right. What's the problem? So there's 10 ama (biblical measurement) over here. There's 10 ama over here. And the aron itself is 10 ama. But there's only 20 ama. Not enough room for aron. What's Chazal's answer? The aron  doesn't take up any space. Oh really? The aron doesn't take up any space. That's pretty weird. What's the deal with an aron that doesn't take up, I mean, it literally sounds like Harry Potter. There's a tent like that in Harry's Potter from the outside. It looks like this. From the inside, it looks like this, that's the aron From the outside.

It looks like it takes up space when you get there. It doesn't really take up space. That's a really strange thing.

Question number three. What's in the aron? Luchot (tablets). What do Chazal say is on the luchot? So the text that's written on the luchot, according to the midrash (rabbinic texts) written in Black fire inscribed on white fire. That's a very psychedelic image. Like what exactly is that? Black fire and white fire. Just some things to wonder about when you're thinking about the mishkan.

The keystone clue to putting this all together, I want to suggest are the kruvim themselves. Why kruvim in the mishkan and why those three places? Let's talk about kruvim. We know the kruvim appear somewhere else besides the mishkan. Where else besides the mishkan? Way back in Gan Eden (Garden of Eden), way back in our creation story.

Okay, so what were kruvim doing back there in Gan Eden? They were barrier angels, right? They were there to keep us out of Gan Eden, lishmor et derech eitz ha’chaim,  to make sure that we couldn't come back. Strange. But what are these kruvim in the mishkan doing? Those kruvim had a sword. These kruvim don't have a sword.

They actually have their wings open as if they're sheltering us beneath their wings, whereas kruvim back in Gan Eden say, stay out. These kruvim seem to say, come on in. If you think back to our analogy between creation and um, and the mishkan, right creation with God building an apartment for us, the mishkan is us building an apartment for God. But when God built an apartment for us, God also wanted a little tiny apartment in that apartment, a little summer home and that place was Gan Eden. When we got kicked out of there, God said, you can't have access to that little summer home my special place in the world anymore cuz that's my special place that I built. But if you ever want to build me one, I'll be happy to lend you my kruvim. The same kruvim that kept you out of the first special place for God will usher you back in to the apartment that you build for him.

So here are these barrier angels, and where are they put these barrier angels in the mishkan. Think about the common denominator of the three places in the mishkan that you find the kruvim. Where do you find them? You find them on the yeriot. You find them on the  the kaporet (lid on the ark) and you find them on the parochet (curtain). What's the common denominator of all three of those places? They are boundary enforcers. They are actually separators, right? Separators between levels of kedusha, really. Right? If you think about it, the most sacred place in the mishkan is the aron. That which separates the aron from the world outside the aron is the kaporet. Then the parochet separates what? It separates the kodesh from the kodesh hakedashim that's even the language of the “lhavdil bein hakodesh u’bein kodesh hakedoshim,”  the yeriot between the world of the mishkan and the outside world. Three points of separation in the mishkan. Three "havdalot" (separations) in the mishkan.

Think back to the idea of connection between the mishkan and creation. There's three havdalot in the mishkan. Does that word remind you of anything in creation? “ וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹקים,” God separated” (Genesis 1:4). 

How many times did God separate with that word? In creation? Guess what? Three times. What are the three? First, light and darkness. Second, water and water. Right? God creates the rakea to separate between water, up high and water below. And the third, the third is on day four. It's the creation of the sun and the moon of the stars, to separate between day and night and to allow for months, days, and years so that we could have Moadim. Fascinating. Three separations in the mishkan, three separations in creation. Here's the question I want to suggest to you. Could there be a correspondence between these three? Could the three separations in the mishkan correspond to the three separations in creation?.

Havdala (Separation) is a Key Process in Creation

If they are, what would that tell us? So let's think for a moment about this concept of separation within creation. What's the function of separation within creation? If you think about what God was doing in creation, the verbs that God uses to create, what are some of the verbs? What does God do when he creates the world?

One world verb is "ברא." Another verb is "ויעש" - "עשה" another word is, "יצר." Right? God forms he creates, he makes. But the other verb is "להבדיל," -God separates. Which one of these things is not like the other? Separates. See, when I make something, I create something or I form something, right? What's the common denominator in that? I'm building stuff. When I separate, I'm not building anything. I'm just, just moving things around, right? I'm not building anything new. So why does God do it? Then? If he's creating, why bother separating? Why not just create? The answer is, well, if you're a creator, you can't really create unless you prepare the ground, unless there's a certain kind of infrastructure from what you're doing. Okay? Now keep that idea in mind for a moment and think about this.

If the mishkan, going back  for a moment, is an attempt to create an apartment for God in our world. If you think about that, that's a little bit of a strange thing to do. You see, if God makes an apartment for us in his world, God knows how to do that, right? We're carbon-based lifeforms. God understands what it takes for a carbon-based life form to survive, need some oxygen, need some gravity, need some laws of physics.

God creates it just for us. So God says, okay, now you do that for me. You create a special place for me. What's the problem? No. Do we have no idea what that means? We don't know where we, we know where you live. We know what you're going to like. How do we know what you're going to like? What does it take for God to be happy? So let me suggest an analogy. Imagine that your great Aunt Sadie was coming to visit you from Australia. She's going to be coming, staying in your house for a month. So your kid is off to camp and you have a spare room. But it's your kid, Bobby, and he is like eight years old, right? So you want to get Bobby's room ready for Aunt Sadie. Problem is you don't know what Aunt Sadie likes  in her room, right?

What would you do to get Bobby's room ready for Aunt Sadie? Think about what Bobby's room looks like now, it's got footballs all over the place. It's got Snoopy characters, stuffed animals, right? All these, so you would say, look, I don't know what Aunt Sadie likes. But I know what she doesn't like, okay?

She doesn't need footballs all over her room, okay? She doesn't need sports paraphernalia. She doesn't need all the stuff that eight year old boys like. She'd probably like at least a nice clean room, right? If I don't know what she likes, let me just give her a clean room. Everything that she doesn't need, let me take it out.

Let's use the same logic for creating the mishkan. Could it be that to create a special place for God if we don't know what God likes, we at least know what he doesn't like. What doesn't he need? If we're taking our world, right, the universe, and we're saying we're going to clean up the room for God, let's take all the stuff out that God doesn't need.

What doesn't God need? The answer is everything. Do you understand? And by everything, I don't just mean all the stuff. I mean everything like the laws of physics. Like time, like space, everything in creation, right? So what you're really doing when you're creating the mishkan is you're deconstructing the universe.

Deconstruction of the Universe

It's a demolition project where you're, we are demolishing the world as we know it, to try to create a clean room for God, right? Devoid of anything possible in creation. Anybody ever demolished a building?

No. So if you demolish a building, you have big skyscraper, you want to get rid of the skyscraper, you have three charges, you have three explosive charges. Where are you going to put the charges to demolish your skyscraper? You don't want to make a mess. You just want to do this as quickly as possible. You want it to come down very elegantly.

Where do you put the charges?

In any construction project, there is infrastructure and there's superstructure in, right? There's the lamps and the shades and the window dressing, and the right. There's all the stuff that you put in a building, but then they're the fundamental underpinnings of the building. The super structure of the building, that's where you put the charges, that's where you put the explosives.

If you put the explosives at the right place, right in the infrastructure, everything just collapses. I want to suggest that in the great building project called Creation, there's also superstructure and infrastructure. The superstructure is all the stuff that God put in the world for that there's the language of creation, vaya'as this, vayivra that vayitzer that, God formed this, he created this, he made this.

That's all the stuff God put in creation. But what's the fundamental underpinnings of creation? L’havdil. The separations God's not making anything, just God is just creating the infrastructure which will be necessary to support that, which he then makes. So I want to suggest that the three havdalot are actually the three infrastructure points in creation and they correspond perfectly to the three infrastructure points in the mishkan.

So now let's read through the creation story, paying attention specifically to the three great הבדלות, and then we'll see how they correspond to the mishkan. And we can use the mishkan to check our math.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now let's get the strain of that strange second pasuk, the pasuk that talks about chaos. It doesn't just talk about chaos. If you look carefully, it talks about three kinds of chaos. If you think about a builder, for a builder, what's chaos? Chaos is your enemy to build. I need a nice orderly surface. If you think about this chaos, there's actually three kinds of enemies here for building.

Listen to it carefully:

 וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ

the first level of chaos is everything is all mixed up.

The second level of chaos is:

 וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם

 It's really dark. If it's dark, you can't see anything. So everything looks all mixed up no matter what everything actually is. Cause you can't see anything.

And the third level of chaos is: 

וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃

wind from God sweeping over the water—

(Genesis 1:2) 

What's there? Just water. What kind of thing is water? What does water do? It mixes everything up. If you're a builder, you're building a house, what's your great enemy? Water. Right? You never want water in your basement. You never want water anywhere. Water, right? Mixes everything up. Put it all together. By the way, what does it look?

If you just imagine what the scene looks like, it's dark, it's chaotic water all over the place. But somehow, strangely enough, this world, which we're hearing now, this is God's world. This is the starting point. See, God doesn't look at those things as enemies for God. That's just the way he likes it, right? Everything is all mixed up. Everything is homogenous. The one God looks at a world in which there are no distinctions, which everything is just one in all of these three ways. The one God lives in an environment of oneness and sameness in some way. But if you're building a world, It's your enemy and you need havdala to get things straight. What I want to suggest is that the three havdalot that you're going to see developing correspond to these three problems that we hear in verse two. Each havdala (separation) will solve one of the three chaos problems. One's going to solve the תהו ובהו problem, one's going to solve the חושך problem, and one is going to solve the מים problem.

Light or Darkness

Let's begin. First thing that happens is God says, “ יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר׃,” let there be light. (Genesis 1:3). Now, God looked at that or and saw that it was good. So imagine for a moment that here is the world, it's very chaotic, it's very dark, and there's water all over the place. All of a sudden - let there be light and there was light. Now describe the scene. What does it look like? So there's this huge light, it's like this overexposed photograph, right? Which creates a problem. The very next verse is a problem. Look at the next verse:

וַיַּרְא אֱלקים אֶת־הָאוֹר כִּי־טוֹב וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹקים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ׃

God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.

(Genesis 1:4)

What's the problem? Where's the darkness? You just turned on the lights. If you turned on the lights by he are, it's light. You got rid of the darkness. That was the whole point of the light, right? So what do you mean you separate between the light and the where did the darkness come from?

You? The darkness is the absence of light. Once you turn on the light, there's no more darkness. Why do you have to separate between light and darkness? There's no darkness. One of the rishonim (medieval commentaries) deals with the question, provides a fascinating answer. The answer is, the only logical answer. He says there's two kinds of darkness.

conventional darkness, as we understand it, is the absence of light. If that's the kind of darkness you're talking about, then yes, by turning on the light, you banish that darkness. But it must be that there's another kind of darkness conceptually, that you can imagine.

One that is not the absence of something, not the absence of light, but the presence of darkness. sort of like a tangible darkness that was the kind of darkness here. In other words, the original light that was created actually was a composite of two elements. It was a composite of light and darkness. There was this, this light force, right? That was this, this thing called light. But then there was this thing called darkness. This actual tangible darkness that was mixed into the light. Now, it didn't look like darkness because when it was mixed into the light, it had sort of like a preservative function.

What it did was it kept the light together somehow. But what happened is that once you separated the two, you could see the darkness for what it was. And the darkness was darkness. And that was the creation of light as we know it. What we might call refined light. Light, which has darkness refined and separated out of it. Now, that seems kind of psychedelic, but if you turn to science, it actually sort of sounds like it corresponds to something. You may be aware that scientists have been struggling with a problem lately, and the problem is there's not enough stuff in the universe if you actually do the math. The gravitational math, it turns out that if you add up all the stuff in the universe, all the matter and energy in the universe, all the hundreds of billions of stars and the hundreds of billions of galaxies, it only accounts for about 18% of the stuff that's out.  How do we know what's out there? Because we see the force of gravity and what gravity is, is the attractive force of everything that's out there in the world, and gravity is at a certain strength, which only makes sense if there's five times as much stuff out there as there is if you add up all the stuff.

So where's the missing stuff? So scientists have taken to calling the missing stuff dark energy or dark matter. They say actually most of the stuff out there is dark matter and energy. Why do they call it dark matter and energy? Because it doesn't interact with light. It's impossible to see.  Light passes through it. You can't illuminate it with light, you can't reflect off of it. Light is just irrelevant to this thing. So in the very beginning of the Big Bang, right, the Big Bang starts where all everything in the universe is all together, and then it explodes. And in the first instance of that explosion, something happens where light energy, so to speak, and light matter starts to break away from dark matter.

Dark matter sticks around. But then there's this thing called light as we know it, which is refined light. Light that is broken away from darkness, from dark matter and dark energy. I don't know, but as a possibility, maybe that havdala, which talks about the creation as light as we know it is the first great infrastructure development in the world, right? 

The next thing that happens next is God says with reference. Here's the thing, what we're doing now, this reading of creation is not the pshat (simple meaning) in chumash. What I mean to say is, go back to our guidebook analogy in pshat, in guidebook, land. Right in, in, in, in human land, the tourist telling you a story to guide you, whatever that guidance is, is not our purview right here. What we're doing almost is factoring out the human view.

So in other words, God talking to humans like, how are you going to explain this to anyone? you know what I mean? Like, if you're not living in the year of 2018 or whatever, you don't know any of this stuff. So how do you explain this? So God basically says, look, let's just call it night and day you know what night is you know what day is? Fine. So think of it that way. That's what I created on the very first day, night and day.

Okay, what's the next great havdala in the, uh, in the universe? The next great havdala is, is water. You hear Eikev Let there be sky in the midst of the waters. Okay, let me ask you something. Why are you so happy for that havdala? Like, think about what it would be like to live in the world if there was never a sky in the midst of the waters. You don't have anywhere to live, right? There's no space for you to live. No habitable human space. I'm not a fish, right? I can't just live in that world. Now, if you think about it in these , God is speaking to you as a human being, but if you factor out the human element, what do you get?  If you factor out you know what day is, you know what night is? you get, Perhaps primal night and primal day, right? Light energy and dark energy. What if you factor out the human element from this havdala? What did God do? God took a world of water. Right, and he created habitable human space, right? Look, there's this space that you can move around in.   There's this sky, there's this air. Don't you like it? You can move around in that. So if that's the way God talks to human beings, he created habitable human space and you want to factor out the human part of it. What did God really create with this havdala? Not habitable human space, but (remove pause) space itself. I want to suggest the second great infrastructure development is the creation of space. 

What's the third great infrastructure development. God says, okay, so I'm going to make the sun and the moon and the stars. It's going to be amazing. It's going to help you keep time. It's going to be so that you humans can understand the calendar. You're going to be able to mark up your calendar. It's going to be the most amazing thing in the world. A havdala that allows humans to mark time. That's how God talks to humans about it. But if you factor out the human element, what did God actually create?

He didn't create a calendar. He created time itself. Right? We're talking about three great infrastructure events. The creation of light as we know it, the creation of space as we know it, and the creation of time as we know it, all of which happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang.

The Conceptual Perspective on Creation

What I want to suggest is that the Torah is not giving you a chronological perspective on creation. It is giving you a conceptual perspective on creation. Conceptually, the most basic thing that God created, the very first infrastructure piece that everything else depends upon is light.

Why? Theory of relativity. What is everything based upon? Space and time itself? You can't measure space and time in the theory of relativity because why? It's all relative. Relative to what? You can't know how big a space is unless you know, how fast you're going relative to the speed of light, right? The faster you go, the more space contracts, the closer you get to the speed of light, you get to the speed of light. The space actually contracts into nothing, so even space and time themselves are dependent upon light. After you have light, you can have, right? Then you can create something else. You can create space.

After you create space. What does God create? After day two, he creates all this stuff to fill space with. But then on day four, God creates time, so to speak, and all of a sudden new things get created. What new things, what gets created after time? Certain kinds of life until now. What things were created?

Trees, vegetation. Those things don't move. They can exist in a world of space alone, conceptually, but then new things get created. What are the new things? Animate. Life. Life that moves. Listen to the language:

יִשְׁרְצוּ הַמַּיִם שֶׁרֶץ נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה וְעוֹף יְעוֹפֵף

Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.

(Genesis 1:20)

Right? Moving life. Movement requires what? Time. Time allows you to actually go through life in movement, go through space, and move in time.

So these are the three great infrastructure developments that get mirrored in the mishkan. Let's take a quick three-dimensional tour of the mishkan starting from the outside. So here I am, I'm starting from the outside and I go through the yeriot and now I'm in the mishkan, I'm in the kodesh and I'm looking up and all of a sudden what happens? I look up and what don't I see anymore? The sun and the moon and the stars, because something's blocking it. These curtains with the kruvim is blocking it.

Where am I living now? What have I just gotten rid of in this deconstruction project? The last of the havdalot, I just got rid of. Time. I'm in a world now with no time. Which explains something interesting by the way, because when you look at the , there's something funny about that bread isn't there, stays fresh all week long.

Wonder why that might be? No time. That's a good explanation. If you're in a world with no time, the bread just stays fresh. But how does this world with no time work? How is it that time evaporates in this world? Oh, so go to Parshat Emor, Moed is all about points in time. How am I going to get rid of points in time through tamid, through things that happen all the time?

So there's going to be two things that are all the time things. The first of them is going to be a menorah (lantern)where, what do we do? We take our, we refine God's products, olives, and we make olive oil out of them. And when we use our melacha to make olive oil and we light it, what does that create? Artificial light. All night long. So what are we getting rid of? Getting rid of havdala between night and day because it's all light all the time. And if you think about it, there's three kinds of time we can get rid of. That way there's four markers of time that we have in the world. What are the four markers of time, days, weeks, months, years, three out of those four are dependent upon light and dark cycles, which three? Days, months, years.

Years. Those are light, dark cycles, right? Light, dark cycle. That right? That's what, not weeks, right? You can get rid of three out of the four elements of time with artificial light that get rid of the distinction between night and day. That's the menorah. By the way, how many times does the word tamid appear with a man?

Three times getting rid of three kinds of ways that we count time, days, years, months, but there's one that remains weeks. Weeks are associated with the shulchan , the other implement that's talked about at the end of Emor, the other tamid thing that gets rid of just one thing with the tamid, the week thing, because a week doesn't come from the distinction between night and day. What does it come from? It comes simply from God creating on seven days. Six days, and resting on the seventh. It comes through God's melacha. What is man doing with the Shulchan and the menorah? We get rid of the four elements of time, through four elements of tamid. Then there you are in the kodesh and you're looking at the parochet and you see the kruvim, and you go through the parochet and all of a sudden you're in a whole new world. You're deconstructing another phase. What have you gotten rid of?

Now the next havdala, what have you gotten rid of? Space. Which explains something funny about that aron,  doesn't it? You look at that aron and you'll be darned if it doesn't take up any space, right? It looks like it takes up space from the outside, but when you're there, it just doesn't seem to take up any space anymore, because you've lost space in this world. What's the only thing you have? Light. There is no space and time. And if you consult physics, that's true for photons. It's actually true for light because light travels at the speed of light. And when you're traveling at the speed of light, what happens to space? It collapses to an infinite point. And what happens to time it collapses too. So photons can go for millions of years, but they don't age because there is no time for a photon and there is no space for a photon.

So in the world of light, there is no time and there is no space.  So if you're in the world of light, how are you going to survive in that world? You don't survive. Which is why anybody who goes into that world, what happens to them, they die . You know why they die, not cuz God is mean. They die because you're not in man's world anymore. You're in the world beyond space and the world beyond time. So you can't live. And then you look at the one thing that's there, this Arun that doesn't take up any space. And you see the three-dimensional kruvim are not in two dimensions anymore. They're real in front of you in three dimensions, and they're beckoning you towards one last separation between the world of the ark.

And what's not on the ark. And you go through that world into the ark and what do you see? All of a sudden, everything is gone. The last great separation was what? The separation between light and darkness, between dark energy and light energy between actual darkness between darkness that you can touch and that you can feel the energy of darkness and the energy of light.

And you look at the luchot and what do you see? You see the swirl. You see light energy and dark energy. And this is when humans say to God, Aunt Sadie, we've taken out all the stuff from Bobby's room. All the stuff that you didn't need. We got rid of it all. We got all the infrastructure elements out of the room. We recreated your world. The world of tohu (chaos).  the world of “וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם וְרוּחַ אֱלֹקים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם׃,” the world before any distinctions the world that's one, for one God.

Ari: Wow, there is so much we could unpack here. So many implications on the creation story, and on how we read the Torah. So many implications on the mishkan. This episode is already getting long, so I suggest we all take some time on our own to reflect.  In the meantime, though, I will leave you with one exciting thought, that God invites us to create space for Him in this world, just like he did for us. 

Credits: 

This episode was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman.

Editing was done by Ari Levisohn.

Our audio editor is Hillary Gutman.