To Shine Upon The Earth
Genesis and the Significance of Light
God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for the set times—the days and the years; and they shall serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to shine (l’ha’ir) upon the earth.” And it was so. (Genesis 1:13-1:14)
LET THERE BE LIGHTS. Now the light was created on the first day, illuminating the elements, but when on the second day the firmament was made, it intercepted the light and prevented it from illuminating the lower elements. Thus, when the earth was created on the third day there was darkness on it and not light. And now on the fourth day the Holy One desired that there be in the firmament luminaries, the light of which would reach the earth. (Ramban on Gen. 1:13)
TO SHINE UPON THE EARTH—they should dispense their light at a time when it is beneficial for the inhabitants of the earth. (Seforno on Genesis 1:14)
On the fourth day of Creation, God creates sun, moon, and stars. All three types of luminaries are created to “shine upon the earth”—l’hair al haaretz. But they are also made to mark human time and meaning, to serve as signs (otot) for appointed times (moadim), that is, holidays, as well as to help us mark the passing of time in the form of days, months, and years.
The double-function of the celestial lights is but one example of a doubling that runs through the Torah’s Creation story. The beginning of the world and the beginning of the human being are two overlapping, but non-identical beginnings. On the one hand, Genesis is a story of how we belong to our natural environment; on the other hand, it’s a story of how we do not belong; or, rather, it’s a story of how we belong precisely by not belonging (a theme on which I wrote last year). Genesis is a story of nature’s self-transcendence, story about the ambiguity of culture, human existence being at once artificial in its deviation from divine plan, and natural precisely in its creative deviance. While the luminosity of the stars would exist even if there were no witness, the sign-function of the stars cannot exist without interpreters to decipher it.
The lit up sky simultaneously allows our world to come into view and allows us to find meaning in that world. Plants enjoy sunlight, and animals may navigate by moonlight. But for human beings, the lights are not just useful or ornamental; they are a signal—a sign bridging the natural world to the constructed one, the world of physics to the world of culture and religion. The word that describes the stars—ot—which means “sign” or even “alphabet letter” is the same word that is used to describe the rainbow God offers after the deluge as a covenantal “sign” to Noah. It’s the same word that appears throughout the Torah to refer to the “signs and wonders” that God performed (i.e., the Ten Plagues) as part of the Exodus story. The notion that the stars are created to be signs foreshadows a human world to come, a realm of interpretation in which those signs will become legible. To this day, Jewish law determines the start of a new day in accordance with the appearance of three stars.
It is puzzling—the Torah has been counting “day 1,” “day 2,” “day 3,” before the creation of sun, moon, and stars on “day 4.” What was day before the invention of sun, moon, and stars? What was the light of day 1 that was not the light of the heavenly bodies? Is time a real thing or is it a human construct? Does God really count in days or are we retrofitting our own contemporary markers onto a story that is itself about the birth of time? The justification for sun, moon, and stars is “to distinguish between day and night.” But who is doing the distinguishing? If it is human beings who are responsible for marking the difference, and they do not yet exist, the Torah is being deliberately anachronistic.
The Torah’s distinction between the light of the first day and the lights of the fourth day recalls the Platonic distinction between an original source and mere representations of it. The sun, moon, and stars are lights, but they are not light itself. To conflate the two is to mistake the reflection for the original. Not coincidentally, worship of heavenly bodies was and is a common form of idolatry. In its secularized, diluted form, contemporary astrology preserves an ancient, pagan desire to personify and deify the constellations. Thus, there is a polemic to the placement of heavenly bodies on day four, a suggestion that their existence is—from a metaphysical perspective—supplemental, rather than basic, to the visibility of the natural world.
In our time, in most cities, the stars do not shine on us. Their presence is a sign, but not a source of actual luminosity. For luminosity we have electricity, lamps, screen light, the shimmer of Times Square. The stars have become for most of us what Gershom Scholem, speaking of Kafka, calls Geltung ohne Bedeutung, valid but without significance—they are there as one spectacle amongst others. The stars have become to most of us “dead letters,” if we are even lucky enough to see them at all through the smog of our post-industrial condition.
Unless the Torah teaches that the shining of the stars does not depend on our ability to notice them. God creates the light of stars, knowing it will be ignored, to teach that there is a profundity and purpose even to things that we devalue or ignore. The value of the light of the stars is not owed to the visibility they provide, but, like the Menorah of the Temple and the Hannukiah used on Hannukah, to a luminosity we cannot use. In this case—a speculative suggestion, to be sure—the stars are a sign that their value will not expire as our technology gets better. We might find substitute for the luminosity of the stars, but not for their significance, which is all the clearer the less needed they are.
The invention of things which might grow to be useless, and the suggestion that they are nonetheless fundamental, is a deeply meaningful idea. It is the basis for our ability to value ourselves and one another for reasons of self-evidence rather than for external reasons. As soon as human life is justified externally, it becomes merely instrumental. In terms of policy, there is no avoiding this problem—at an abstract level, we do weigh human lives against one another regardless of how we feel about it; but at an interpersonal level, the reduction of human existence to something like utility or even something like beauty ends up becoming dystopic. We end up with a world in which, as the Midrash tells us, we value the bricks of the Tower of Babel more than we do ourselves, the builders. Care for the out-dated stars offers one way we can practice loving that which has become defunct, lost to history and the march of progress. Perhaps the outdated stars are reflections of us.
On Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur we pleaded with God—“al tashlicheini l’et zikna”— “do not abandon me in my old age.” This is the cry of the disrupted, of those who cannot keep pace with “progress,” the natural cycle of aging. This is not to say that the Torah is against disruption and innovation; it’s to say that the Torah seeks to weight the value of change against that of preservation, novelty against commitment, adventure against loyalty.
The Torah’s distinction between light and lights, between the light of the first day and the light of the fourth, is one of the first indications we have not to heap too much praise on that which happens to be in vogue, that whose light happens to be ascendent. Rather, we should have an ambivalent relationship to the lights of our time, enjoying them for what they can do while remaining conscious that they also conceal other possibilities.
Bereishit Rabba teaches that the light of day one refers to the or haganuz, the hidden or underground light, which God sews for the righteous at the end of days, or else keeps for Godself. Why is this original light hidden? One possibility is that it would be misused or misunderstood. Out of shame or modesty or simply self-protection, the original light of being goes into hiding. This is the first exile. We live in the world of a second set of lights, a renewed light, paralleling a litany of second chances that populate Tanakh, life after Cain kills Abel, life after the flood, life after the golden calf, after the sin of the spies.
It seems that no sooner has creation begun than it’s gone awry, even before we’ve gotten to the human realm. In Heidegger’s terms, the self-giving of light is at the same time a self-concealing of it. No sooner have we found Being than we have found it’s oblivion. In less poetic terms, if light is a stand in for certainty, the replacement of The Light by a series of mini-lights marks our journey from the world of obviousness to one of questioning, from the world of ease and direct knowledge to a world of ambiguity and interpretation.
But note that life in the world of light is univocal, even, possibly authoritarian. But life in the world of lights, is plural, dialogical, collaborative, even if it is also conflictual. As I wrote in an essay on Gadamer, our inability to understand anything fully is one of the fundamental reasons why we need each other, why the pursuit of knowledge requires conversation and not simply introspection. The movement from day 1 to day 4 is a movement from God’s realm, the realm of absolute truth, to our realm, the realm of relative and relational truth; that God Godself creates lights to supplement the original light is a sign that this, too, is good.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
If you appreciate this work and feel moved to support it, you can make a tax deductible donation here.
You may also enjoy my daily question newsletter, What is Called Thinking?