Opening: The Light of the First Day

Ohr zarua latzaddik, ul’yishrei lev simchah. Light is sown for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart.

Psalm 97:11

Before the sun

Read the first page of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, slowly and you will find a puzzle.

On the first day, G-d says, “Let there be light,” and there is light. On the fourth day, G-d makes the sun, the moon, and the stars.

So what was the light of the first day?

It was not sunlight. The sun did not exist yet. It was not starlight or moonlight. Those came three days later. Something was shining before anything in the sky could shine, and the Torah calls it good: “And G-d saw the light, that it was good” (Genesis 1:4).

It is easy to read past the puzzle. The sages of the Talmud, the great record of the rabbis’ teaching and debate, stopped and looked at it for a very long time. What they saw is where this book begins.

What the sages saw

In the tractate Chagigah, Rabbi Elazar teaches that the light of the first day was a different kind of light altogether. By it, the first human being could see from one end of the world to the other (Chagigah 12a). As later teachers understood it, it was not light for the eyes alone. It was light for seeing truly: seeing the whole of things, seeing what connects them, seeing the good in them.

Then the Talmud tells us something sad and something hopeful in the same breath.

The sad part: G-d looked ahead to the generations that would misuse the world, the generation of the flood and the generation that built the Tower of Babel, and hid the light away. A light that clear could not be left lying in the open for people who would turn it to harm.

The hopeful part: the light was not destroyed. It was hidden, for the righteous, in the time to come. The sages read “that it was good” as a hint. “Say of the righteous that it is good,” says the prophet Isaiah (3:10). The good light is kept for the good.

In Hebrew it has a name: HaOhr HaGanuz, the hidden light.

Where it went

If the light was hidden, where was it hidden? For centuries, Jewish teachers have given that question beautiful answers.

It was sown like a seed. The psalm at the top of these pages says ohr zarua, light is sown. You do not sow something to lose it. You sow it so it will grow. The Kabbalists loved this verse. The light was planted in the world, and it comes up wherever someone tends it. In many congregations, this verse is said aloud on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest night of the Jewish year, just before Kol Nidrei.

It was hidden in the Torah. The Baal Shem Tov taught, as his grandson records in the Degel Machaneh Ephraim, that G-d hid the first light inside the Torah itself, so that anyone who learns it with an open heart catches a glimpse of that first clear seeing. On this reading, study is not a dry exercise. It is a way of opening a door to a light older than the sun.

It was hidden in good deeds. Chassidic teachers also speak of good deeds this way: every act of kindness lets a little of the hidden light back into the world. A meal given, a visit made, a wrong set right: each is a small window where the first light shines through.

It was hidden in people. The Talmud speaks of at least thirty-six righteous people in every generation who greet the Presence of G-d each day (Sanhedrin 97b; Sukkah 45b). Later tradition added that they are hidden: humble, unknown, perhaps unknown even to themselves, and that the world quietly rests on their goodness. They do not announce themselves. They may not know who they are. The light is in them, working quietly.

Put these answers together and a picture forms. The first light did not leave the world. It went underground, into teaching, into kindness, into ordinary people, and it waits there to be found.

Thirty-six

There is a number that keeps appearing around the hidden light, and later teachers noticed it.

An old tradition says the first light shone for thirty-six hours before it was hidden (Bereishis Rabbah 11:2): through the first Friday, through the first night of Shabbos, the Sabbath, and through its first day. There are thirty-six hidden righteous in every generation. And across the eight nights of Chanukah, when one candle is lit, then two, then three, until eight are burning, the candles add up to exactly thirty-six, not counting the shammes, the helper candle.

The Chassidic master Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov, in his Bnei Yissaschar, drew the line between them. The lights of Chanukah, he said, carry a trace of the hidden light. Each winter, in some of the longest nights of the year, Jewish families place those lights in a doorway or a window, where anyone passing in the street can see them.

That is the spirit of these books. The light is not meant to be kept indoors.

What Kabbalah is

The word Kabbalah means “receiving.” It is the name Jewish tradition gives to its mystical teaching: the inner side of the Torah, the part that asks not only what should I do? but what is G-d? what is the soul? why is there a world at all? It is called receiving because no one claims to have invented it. It was handed down from teacher to student, over many centuries, and each generation received it and added its own light. The first chapter tells that story, and what Kabbalah is not.

What you will find in this book, and in this series

This is the first of four short books called The Hidden Light. Each one can be read on its own. Read together, in order, they are one climb, and each has a single word that names its step: receive, return, give, ascend.

This book, The Light of the First Day, is about receiving. Its first part tells you what Kabbalah is, where it came from, and how it describes G-d: the Infinite beyond all names, the ten qualities through which the Infinite shines into the world, and the Shechinah, the presence of G-d who dwells among us. Its second part tells the great mystical story of creation: how G-d stepped back to make room for a world, how the vessels meant to hold the light shattered, how sparks of holiness were scattered into everything, and how we help repair it.

The second book, The Door That Never Closes, is about returning. It shows how Judaism understands the partnership between people and G-d, and follows the soul: why it comes into the world, what it is here to repair, what the tradition teaches about returning souls and the life after this one, and the door of return that never closes.

The third book, The Open Hand, is about giving. It gathers Jewish wisdom on wealth, honest work, and tzedakah, which means justice before it means charity.

The fourth book, Every Candle Lit, is about ascending. It is about kindness, which in Judaism is the foundation the world stands on; the commandment, repeated again and again in the Torah, to love the stranger; the people who carry the light for others; and the simple practices, Shabbos and the candles that add one more light each night, that let the light grow.

Every chapter follows the same shape. It opens with one line that holds the whole chapter. It gives you the source, the words of the Torah, the Talmud, or the mystics themselves. It explains the teaching, including where the sages read it differently. It tells a tale from the tradition. And it ends with one small practice, a Light for the Week.