Levi Ghanooni Celebrates His Bar Mitzvah at BHC

Levi celebrated his post-COVID Bar Mitzvah with the support of his family and adoring BHC community.

Levi’s Speech:

Shabbat Shalom. My Torah portion is B’reishit, the very beginning of the Torah. It starts with a mysterious description of the creation of the heavens and the earth, followed by the rest of creation, and ends with God regretting the decision to create the world.

In the very last verse of the parsha, Noah is singled out as the only one to find favor in G-d’s eyes. The idea that G-d has deep regret for creating the world exposes a major contradiction.

At first, G-d says five times over that creation is good, and then on the sixth day, when humans are created, that it is very good. Yet by the end of my parshah, G-d plans to destroy all that has been created except for Noah and the animals who will re-propagate the world.

This is not the only apparent contradiction in the parshah, however. There seems to be one even in the first few verses. In the third through fifth verses we read these words: “And G-d said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.

However, only eleven verses later, in verse 14, God says: ”Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for set times – the days and the years.” This verse describes Day Four. But there’s already light, and there are clearly not two suns! What’s going on?

Furthermore, in verse 18, we read: “And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth, to dominate the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.” We’ve already been told about this very separation in verse 4! Why repeat it?

Many commentators have tried to deal with these strange, repeating words about light being created on two separate days and about G-d separating the light from the darkness. For example, the Babylonian Talmud suggests that the original light had to be hidden because people would be too sinful to benefit from it.

This strikes me as a contradiction in and of itself because if G-d knew we would be too sinful, why would G-d create humankind, then destroy us and recreate us?

Our Sages give another explanation, right in the same Talmud passage, by suggesting that the light of Day One and Day Four is one and the same, but that the sun and moon were not hung in the sky until Day Four. About 500 years later, a rabbi named Yosef Kara suggested that “the firmament” – a kind of hard, dome-like barrier – is what separates the earth and the close-by heavens from the outer heavens.

As a result, by the time that light from beyond the firmament reaches us, it is diminished and we need both its light and the light from the sun and moon. Today we might consider the idea of a ‘firmament’ as a kind of pre-scientific way to talk about the earth’s atmosphere. We understand that the light of the universe can not be seen as well from here because of the interference of our atmosphere, a layer of nitrogen, oxygen, and small amounts of other gases that wrap around the earth.

But what if we look at the ideas found at the beginning of the Torah in the light of cosmology, the scientific study of the origin and development of the universe? We might discover that what seems to be contradictions, such as light being created on Day One and Day Four, and redundancies such as G-d separating the light form the darkness on Day One and Day Four, are not really such.

In the words of Dr. Nathan Aviezer, an Orthodox Jew and Professor of Physics at Bar Ilan University in Israel, [quote] “Cosmologists now recognize that the sudden unexplained appearance of the primeval fireball is the actual creation of the universe. The biblical expression ‘Let there be light’ may therefore be understood as the Big Bang,”

We also know now that all the matter and energy that exists throughout the universe comes from this primeval light.b” [end quote] The Big Bang theory says that a different kind of light is caused by the radiation that begins to separate the moment that the universe is created.

Therefore, this theory doesn’t just describe the creation of the universe, but helps to untangle a contradiction that seems to occur at the beginning of the Torah. How did our ancestors, who lived in the pre-scientific era, come up with such a complex idea?

I hope you’ll think about that! In the meantime, I want to thank everyone for helping me celebrate my becoming an adult in the Jewish community.

I know that some of you had to re-arrange your schedules to be here – thank you; it means a lot. I also want to thank Rabbi Kirshbaum for helping me prepare, as well as BHC President Dave Goldstone, Vice Presidents Martin Kessel, Lucy Goodhart, and Fred Apple, and the members of the congregation for maintaining a synagogue in the North Country for my family to be part of.

I also want to thank my mom and dad for supporting me through this process and my sister Zoe for being here and getting me to think about what this is all about. Shabbat Shalom