(א) בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw the light, that is was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And it was evening and it was morning, first day. (1-5)
And God said, Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let it divide water from water.” And God made the vault and it divided the water beneath the vault from the water above the vault, and so it was. And God called the vault Heavens, and it was evening and it was morning, second day. (6-8)
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered in one place so that the dry land will appear,” and so it was. And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering of waters He called Seas, and God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth grow grass, plants yielding seed of each kind and trees bearing fruit of each kind, that has its seed within it upon the earth.” And so it was. And the earth put forth grass, plants yielding seed, and trees bearing fruit of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And it was evening and it was morning, third day. (9-13)
And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the heavens to divide the day from the night, and they shall be signs for the fixed times and for days and years, and they shall be lights in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth.” And so it was. And God made the two great lights, the great light for dominion of day and the small light for dominion of night, and the stars. And God placed them in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth and to have dominion over the day and night and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And it was evening and it was morning, fourth day. (14-19)
And God said, “Let the waters swarm and the swarm of living creatures and let fowl fly over the earth across the vault of the heavens.” And God created the great sea monsters and ever living creature that crawls, which the water had swarmed forth of each kind, and the winged fowl of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of each kind, cattle and crawling things and wild beasts of each kind. And so it was. And God made wild beasts of each kind and cattle of every kind and all crawling things on the ground of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth. And God created the human in his image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. (20-27)
And God saw all that He had done, and, look, it was very good. And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day. (31)
(1) בראשית, at the beginning of time; this is the first moment which is indivisible into shorter periods.. There had not been a concept “time” previous to this, i.e. there had only been unbroken continuity. (The author perceives “time” as one of the creations. Ed.]
(1) The heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array. (2) On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done. (3) And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done.
All science deals with the measurement of things.
But there are several limitations to this ability of ours. Of course, there are the subjective limitations: the precision of the tools of measurement, the form of measurement chosen, and even the consciousness of the subject who is measuring. Measurement is not really telling us directly about the phenomena we are measuring, but about the tools of measurement and our own relationship to them.
In this paradigm, Time is not dependent upon the existence of space and matter, but the converse: any event presumes the existence of a continuum of Time in which that event occurs. In fact, we can even extend this to the primal event, the initial emergence of space and matter: to say that before there was nothing, and then there was, already implies the existence of Time. Thus, Creation presumes Time, and not the other way around.
In other words: is Time an absolute given, like G‑d Himself, in which a universe occurs? Or is Time just another creation, as are space and matter?
In the mishna, we learned that Rabbi Eliezer establishes that one may recite the evening Shema until the end of the first watch. These watches are mentioned in the Bible as segments of the night, but it must be established: Into precisely how many segments is the night divided, three or four? Moreover, why does Rabbi Eliezer employ such inexact parameters rather than a more precise definition of time (Tosefot HaRosh)?
The Gemara responds: Actually, Rabbi Eliezer holds that the night consists of three watches, and he employs this particular language of watches in order to teach us: There are watches in heaven and there are watches on earth; just as our night is divided into watches, so too is the night in the upper worlds. As it was taught in a baraita: Rabbi Eliezer says: The night consists of three watches, and over each and every watch, the Holy One, Blessed be He, sits and roars like a lion in pain over the destruction of the Temple. This imagery is derived from a reference in the Bible, as it is stated: “The Lord roars [yishag] from on high, from His holy dwelling He makes His voice heard. He roars mightily [shaog yishag] over His dwelling place, He cries out like those who tread grapes, against all the inhabitants of the earth” (Jeremiah 25:30). The three instances of the root shin-alef-gimmel in this verse correspond to the three watches of the night.
And signs of the transition between each of these watches in the upper world can be sensed in this world: In the first watch, the donkey brays; in the second, dogs bark; and in the third people begin to rise, a baby nurses from its mother’s breast and a wife converses with her husband.
למאי נפקא מינה למיקרי קריאת שמע למאן דגני בבית אפל ולא ידע זמן קריאת שמע אימת כיון דאשה מספרת עם בעלה ותינוק יונק משדי אמו ליקום וליקרי.
What is the practical ramification of this sign? It is relevant to one who recites Shema while lying in a dark house, who cannot see the dawn and who does not know when the time for reciting Shema arrives. That person is provided with a sign that when a woman speaks with her husband and a baby nurses from its mother’s breast, the final watch of the night has ended and he must rise and recite Shema.
Time plays an enormous part in Judaism. The first thing God declared holy was a day: Shabbat, at the conclusion of creation.
The first mitzvah given to the Jewish people as a whole, prior to the Exodus, was the command to sanctify time, by determining and applying the Jewish calendar (Ex. 12:1-2).
So time in Judaism is an essential medium of the spiritual life. But there is one feature of the Jewish approach to time that has received less attention than it should: the duality that runs through its entire temporal structure.
Take, for instance, the calendar as a whole. Christianity uses a solar calendar, Islam a lunar one. Judaism uses both. We count time both by the monthly cycle of the moon and the seasonal cycle of the sun.
Then consider the day. Days normally have one identifiable beginning, whether this is at nightfall or daybreak or – as in the West – somewhere between. For calendar purposes, the Jewish day begins at nightfall (“And it was evening and it was morning, one day”). But if we look at the structure of the prayers – the morning prayer instituted by Abraham, afternoon by Isaac, evening by Jacob – there is a sense in which the worship of the day starts in the morning, not the night before.
וַיֹּאמֶר יְ-הוָה אֶל מֹשֶׁה וְאֶל אַהֲרֹן בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם לֵאמֹר. הַחֹדֶשׁ הַזֶּה לָכֶם רֹאשׁ חֳדָשִׁים רִאשׁוֹן הוּא לָכֶם לְחָדְשֵׁי הַשָּׁנָה. דַּבְּרוּ אֶל כָּל עֲדַת יִשְׂרָאֵל לֵאמֹר בֶּעָשֹׂר לַחֹדֶשׁ הַזֶּה וְיִקְחוּ לָהֶם אִישׁ שֶׂה לְבֵית אָבֹת שֶׂה לַבָּיִת...
And the LORD spoke unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying: ’This month shall be unto you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you. Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: On the tenth day of this month you shall take, every man, a lamb, according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household; ...
(1) החודש הזה לכם ראש חדשים, from now on these months will be yours, to do with as you like. [you have My authority to organise your own calendar. Ed.] This is by way of contrast to the years when you were enslaved when you had no control over your time or timetable at all. [Freedom, i.e. means being able to formulate one’s own timetable. Ed.] While you were enslaved, your days, hours, minutes even, were always at the beck and call of your taskmasters. Therefore, this is the first of the months of the year, since this begins your time of freedom.