But the Lubavitcher Rebbe rightly asked: what does a man of science mean when he says in kiddush, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens,” etc.? And likewise regarding the commandment of the Sabbath. What do you, Rabbi, really think—or what tip would you recommend for what to have in mind in “who sanctifies the Sabbath” and when we say this text? This is a question of the intention of the commandment, of speaking falsehood before God, and so on. It’s not just an abstract question about information located somewhere in the Torah scroll. It’s a practical question!

Before you ask what we should have in mind in kiddush, ask how we should understand the Torah. What did the Torah itself mean when it spoke about creation in six days? That’s what I also mean in kiddush. The creation of the world in six metaphorical days. In other words, I mean that He created the world, and it really doesn’t matter in how many days.

But you specifically rest on the seventh day. There’s a certain strain in this feeling of a general metaphorical intention from which we derive a very concrete, tightly delimited practical commandment—whose very definition is its essence: the seventh day, specifically. In addition, and on the other hand: your general intention about the creation of the world could also work well on another level—in the observance of the Torah as a whole. I keep the commandments not because of one moment when God descended before the eyes of the whole people and was revealed at Sinai, but because that is only a metaphor for the cumulative experience of revelation among the Jews in the days of the First Temple—of prophets and sages and priests who drew inspiration from Moses, etc., and from the movement of prophecy and law that he generated—until the nation as a whole came to accept belief in the possibility of collective revelation before all. That acceptance could have occurred at covenantal ceremonies like the covenant of Josiah and Ezra. That is to say: the very trust of the people of Israel in the myth of Mount Sinai is itself Mount Sinai. It is a revelation of God in the hearts of the believing Jews—from then until today—that prophecy is democratic and that all Israel are under His providence. Such a belief is not found among other nations. This is a metaphorical conception of the unique event of Mount Sinai, and only one example out of many one could imagine. A conception that accepts the conclusions such an event would generate without accepting its factuality. It accepts the heteronomous authority of the commandments without accepting the concrete event that authorizes them. And the same applies to the creation of the world as you believe in it: just as creation in six days is a metaphor for the religious conclusion that God stands behind the process of the world’s creation (where six days might be interpreted, on the one hand, as a very short time, and on the other hand as a deliberate process. A very short time, meaning relative to God’s great power, by which He easily created the world, as if within a few days; and on the other hand, He didn’t just spray it out of His sleeve as some artistic whim. Rather, He had intention in the matter, and therefore in the first three days He created the area that was populated, in full parallel, in the next three, as Cassuto famously explained)—even though He did not do so as depicted in the Torah, so too the event at Sinai functions as a metaphor for the fact that God stands behind the phenomenon of the Jewish world of commandments and prophecy, even if in practice these were given by Him through a long historical process. This is an argument you do not accept in the Fifth Notebook, despite the conceptual similarity between them. I would add that in kiddush the difficulty is even greater, because with your own words you are forced to proclaim before your family the reason for the commandment, which is not correct (“for in six days…”); unlike observance of the commandments, where you are not forced to declare that you keep them because of the revelation at Sinai. (The Bible scholar Baruch Schwartz even “proved” this in his article on the meaning of the event at Sinai: according to biblical scholarship, they observed one commandment or another even before the story of Sinai was accepted. Meaning: the story provides authority for commandments that were already observed without it; it does not generate them. Later I’ll quote him, God willing.) In my view, the peace of mind involved in saying kiddush is illusory—and on this point the Lubavitcher Rebbe was very right (even if he did not offer a satisfactory solution).

Indeed, if it were possible to see the event at Mount Sinai as a metaphor for some other giving of the Torah, there would be no problem with that. I just don’t think there was another giving of the Torah. Torah has to be given from Heaven in order to have authority. If you propose that it was given from Heaven in some other way, I have no problem with that.
I don’t see any problem in saying in kiddush that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world in six days. Those are six stages or whatever, and that is what is meant. I didn’t understand what is bad about that in your view.
As for the questions of when the myth of Mount Sinai was accepted, and whether the commandments were observed before it or not—I don’t accept that. These are speculations of biblical scholarship, and I do not attribute much authority to them. Therefore all the conclusions based on it have no real substance in my opinion. And even if someone sometime did observe the commandments without the event at Sinai, I disagree with him (that is, I would not keep them that way).

With God’s help, 28 Tevet 5777

To Gilad—greetings,

The use of “day” to mean an extended period is common in the Bible. A year is called “days,” as it says: “Let the girl stay with us days or ten.” When the Torah promises, “that your days may be long upon the land” and “that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied,” it is speaking of generations upon generations. Likewise, in the words of the prophets who prophesy about “that day,” “the day of the Lord,” one can simply understand that a period is meant. Why, then, can we not say the same regarding the account of creation, which is among the secrets of the Torah, concerning which “the glory of God is to conceal a matter” (as explained in Igrot HaRe’iyah 191), that the Torah uses days as a metaphor for periods? And see in the book of the physicist Prof. Nathan Aviezer, In the Beginning, an explanation of the periods represented by the six days of creation.

By contrast, regarding the event at Mount Sinai, this was an event that took place before six hundred thousand people, whose eyes saw the thunder and torches and whose ears heard the voice of God speaking from the fire; they themselves attained the level of prophecy, and therefore believed in the prophecy of Moses and undertook upon themselves and their descendants: “All that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will hear.”

It is the Torah’s way throughout the whole book of Genesis to describe in “general and particular”: a general description of what happened, followed by a focus on the details important in the Torah’s eyes. Thus there is a general description of the creation of the world and then a focus on man; a general description of ten generations and then a focus on Noah; a general description of ten generations and then a focus on Abraham and his descendants.

And so the Torah passes swiftly over the creation of the inanimate world, vegetation, and animal life, and focuses on the rational human being, the “speaker,” whom the Torah came to straighten and guide—the rational human being who appeared on the stage of history, according to the researchers as well, only about six thousand years ago (as explained in the book of archaeologist Dr. Yitzhak Mייטליס, Parashat Derakhim, which explains Torah portions in light of archaeological research. Meitlis follows this idea in the footsteps of zoologist Prof. Mordechai Kislev).

With blessings,
S. Z. Levinger

And even so, the possibility that the world was created literally in six actual days is not unfounded, for all the datings proposed by researchers are based on the assumption that the rate of natural processes is constant. But from our own flesh we can see that this is not so. At the beginning of our formation, we developed from a microscopic cell into a creature dozens of centimeters long in the “meteoric” time of nine months. From then on, as time passes, the rate of development decreases.

One may assume that if a researcher from another world encountered an adult human being and measured the changes in his size from year to year, which are on the order of a few millimeters, that researcher would conclude that it took his subject hundreds or thousands of years to reach his current size 🙂

Thank you very much for your responses, Rabbi Michi and Rabbi Levinger. I’ll reply briefly now. About what Rabbi Michi wrote, this is what I’m talking about: “I don’t see any problem in saying in kiddush that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world in six days. Those are six stages or whatever, and that is what is meant. I didn’t understand what is bad about that in your view.” But you do not think the world was created in six stages, because we would be forcing science if we were to think that. There simply are no six stages, and Aviezer’s lack of success testifies to that (this is addressed to you, Rabbi Levinger. Just look at the strained interpretation on the fifth day with its “great” sea monsters, and the lack of order compared to reality in the fourth day, where the luminaries were created only after the plants on the third).

So there are no six stages, and we have no choice but to interpret the matter metaphorically—but then we are lying when we infer that therefore, because the world was supposedly created in six “stages” and on the seventh stage God rested, therefore we also imitate Him and rest specifically on the seventh. As I wrote, this is the plain meaning of the words: “You shall not do any labor… for in six days… and on the seventh day He rested.” Therefore it seems to me that not accepting the meaning of six days / stages, and at the same time sanctifying the Sabbath by speaking about that same content, is a problem. And it seems to me that what you wrote on the matter, Rabbi Michi, does not fit your normative conception of the Torah’s stories, because it suddenly glances toward historical meaning—as though there really were six stages in the creation of the world, heaven forbid.
As for the matter of the event at Mount Sinai and its metaphorical plausibility, I’ll write more later.
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Fine, we have a dispute, and there is no point going over it again and again. I truly see no problem with it.
He created the world in the way described in the book of Genesis, metaphorical or not, six stages or not. That is what is meant. I also see no difference between interpreting the Torah and saying kiddush. Whatever the Torah meant, that is what is meant in kiddush.
My view of the Bible is that it has normative messages, but that does not contradict the interpretation that this is about six stages. Whether there were such stages or not, one should relate to creation as something done in six stages. The division into stages is in the eye of the beholder (depending on what is defined as a stage), so I do not see how you can determine so categorically that there were no six stages. But none of that matters, as I said, because the six stages can be historical or merely a division for the purposes of the message.

With God’s help, 29 Tevet 5777

To Gilad—greetings,

Any historical scheme that divides history into periods must by its nature simplify a complex reality. But broadly speaking, the picture that emerges both from science and from the Torah’s creation story is of a world developing in stages: the creation of the universe; the formation of the solar system (“the firmament”); the formation of vegetation; the stabilization of the seasons; the formation of sea creatures, winged creatures, land creatures and mammals; and finally rational man (In the Beginning, p. 134).

The “fourth day” does not describe, according to Prof. Aviezer (pp. 54–57), the beginning of the creation of the solar system (that occurred in the second stage—the creation of the firmament), but rather its completion and stabilization: the stabilization of the relations of distance and revolution of the earth, sun, and moon, which brought about a pleasant and stable climate with regular seasons that allow the stable existence of life, and fixed time cycles that enable the formation of human civilization.

Prof. Aviezer identifies the “great sea monsters” (pp. 93–94) with the giant Ediacaran creatures of the Precambrian period, which appeared and disappeared, and after their disappearance the world was filled with a huge variety of marine creatures—“every living creature that creeps, with which the waters swarmed.”

I would say that the great sea monsters need not precede the other marine creatures, but rather live alongside them. Just as in the “host of heaven” there are “great luminaries” and around them masses of stars, so too in the “host of the waters” there are large creatures and small ones as well.

With blessings,
S. Z. Levinger

With God’s help, eve of the New Moon of Shevat 5777

The creation story is a story of organizing the world, bringing it out of a state of chaos and void and preparing it to become “the lands of life.”

Every reorganization begins by separation into components: separation between light and darkness, between a time for action and creation and a time for rest and reflection; recognizing the raw materials needed for the process—water and air, land and food; and recognizing the instrument that will carry the process out: the two luminaries, which by the cycles of their revolution create the frameworks of time and the seasons, and the greater luminary—which radiates light and heat, activates together with the plants the process of photosynthesis that produces oxygen for breathing, and by means of the changes of heat and cold in the seasons activates the water cycle in nature, evaporating the seawater in the hot season and returning it to the earth in the rainy season.

When there is proper infrastructure, diverse life can appear, with man the organizer and leader at the center, and his battery charger—the Sabbath day—on which he reorganizes himself, gathers strength and insights, and refreshes his connection with his Creator, who gives him the power and wisdom to prosper, enabling him to continue in the next six weekdays with the work of organizing and improving.

With blessings,
S. Z. Levinger

With God’s help, 2 Shevat 5777

The creation story mocks the mythological heroes.
The sun and the moon descend from the top of the pantheon, from the top of the pyramid, and find themselves as ordinary created beings, somewhere between “the grass of the field” and “the creeping creature with which the waters swarmed.” Even the “great sea monsters” swim in pastoral calm together with “creeping things without number, small creatures with great ones.” And so man was created on one day together with his counterparts—beast, creeping thing, and the land-animal of its kind—whom he will lead as first among equals, together with his partner, the woman. All of them alike are soldiers in the host of heaven and in the host of earth, obeying the commands of the “one and only Master of the house—the Master of the universe!”

With blessings,
S. Z. Levinger