World of Thought

There’s something that has always bothered me about the Torah’s account of creation. “Let there be light” lacks the expressive sensitivity you would expect from the ultimate creative act. It sounds cold and removed.

How about, “And the Creator began to consider the concept of luminance, and as He did, light came into being”?

Or perhaps, “And then a sense of clarity arose in the Supernal Consciousness, and so there was light”?

I suppose what really bothers me is this: Why did the Creator have to speak in order to create? Wouldn’t it be so much more wonderful if we were all just a thought?

Actually, we are. That’s how things started off. And that’s what we connect into on the day of Shabbat.

You see, first there was a World of Thought. The written Torah doesn’t start with that world. The Torah begins with a beit—the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It starts at the second part of the story. But at first there was a world that just emanated out of thought—and never left that place.

The second part of the story is when all those thoughts descended to become a concrete world. A place that seems separate from its Creator, outside of its source. Like speech: Your words travel outside of you and become part of someone else.

That’s the world we live in for six days. A world that pretends to have no source. We try to push it around a little, it pushes us around a lot, and we both pretend that this is a real and autonomous world. That there is a world, and there is us, and we are all separate things.

But then, on the seventh day, the Creator let into this world a taste of that higher plane of the “World of Thought.” We tune into it by no longer pushing anything around—or letting anything else push us around. We don’t change anything. We don’t create anything. We don’t make fires, we don’t cook food, we don’t stink up the air with carbon monoxide or make cyberspace connections. We only meditate, contemplate and enjoy. We get a feel of a world that is no more than a single, vast, expressive and wondrous thought.

And then we return to the other six days. But we’ve already experienced this world’s hidden truth. We can see through its facade. We can rip it away. We can draw on that higher plane to illuminate our mundane world.