LET THERE BE LIGHT

Every year, as we begin Bereishit, we stand again before the mystery of creation.
The Torah opens not with a commandment, nor with the history of Israel, but with a vision of a universe coming into being through Divine speech: “Vayomer Elokim, Yehi Or — and God said, let there be light.”

This week, a new book published in Britain, God: The Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, invites readers to revisit that same mystery through the lens of contemporary science. The authors are not rabbis or theologians but lay thinkers and scientists who draw on modern cosmology, quantum physics, and biology to argue that the more we discover about the universe, the more its coherence, precision, and beauty seem to point beyond chance. The astonishing fine-tuning of the constants of nature, the improbable emergence of life, and the unity of the physical laws — all these suggest that creation bears the marks of intention. In their words, science has not pushed God aside; it has illuminated the depth of the question.

For us, Bereishit is not a physics textbook. Yet its opening verses express a truth that modern science, in its own way, now echoes: existence is not self-explanatory. The more light we cast into the cosmos, the more we encounter wonder. The universe is intelligible — but why should it be intelligible at all, unless mind precedes matter?

Jewish thought, too, has long refused to see conflict between scientific discovery and divine creation. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (d. 1993), one of the great rabbinic thinkers of the twentieth century, wrote that he found no tension between modern scientific theories and the biblical account of creation. In our time, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l expanded this insight in his masterly The Great Partnership, clarifying the different domains of science and religion. He taught: “Science explains how; religion asks why. Science takes things apart; religion puts them together.”

As we roll the Torah back to its beginning, we are invited to hear those ancient words with new ears. “Let there be light” was not only the dawn of physics but the birth of purpose. To live as a Jew, to study creation is itself an act of faith — faith that the world is not absurd, that light can be understood, and that life has meaning.

This week, as the hostages in Gaza are released, we can sense a new light breaking through the long darkness. As their return restores brightness to their lives and their families, may all of us strive to increase the light of Torah in our world.