If G-d’s light is eternal how can it be that in the first words of the Torah it says “in the beginning” ?

Hi! Thank you for your fascinating question. I have to tell you that these kinds of issues are really hard. The closer you get to the beginning of “Genesis”, “the beginning”, the more fundamental are the issues involved. And you’re asking about the very first word, the most fundamental place in the entire Torah. Anyhow, I’ll tell you what occurs to me, and that’s all I can ever do with something so complex.

There are two things in existence. One is G-d, the other is his creation. G-d is infinite, his creation is finite. He is wholly non-physical, but his creation is a bridge between the spiritual and the physical. He is beyond time, but his creation was created in time and exists within time.

Though we are so different, in the beginning G-d created his universe. Somehow he “dimmed” or “cloaked” his light enough to allow a finite world to “exist within it”. Otherwise there would be no “place for it to be”; its finite nature would be extinguished by his infinite one. As you can see, I’m going to run out of quotation marks. That’s what happens when we try to describe infinite events in a way that we finite creations can understand them a little bit.

Anyhow, I would guess that this is why the Torah begins with “in the beginning”. It’s describing the creation of the finite, of the limited, which is fundamental to having a universe.

Best wishes,
Michoel Reach