Parshat Yitro
January 25, 2003

In the Revelation at Sinai, Hashem encounters the people of Israel in the arena of history, yet gives them the Torah, which is eternal and outside of history.

Two other seminal historic events are mentioned in the Aseret HaDibrot (Decalogue): the Exodus (in the first commandment to believe in G-d), and the Creation, in the command to sanctify Shabbat:

Remember the Shabbat day to sanctify it. Six days (SHESHET YAMIM) shall you work and do all your creative activity; but the seventh day is Shabbat to Hashem, your G-d; you shall not do any creative activity, not you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your slave, nor your maidservant, nor your beast, nor your stranger that is in your gates. Because six days (SHESHET YAMIM) Hashem made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day. Therefore, Hashem blessed the Shabbat day and He sanctified it (Shemot 20:8-11).

Although SHESHET YAMIM does not include the prepositional prefix “B,” most translations read "in six days . . ." Still, why is there no BET?

Ramban remarks, cryptically:
“I have already written concerning this matter by way of the Truth
[i.e., Kabbalah] on the verse in [the section] ‘and they were completed’
(Bereishit 2:1 ff.). From there, you will succeed in understanding that the expression, ‘Because six days Hashem made’ is not missing the letter BET. Rather, the sense of the verse is that G-d made six days and on the seventh day He ceased from work and rested” (see 31:17).

What does the Ramban mean?

Kesef Mezukak (super-commentary to Ramban by R. Avraham Lieblein) explains the connection. On the verse in Bereishit 2:3, Ramban elucidates that the six days of creation hint at the six thousand-year duration of world history, based on Tehillim 90:4:
“For a thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday when it is past.” The seventh millennium will be the purifying desolation of the Messianic era: it will be wholly a Shabbat and will bring rest for life everlasting. (See Sanhedrin 97a, Avodah Zara 9a and Ramban’s comments to Vayikra 23:36.) In this case, “Because six days Hashem made” means, literally, that Hashem made a "six-day"  that is to say, a six-millennium-world. SHESHET YAMIM therefore alludes to the end of history.

Alternatively, it might be suggested that Ramban is referring to the beginning of history. Rabbenu Bachya (ben Asher ben Hlava, 13th Century) connects this to our verse explicitly: “The ‘six days Hashem made’ are included in the origin [of the universe]. This teaches that time was created. Were it to have said "in six days," it would have indicated that time is pre-existing. According to Rabbenu Bachya, the verse should be read as a list of Hashem’s creations, beginning with the dimension of time:
Because Hashem made six days, the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them . . .

Whether or not Ramban had this in mind in his commentary to our verse, he certainly agrees that time was created, as he states in his commentary to Bereishit 1:5:

“And G-d called the light day.” It says that time was created, and He made the measure of day and the measure of night.

Rambam explains the fundamental concept that time is one of Hashem’s creations in The Guide of the Perplexed (II, 13):

. . . the opinion of all who believe in the Torah of Moshe our Master, peace be on him, is that the world as a whole  I mean to say, every existent other than G-d, may He be exalted  was brought into existence by G-d after having been purely and absolutely non-existent, and that G-d, may He be exalted, had existed alone, and nothing else  neither angel, nor a sphere, nor what subsists within the sphere. Afterwards, through His will and His volition, He brought into existence out of nothing all the beings as they are, time itself being one of the created things.

The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo (c. 20 BCE-c. 50 CE) writes, in "Allegorical Interpretation" (1.2):

It would be correct to say that the world was not made in time, but that time was formed by means of the world, for it was heaven’s movement that was the index of the nature of time. In other words, time is a property of the universe that Hashem created.

Most scientists today subscribe to the theory that observable phenomena point to a beginning of the universe, which they call “the big bang.” According to this, time itself began at “the big bang,” as Stephen Hawking explains in A Brief History of Time (p. 46):

“As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang.”

The Midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 3:8) goes even further:

“Said R. Yehudah son of R. Simon: It is not written here "Let there be evening." Rather, ‘And there was evening’ (Bereishit 1:5). From this, it is learned that there was an order of time before this.” As explained in Etz Yosef (commentary to the Midrash by R. Chanoch Zundel ben Yosef, d. 1867), Hashem first initiated the progress of time, when He wrote the Torah (see Shabbat 88b) and created other worlds and destroyed them (see Bereishit Rabbah 9:2). Afterwards, He brought our universe into existence. Time was created before the creation of the universe.

There is a parallel between our actions and those of Hashem:

“Six days (SHESHET YAMIM) shall you work . . . Because six days (SHESHET YAMIM) Hashem made.” By sanctifying the time of Shabbat in our lives, we emulate Hashem, attesting to our belief in Hashem as Creator of the Universe, and of Time itself.

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