According to a tradition cited by Rashi, all that would ever be created was created in potential on the first day. Each succeeding day of creation revealed that which had already been created in potential on the first day. The notion of all creation being contained in, and emanating from, an initial starting point has been reflected in modern physics in the Standard Model of the Universe, which begins with the Big Bang. According to this model, the entire universe composed of tens of billions of galaxies, was contained in an almost infinitely small and condensed speck of quasi-matter that “exploded” and to this day is still expanding—a scientific equivalent of the rabbinic tradition that all that would ever be created existed in potential on the first day of Creation, described as “one day” in the Torah because it was a singular and self-perpetuating day, which included all the other days as well. This tradition thus applies contraction-as-condensing to Creation.
The Torah’s first verse, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” contains all that was created on the first day in archetypal form. The heavens are an archetype for everything spiritual that would ever come into existence, and the earth is an archetype for all things material that would ever emerge.
The opening verse of the Torah contains the letter alef six times, which according to the sages alludes to the six thousand years of our current state of reality before the coming of the Messianic era because the name of the letter alef can also be read as elef, which means “a thousand.”
Another example of contraction-as-condensing is evident in the Torah’s first word, Bereishit (בראשית), which can also be read as the phrase, “He created six” (ברא שית), referring to the six days of creation that in potential already exist in the first day.
One final insight regarding contraction-as-condensing relates to the unusually large letter beit found in a Torah scroll as the Torah’s very first letter, the first letter of Bereishit (בראשית). The gematria of the letter beit is 2, which symbolizes the transition from the absolute oneness of God pre-creation to the apparent world of duality and opposites that is found everywhere in our finite reality. Our task is to reveal the oneness of God that still permeates all apparent duality.
