On the Need for Separation
Separation is a central motif in creation – a condition for order, life, and development
Biblical quotations: JPS 1917 (public domain). The original Hebrew is provided for reference.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. And God said: ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ. וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל פְּנֵי תְהוֹם, וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם. וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים: "יְהִי אוֹר" – וַיְהִי אוֹר. וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת הָאוֹר כִּי טוֹב, וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ. וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר – יוֹם, וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לָיְלָה. וַיְהִי עֶרֶב וַיְהִי בֹקֶר יוֹם אֶחָד. (בראשית א', א-ה)
God created light and saw that it was good. We might expect Him to keep the light and eliminate the darkness – the pre-existing evil – but that is not what He did. Instead, He left the darkness in place and simply separated it from the light.
The separation of distinct entities is a central motif throughout the creation story. God separates light from darkness, day from night, the waters above the firmament from those below it, and sea from dry land. Separation is a fundamental principle of creation and of the world’s functioning, serving two main purposes.
First, separation gives a role and a purpose even to something that seems negative in itself. Separating light from darkness, for example, creates the cycle of day and night – a cycle essential for regulating biological rhythms, maintaining ecological balance, measuring time, and regulating temperature. Darkness, seemingly an absolute negation, becomes an essential part of the system.
Second, separation reduces entropy – the degree of disorder and uncertainty in a system. It thereby creates order in the universe and allows each entity to realize its potential and develop independently. In the creation account, the very emergence of life depends on separation and the definition of distinct spaces: plants can grow only after the waters gather in one place and dry land appears (Genesis 1:11); the waters, too, teem with life only after the sea has been separated from the land and its boundaries established (Genesis 1:20). Only once the world is divided into distinct domains – sea and land – can life emerge within them.
Separation makes possible “second-order creation,” another recurring motif in the creation account. God does not Himself create the plants, fish, birds, and animals; He commands the earth and the seas to bring forth life from within themselves. God initiates the process through separation, giving the entities He has separated the capacity to continue developing on their own. In fact, God creates very few things “out of nothing.” His principal activity during the six days of creation is to establish distinctions and separations – those that make further development possible.
Sometimes separation itself leads to something new that exists in neither component alone. Humanity, for example, is created male and female. It is precisely this distinction that makes relationship, love, and the creation of new life possible. Neither the male alone nor the female alone can bring forth new life; only their encounter, grounded in difference and complementarity, creates a third entity that existed in neither.
The idea that separation enables life to develop appears elsewhere in the Torah. In the story of the Tower of Babel, people attempt to speak one language and live within a single uniform culture in one concentrated place. God’s response is to scatter them across the earth in a way that allows cultural diversity (Genesis 11:1–9). Even Jacob’s separation of the flocks proves effective, leading to the increase of the animals counted as his wages (Genesis 30:31–42).
This understanding may also underlie many Torah laws that require distinction and separation – for example, the distinction between impurity and purity, and between Israel and the nations.
Life requires movement, change, development, and a striving toward the good. These can exist only within the space created by the distinction between two poles. Separation does more than divide things; it creates the distance that makes movement, transition, and change possible. Without separation, life and development are impossible, because life itself is movement and becoming. What remains is a uniform, frozen state devoid of vitality.