Ask an Israeli when the new year begins, and you may hear two answers. The calendar says Rosh Hashanah, but “real life” says acharei hachagim, “after the holidays.” That is when every appointment that could not be scheduled, every project put on hold and every “let’s talk after the holidays” comes due at once.
That moment arrived this week. The sukkah has come down, the children are back in school, and the inbox is full again. Now comes the hard part: turning a month of holiday resolutions into actual life.
It is also when many of us feel least ready. The inspiration of the holidays fades quickly, and fresh starts often feel uncertain.
Fittingly, this is also when the Bible starts over. On Simchat Torah, the holiday marking the completion of the yearly cycle of Torah readings, we read the last verses of Deuteronomy and rolled the scroll right back to Genesis. And the very first chapter has something to say about uncertain beginnings.
Each day of creation closes with the same refrain:
Evening first, then morning. That is not how most of us experience a day. We wake up with energy, work through the afternoon, and wind down as the sun sets. In our minds, morning is the start and night is the finish.
The Bible turns that order upside down. In fact, Shabbat and Jewish holidays all begin at sundown.
Why would God design His world so that every day begins in the dark?
The simplest answer is chronological. Before God spoke the first light into being, “darkness was over the surface of the deep” (Genesis 1:2), so the first day naturally started at night.
The medieval commentator Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra looked closely at the Hebrew words for evening and morning. He explains that erev, “evening,” comes from the root meaning “mixture,” because at that hour all the shapes blend together. Boker, “morning,” is its opposite, the time when a person can levaker, distinguish one shape from another (Ibn Ezra on Genesis 1:5).
Evening, then, means more than the absence of light. It describes a state of confusion, when nothing has yet taken its proper shape. Morning brings clarity.
This is the lesson built into the order of the biblical day. Life tends to unfold the same way. Many of the most important things we do begin in confusion, when we cannot yet see how the pieces fit together, and only later come into focus. By making every day move from evening to morning, God placed that truth at the foundation of creation. The confusion comes first, and the clarity follows.
King David, who knew many hard nights, wrote:
David does not deny the weeping. He only insists that morning follows it.
Our own beginnings often work the same way. A new job, a new home, a new school year. Hebrew has a saying for it: kol hatchalot kashot, “all beginnings are hard” (Rashi on Exodus 19:5). In Ibn Ezra’s terms, every beginning is an erev. The shapes have not yet separated, and we cannot quite tell what we are looking at. It is easy to take that confusion as a sign that something has gone wrong.
Genesis suggests otherwise. In the Bible, every day starts in the dark, so a confusing beginning is simply the first half of the day. Every day starts in the evning, but we trust the morning to follow.
So if these first weeks after the holidays feel more like erev than boker, with the shapes still blurred together, don’t be discouraged. That is how every day in the Bible begins. And just as on the very first day of creation, the morning will follow.
