Words matter. Words can create or destroy — a life, a reputation, a relationship, a movement, a moment. And words can create worlds. 

The first words spoken in our world were, “Let there be light. And there was light.” (Genesis 1:3) Creation here occurs not through destruction or war or fighting or conflict, but through words. 

The God of the Bible is not primarily a God who fights, who parents, who is rock-solid, who is peaceful or who is violent. The God of our sacred Scripture is a God of words, a God who speaks. Yes, God acts in other ways and other capacities, but those are more the exception than the norm. The standard, most common way for God to act in the Bible is through speech. 

This may have been a significant departure from other contemporaneous Near Eastern theologies and cosmologies that understood gods as warriors more than talkers, the “Women’s Torah Commentary” points out.

The world begins by God speaking and, slowly, throughout the biblical narrative, God speaks less and less, to fewer people, more indirectly, eventually through dreams and prophecies, until the postbiblical era, when God’s voice is no longer heard in the direct way the Bible describes. 

The rabbis of the Talmud rarely hear God’s voice, but rather, only an echo of it, called in Hebrew a bat kol, which literally means “the daughter of a voice.” Maybe we no longer merit to hear God’s voice directly, or perhaps we would not be able to handle that intensity. Or maybe we can no longer hear at the frequency God’s voice speaks and can hear only the echoesthereof. 

Or, perhaps, everything God has ever needed to say God has already said, and sometimes we hear the echo of the words that are needed for that moment. 

If you are having trouble imagining what God’s voice sounds like and what God’s mouth looks like when speaking, and how God speaks in human words, you’re in good company. We often compare God to a human, so as to make God more understandable to us, but then we find ourselves puzzled that we’ve imagined a God so much like us, when God cannot be anything like us and still be God. 

While there are many interpretations of Torah that anthropomorphize God, describing God with human attributes, there are many others that push us back in the other direction. 

God did not speak and create light, says one midrash (Genesis Rabbah 3:1). Rather, it was just God beginning to speak, not the actual words, that created light. The prooftext for this is a verse from Psalms: “The opening of Your words illuminates, granting understanding to the simple” (Psalms 119:130). The very beginning of God speaking created the effulgence, the flowing out of light. 

Perhaps for God, the words actually matter less. But we need the words. We need God’s words, and we need our own, to continue to create light and to shine light where it is most needed. 

May we each find the words to create the light we, those around us and our world need this new year. 

Rabbi Noah Arnow serves Kol Rinah and is a member of the St. Louis Rabbinical Association.