Hidden North and Beginning of the World

This week the Jewish communities begin again the reading of the Bible with Bereishit. The first words of the Torah rise like breath over the still waters: Bereishit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim ve’et ha-aretz (בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ). In the commencement, God created the heavens and the earth. Every year the reading feels new, yet the same. The story is not of a distant past but of present and future creation itself unfolding again.

This year the word Bereishit meets us amid grief and trembling. Some of the hostages have come back; others remain in darkness, and the dead cannot all be found. The first breath of the Torah confronts the wound of breath lost. The same situation affects all the victims of wars worldwide, in particular Ukraine and Russia, The Middle East.

Far from the deserts of Genesis, I have been in contact with the far “North – Tzafon (צָפוֹן)”, the hidden place. In the Torah and the Psalms, Tzafon is both direction and mystery: the concealed region where the unknown gathers, where darkness waits for dawn. In the maps of the modern world it is Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago beyond the Arctic Circle.

The Ice and the Breath

The scientists of the Svalbard University study the ice as if reading the sacred text of nature. Layer after layer, they read the sediments of time: air from the age of mammoths, the thin dust of volcanic winters, the invisible traces of our modern poisons. The ice keeps memory better than any book. It remembers creation – its purity, its cold equilibrium, its patience. When it melts, the world’s memory is released. The waters of the Flood return.

In Hebrew, ruach (רוּחַ) means both wind and spirit. The first movement of creation was not speech but breath – ruach Elohim merachefet al pnei ha-mayim (רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם), the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters. Over the polar seas that breath moves, fragile, endangered. Yet humanity has filled the air with another kind of breath: smoke, anger, and the stench of war.

Languages of the Edge

Once there was Russenorsk, a pidgin of contact spoken by Norwegian and Russian fishermen. Its few surviving words – moja for “I,” basiba for “thanks,” kleba for “bread” – remind us that even at the edge of survival, human beings once found a way to understand one another. That language is gone, yet it witnesses to Commencement itself: meaning born from encounter, light from chaos. This is “universal”.

The War from the North

The Arctic has become a theater of new conflict. Former Soviet citizens return to Pyramiden and Barentsburg, while Western powers claim the same waters in the name of ecology and resource rights. The North becomes the last mirror of the South: a cold battlefield reflecting the heat of other wars.

The war that Russia conducts across the world – openly in Ukraine, covertly in energy networks, in cyberspace, in the politics of fear – finds its natural home in the North. It was from Tzafon, the cold and hidden direction, that biblical destruction was often said to come. “Mi-tzafon tipatach hara’ah” (מִצָּפוֹן תִּפָּתַח הָרָעָה)—“Out of the north an evil shall break forth” (Jeremiah 1:14). The prophets recognized that evil often hides behind distance and grandeur, behind coldness and pride. The North conceals and reveals power at once.

Today’s empire of deceit and militarized piety, of icons mingled with missiles, claims holiness while serving violence. Yet even in its distortion, the same geography holds another secret: the North is also where revelation begins. The Psalmist sings, “Yarketei Tzafon, kiryat Melekh Rav” (יַרְכְּתֵי צָפוֹן, קִרְיַת מֶלֶךְ רָב)—“Mount Zion, on the sides of the North, the city of the great King” (Psalm 48:3). The hidden side of Tzafon is not only judgment but radiance. The moral geography of the North remains ambiguous, as it was in Scripture: both birthplace of aggression and cradle of light.

The Return of the Peoples of Ice

Around the Arctic Circle, ancient peoples once scattered by empire are rising again into visibility – the Inuit, the Nentsy, the Sámi, and others who remember the ways of the ice. Their voices resound quietly from Greenland to Alaska, from the Kola Peninsula back to Siberia, tracing the same invisible circle that now attracts the armies of new empires. From the Baltic and Jan Mayen – where military exercises are constant – to the Faroe Islands and Greenland, and across the Polar Sea to the Alaskan straits, the North is becoming a single contested circumference.

It is as if the submerged memory of creation itself stirs again through these peoples and their lands. Yet the renewal is double-edged: the same forces that awaken ecological consciousness also awaken the rampant ghosts of conquest. Purity becomes again a struggle for mastery. Silence becomes noise. The ancient cry of the earth is caught between rebirth and re-armament, i.e. self-destructive behavior.

Crosses and Empire in the Frozen North

On the Kola Peninsula and across to Svalbard, Russian Orthodox clergy have become agents of a nationalist mysticism that fuses empire and faith. Bishop Iyakov of Narayan-Mar, who appeared in Pyramiden – the ghost town that once was the pride of Soviet industry – erected a giant cross decorated with the black-and-orange ribbon that has become the symbol of Russian expansionism. No permission was granted by Norwegian authorities, yet the act was celebrated as a “blessing of the Arctic.” A month later, the same bishop repeated the gesture in Franz Josef Land, this time in the company of soldiers and members of the Russian Geographical Society.

Another hierarch, Bishop Mitrofan of Murmansk and Monchegorsk, has gone further, declaring that the far-north Norwegian municipality of Sør-Varanger “is our Orthodox land.” Such words transform the Cross from sign of redemption into marker of territorial claim. It is a tragic inversion of meaning: the wood of salvation turned into a boundary post.

Observers from Norway’s UTSYN think tank and the Barents Observer trace these gestures as part of a deliberate state-church campaign to claim spiritual authority over the High North. It echoes the old Pomor trade routes and the imperial fantasy of a “Holy Arctic.” But holiness cannot be annexed. When faith becomes a tool of policy, its light turns cold. The Cross cannot sanctify conquest. It must illumine repentance, love and freedom.

The Hesychast Light

The Orthodox tradition knows this hiddenness through hesychia (ἡσυχία), the silence of the heart. In Hesychast – the practice of inner stillness  – the monk, the faithful descends into silence not to escape the world, but to rediscover the first light within it. “Let there be light” is not a past command but a present revelation.

In the Hesychast vision, the heart of creation is silence. Sigē theou (σιγή Θεοῦ)—the silence of God –  is not absence but fullness beyond sound. The Arctic embodies this silence and persistency. Its vastness purifies speech; its stillness reveals how fragile every word is. For those who seek to hear the divine Word, the North teaches a paradox: only when the world falls silent can the Word be born anew.

Renewal and Moral Entrustment

After the Flood, the earth began again. The dove found a branch, a sign of peace. But the story of Noah is not only about survival; it is about learning to begin again after devastation. Our own age is another post-Flood moment. The seas rise, the wars return, and we struggle to believe that the world can still be renewed. Yet Bereishit reminds us that creation itself began from tohu va-vohu (תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ), from chaos and void. The divine act was not destruction but ordering – giving form to what was formless, drawing light out of darkness.

To begin again requires moral clarity. Humanity is commanded to be shomrei adamah (שׁוֹמְרֵי אֲדָמָה)—guardians of the earth. The Talmud teaches that when the Holy One showed Adam all of the creation, He said, “See My works, how fine they are… take care that you do not destroy My world, for if you destroy it, there will be none to repair it” (Kohelet Rabbah 7:13). The Gospel echoes the same trust: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). Both traditions affirm the same truth: creation is not possession but covenant.

The hidden North thus becomes a testing ground of conscience. The ice and the silence ask whether we will finally listen to what has been entrusted to us – from Bereishit to the Sermon on the Mount – the moral rhythm of restraint, humility before creation.

Toward the Hidden Beginning

The false crosses of empire and the returning peoples of ice, the vanished language of Russenorsk and the scientists reading glaciers like Scripture – all are parables of our age. One shows how holiness can be betrayed by power, another how speech can become communion, another how memory preserves renewal. Between them stands the task given to us from Bereishit/Heading forward: to choose creation over conquest, dialogue over domination, and to hear again the breath of God moving over the waters of the North.

If we could listen to the Arctic with the ears of the heart, we might hear the same breath that moved over the waters of Genesis. It is not lost; it only waits for silence. And from that silence, the uncreated light will speak again: Yehi or (יְהִי אוֹר). The regions shake, tremble in conflicts in search of new structures, beyond wars and peaceful periods.

At the edges of the world, creation begins anew.