Our gemara on amud aleph discusses the well-known halachic principle, that even though often a prohibited item can be nullified in a majority or mixture of 60 times, an item whose prohibition can become permitted at some point in time, is not negated or nullified even if it is in a mixture with one thousand permitted parts.  

 

The phrase “even a thousand times”, is not literal. It means in any amount, so to speak, even 1000 times. The Rama (Toras Haolah 3:82) discusses the idea of the number one thousand not being literal, and rather it represents a large number, and uses this rule as an example.  He also discusses the metaphysics of this number.  For example, Bereishis Rabbah (5:4) grapples with the problem of why Adam did not die immediately after eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Hashem warned Adam (Bereishis 2:17): “For on the day you eat of it, you shall die.”  The Midrash answers that Hashem’s day is 1,000 years, and this is why indeed Adam did not live out the “day”, i.e. 1,000 years. How do we know Hashem’s day is 1,000 years? It states in Tehilim (90:4): 

 

For in Your sight a thousand years are like yesterday that has passed, like a watch of the night.

 

The Midrash seems to take this number 1,000 literally, however many commentaries, including Eitz Yosef (Midrash Rabbah ibid) and the above mentioned Rama point out that God has no time, so it is ridiculous to say that God’s day is 1,000 days.  Just as when we say God is strong, we do not mean he is strong in human sense, because that still means a quality or essence that is finite, because strong is a power that is possessed and therefore quantifiable. God is not the strongest in a sense relative to others, as having more strength, but His essence is something that we identify as having a quality of strength in that His power is unlimited. (See Rambam Yesode Hatorah 1:11.) Therefore, Rama asserts that God’s day can mean a long unimaginable time, i.e. infinity.

 

Given that we must acknowledge the apparent age of the universe, just in the fact that we know light from some stars are hundreds of thousands of lightyears away, it makes it difficult to accept that the world is 5784 years old. Some therefore use an approach based on the verse above in Tehilim. Hashem’s day is long (infinite really), and therefore use of time in reference to His actions, merely means a long, long time. If so, we could argue that the six days of creation are in God’s days, and not even 1,000-year days, but much longer. After all, the first days of creation did not have the Sun or Moon, so there was no day, technically. The Ramban (Bereishis 1:3) rejects this idea, and believes the Torah would not have used the term day, unless it literally meant the world was created in six days.

 

Another interesting way to solve this problem is based on a Gemara in Rosh Hashanah (11a) which asserts:

 

All the acts of Creation were created with their full stature, immediately fit to bear fruit; they were created with their full mental capacities; they were created with their full form.

 

If so, we might say that the light from the far away stars and galaxies came front-loaded, so to speak, as if the universe was millions of years old. Additionally, we have an interesting Midrash (Kohelles Rabbah 13:11) which tells us:

 

The Holy One blessed be He created worlds and destroyed them, created worlds and destroyed them, until he created this [world], and said: ‘These please Me and those did not please Me.’

 

So, we might say, any cosmological or paleontological evidence of aspects of the world or the universe that seem older may have stemmed from those prior iterations.  

 

I will conclude this discussion with a powerful thought.  Though God is infinite and unknowable, the Torah allows and encourages us to use symbolic ideas of God that we can grasp, so we can relate to him. We can see him as angry or merciful, and subject to all other relational experiences as far as we are concerned, because it is the best way to understand that he hears our prayers, rewards, punishes, and forgives.  If so, what lesson is there in the Midrash above?  It is to teach us that important projects do not arrive at perfection immediately, and there is much trial and error.  This goes so far as to even say that God’s plans took time to develop and bring out into its best form.