Bereshit! Again!

On Simchat Torah this year (Tuesday Oct. 9) we finished reading the entire Five Books of Moses and rolled the Torah scroll back to the first of the Five Books, Bereshit/In the Beginning, more commonly known by its Latin name, Genesis.  This Shabbat, October 13, our parasha (weekly Torah reading) is called Shabbat Bereshit, and we start the annual reading cycle over again with Genesis chapter 1 verse 1.  I don’t know about you, but I think new beginnings are exciting in and of themselves, partly because we have an expectation that something new and surprising is going to unfold.

No matter that we may have read these verses before — in fact, we may have read them many times. And no matter that echoes of these verses have entered our lexicon and the consciousness of Western Civilization. After all, here is the biblical creation story — the poetic rendering of the way our world began. This is where we here sonorous, lofty phrases such as “Let there be Light!” This is where we meet some of the best known Bible figures: Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel and Noah.  Lots of us have memories of these guys from our childhood, from the comic book version of the Bible, or a beautifully rendered children’s book.

These first five chapters and the first 8 verses of chapter 6 are so chock full of interesting things — so many puzzles, so many questions, so much angst and drama and so many beautiful images — that it is really hard to focus on just one thing.  In fact, the creators of the G-dcast produced TWO renditions of this Parasha; watch both — each has different big ideas!

Chapter 1 gives us the famous creation story. But right away, in chapter 2, we get another creation story!  How does that happen? What are the differences between these two stories? Which do you like more?  Why do you suppose that the editors of the Torah kept both stories?  Chapter 3 gives us the story of the Garden of Eden, and how the two humans interacted with their new pristine environment, with each other, and with God.  In Chapter 4 we read more about this first human family, the two sons born to the first couple, and the first murder!  Chapter 5 provides the first biblical genealogy, which some folks think has lots of fascinating tidbits to chew on.  And in the first verses of Chapter 6, we get the set-up to the flood saga…

Doesn’t it seem like this should be divided into at least a month of Shabbat readings instead of all being packed into one week??

Lots of people have favorite parts in Parashat Bereshit. I happen to love verses 27 and 28 of Chapter 1:

And God created adam (human) in the Divine image,
in the image of the Divine God created It —
male and female God created them (gender sensitive translation)
God blessed them and God said to them:  “Be fruitful and increase
fill the earth and master it; rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky
and all living things that creep on the earth.”

Why?  Well, it embodies a core Jewish belief—that each human is created in the image of God, and, at the very beginning, the first human was both male and female, some mystical androgynous being that later was separated.

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