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Back to JTS Torah Online's Main pageGod’s Partners in Torah
Oct 25, 2024 By Robert Harris | Commentary | Bereishit
The ancient rabbinic Sages taught that the people of Israel must consider themselves, שותפיו של הקדוש ברוך הוא במעשה בראשית “God’s partner in the work of creation” (BT, Shabbat 119b and elsewhere). Often overlooked is that reading the Torah’s opening (בראשית ברא אלהים…, which I am deliberatively leaving untranslated for now) demands a similar type of partnership. The reason for this is that the opening of the Torah contains impenetrably difficult syntax. Let us consider the very first verse: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ. If we were to translate this verse literally, and absolutely retaining the order of the words, we would understand it along these lines: “In the beginning of, he-created God (did), heavens and earth . . . ” This is a far cry from the affecting cadence of the majestic King James Bible’s translation, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The question is, given the difficult syntax, what does this verse “actually” mean?
Read MoreAn Anthology of Beginnings
Oct 13, 2023 By Benjamin D. Sommer | Commentary | Bereishit
The Torah seems to begin twice, in a way not paralleled by any other creation narrative from the ancient Near East. It uses the conventions of ancient literature in a new way. By beginning twice, the Torah announces what sort of a work it intends to be: it is less a book than an anthology, a compendium of numerous viewpoints and competing teachings.
Read MoreThe World of Creation in Each of Us
Oct 21, 2022 By Israel Gordan | Commentary | Bereishit
One of the most well-known, and controversial, passages in the Torah comes after God creates man and woman: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea the birds of the sky, and all living things that creep on earth’” (Gen. 1:28).
Read MoreIs the World a Mirror?
Oct 1, 2021 By Dianne Cohler-Esses | Commentary | Bereishit
The God of the Torah is driven by loneliness, by a desire to be in relationship with humanity and to God’s chosen people, Israel. As Abraham Joshua Heschel says (quoted by Michael Lerner in his book Jewish Renewal), “God’s dream is not to be alone, but to have humankind as a partner in the drama of continuous creation” (vi). Out of a great loneliness God emerges from royal solitude to create a world and within it humanity as a partner for God.
Read MoreBeginning, Rebuilding
Oct 16, 2020 By Daniel Nevins | Commentary | Bereishit
Like millions of American children in the 1970s, I tuned in weekly to ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The opening sequence showed skiers gracefully racing down a mountain, and then spectacularly wiping out while the narrator promised viewers “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Something tragic and true was contained in this message. The possibility of calamity makes moments of triumph precious and worth pursuing.
Read MoreDon’t Wait Until Next Week
Oct 25, 2019 By Burton L. Visotzky | Commentary | Bereishit
Authored together with Karenna Gore, Director, Center for Earth Ethics, Union Theological Seminary
The Earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world and all its inhabitants. God founded it upon the oceans and set it on the rivers. (Psalm 24:1-2)
As the Jewish community once more begins its annual reading of the Torah, and as we recount the grandeur of God’s creation, we focus on God’s charge to newly created humanity: “The Lord God took Adam and placed him in the Garden of Eden, to serve and protect it.” (Gen. 2:15, authors’ translations).
Read MoreHere We Go Again!
Oct 5, 2018 By Stephen P. Garfinkel | Commentary | Bereishit
What?! Starting Genesis again? We read it last fall. And we read it the year before that, and the year before that. How many times do we need to hear, “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth” (or “When God began to create . . .,” or the even better known, but less accurate, translation, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth . . .”)? Really, don’t we already know that the first chapter of the Torah announces to all readers and listeners that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day?
Read MoreA Year Without Second Chances
Oct 11, 2017 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Bereishit
One of the greatest gifts that Judaism offers its adherents is multiple opportunities for starting over. The first ten days of the New Year are devoted to teshuvah: repentance, renewal, return to one’s best self and to God. On Simhat Torah, the final day of the fall holiday season, we read the last words in the Torah and then without pause scroll back to the very first word, bereishit, “in the beginning.”
Read MoreReading and Rereading
Oct 28, 2016 By Avi Garelick | Commentary | Bereishit
There’s a good quip about the Jewish people: we’re the longest running book club on the planet. This week, in synagogues and study halls across the world, Jews are rolling the scroll of the Torah back to the beginning and starting again.. This is a different kind of reading than we do in other spheres of our lives. We read books, articles, and stories at specific times. They could be life-changing—we might return to those texts and re-read them—or they could quickly be forgotten. Some people will do that more than once, at which point they have become either fans or scholars, giving those texts a place of privilege in the formation of their individual identity.
Read MoreAleph: The First Breath
Oct 28, 2016 By JTS Alumni | Commentary | Bereishit
By Joshua Hooper (DS ’17)
My artwork is inspired by the opening verses of Bereishit, when God’s first breath calls forth light (יהי אור) out of the darkness (Gen. 1:3). This holy light (shown in blue) is timeless—the first manifestation of God’s will. The Aleph is depicted as emerging out of the darkness surrounding it while the holy light is concealed within it. The essence of this light radiates outwards (towards the lower worlds, which are expressed by the three colors that surround the Aleph’s form). The light transcends all levels of Creation.
Read MoreAn Anthology of Beginnings
Oct 9, 2015 By Benjamin D. Sommer | Commentary | Bereishit
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” These opening words of the Torah in most translations are clear, straightforward, and well known. But they don’t render the Hebrew original correctly. As Rashi already pointed out, the first verse of the Torah is not, by itself, a grammatical sentence. Instead, it is part of a longer sentence that continues through the end of verse three.
Read MoreMinding Our Words
Oct 17, 2014 By Anne Lapidus Lerner | Commentary | Bereishit
On Simhat Torah, we complete the reading of the humash—all 79,796 Hebrew words of it—and when we’re done, what do we do? We roll it up to the very beginning and start to read it all over again. Words, words, words. Devarim (Deuteronomy)—which, of course, means “words”—ends with Moses’s death after the conclusion of his lengthy final oration; Bereishit opens with God demonstrating the power of words by creating the world with them.
Read MoreMortals and Immortals
Oct 17, 2014 By Benjamin D. Sommer | Commentary | Bereishit
We human beings tend not to see something that doesn’t fit our preconceived notions, including when we read the Torah.
Read MoreBereishit with a Capital Bet
Sep 22, 2013 By David Marcus | Commentary | Bereishit
With this week’s parashah, we once again commence the cycle of reading the Torah from the first chapter of Genesis, which begins with the Hebrew word bereishit.
Read MoreMastery = Harmony
Sep 22, 2013 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Bereishit
This coming Shabbat, we return to the beginning of Torah with Parashat Bereishit.
Read MoreThe Myths of Creation
Oct 12, 2012 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Bereishit
With the celebration of this coming Shabbat, we return to the beginning—specifically, to the narrative of Creation.
Read MoreWho’s the Hero and Who’s the Villain?
Oct 10, 2012 By Richard Kalmin | Commentary | Bereishit
To state things up front, my claim is that Adam and Eve did not just undergo a fall, but also a significant rise; to make that claim, I’m going to argue that two of the main characters, the snake and God, have often been misunderstood. The snake has gotten a bum rap, and God has usually gotten off much too easily.
Read MoreReason Versus Faith
Oct 22, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Bereishit
If the ancients worried to prove God’s existence, the challenge of Darwinian evolution posed an even greater threat: counterevidence to the biblical account of Creation. In the postmodern era, we Jews-in-the-center find ourselves oddly caught in the middle of a debate portrayed in the news media as between those who insist literally on the biblical account and those who reject it altogether.
Read MoreCreation and Good Health
Oct 22, 2011 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Bereishit | Simhat Torah
With this week’s celebration of Simhat Torah and Shabbat Bereishit, we return to the very beginning of Torah as we read anew the narratives of Creation, the Garden of Eden, and the tragedy of Cain and Abel.
Read MoreThe Universal and Particular Nature of Creation
Oct 22, 2011 By Andrew Shugerman | Commentary | Bereishit
Shortly after Rosh Hashanah this year, Jewish extremists torched a mosque in an Arab-Israeli village in the Galilee, damaging the building and destroying its holy books. Two days later, a rabbinic statement condemning this desecration of a house of worship on Israeli soil garnered the signatures of more than a thousand rabbis of all denominations within 36 hours of the document’s publication. One of my former JTS classmates, however, explained with great disappointment why he did not add his name to this effort.
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