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Back to JTS Torah Online's Main pageA New Purpose to the Creation Story
Oct 12, 1996 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Bereishit
It happens every year: A fresh, slow reading of the Torah brings to light things I had not noticed before. Like Hagar lost in the wilderness with her son Ishmael, I failed to see the well which had always been there till God opened my eyes (Genesis 21:19). No chapter of the Torah is more familiar to me than the first, with its compressed and majestic story of the creation of the world. And yet here I sit astir with insights that eluded me till now.
Read MoreIsaiah Berlin and Kant
Oct 21, 1995 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Bereishit
I like Isaiah Berlin’s favorite quotation from Kant: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.”
Read MoreThe Profundity of Genesis
Oct 1, 1994 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Bereishit
The Torah’s story of creation is not intended as a scientific treatise, worthy of equal time with Darwin’s theory of evolution in the curriculum of our public schools. The notes it strikes in its sparse and majestic narrative offer us an orientation to the Torah’s entire religious worldview and value system. Creation is taken up first not because the subject has chronological priority but rather to ground basic religious beliefs in the very nature of things. And I would argue that their power is quite independent of the scientific context in which they were first enunciated.
Read MoreBack to the Beginning
Oct 9, 1993 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Bereishit
Back to the beginning! Without losing a step, we move from the death of Moses back to the story of creation. Israel circles the Torah much as the earth does the sun, with Simhat Torah to mark the moment when one cycle ends and the next begins. From its light we draw our wisdom, our identity, our cohesion as a people. To hear it read weekly in the synagogue is to keep the experience of Sinai alive. But we need to prepare ourselves or else the power of the event will elude us. Hence, the study of the parasha should be the religious curriculum of our week.
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