An 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.
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Creation As Preparation for Sinai
Oct 21, 2006 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Bereishit
Why did the Torah begin where it does, at the very Beginning, rather than with the first commandment given the children of Israel, which comes well into the Book of Exodus?
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Minding 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.
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Mortals 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.
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