of the book of Genesis, was about the beginnings of things, how out of the undifferentiated murk, gradually, the forms of things became clear: oceans, skies, heavens, earth, and later animals, plants, fishes, birds and, finally, humans. I learned how certain of its stories were allegories for the way the world is: for instance how the Adam and Eve story explained, among other things, why women must endure the labor of childbirth; how the story of Cain and Abel, which disturbed me so much when I was a boy that I never bothered to learn it properly in Sunday school and hence for a long time afterward was never clear whether it was Cain or Abel who was the “bad” one, explained why there is violence and murder and war in the world. I learned about parashat Noach, the section of Genesis that includes the story of Noah and the Ark, of his terrible wanderings across the face of the earth—which once again would become an undifferentiated mass of water, since God had decided to wash away his own Creation in a fit of annihilating rage that would not be his last—but also includes a genealogy of Noah’s descendants, focusing, with increasing intensity as the narrative progresses, on one family in particular, and then on one man, Abram. I learned how Abram’s trek across the known world in search of the land that God has promised to him, an epic wandering that is recounted in the parashah called Lech Lecha (“Go Forth!”), forces him, in the end, not only to pass through strange new geographies but to confront the extremes of human evil and goodness, as is recounted in parashat Vayeira , “And He Appeared”: for there we see how, in Sodom and Gomorrah, he encounters total rejection of God’s moral law, and on Mount Hebron he himself is called upon to submit to a total acceptance of God’s law, even if that law must cost him his own son.
I must admit that I never got beyond parashat Vayeira in my Jewish home-schooling program. But of course I know the ending of the five books I started to read, twenty years ago: how Joseph, the favored descendant of Abram, was rejected by his brothers, was abandoned and ultimately led off into Egypt, where, eventually, his tribe prospered—although Egypt was, in the end, to become the land from which this family, that tribe, would make its long, arduous, unimaginable journey back to a “home” that, since none of them actually knew it, must not have felt like home at all.
As I have said, the first thing that happens in parashat Bereishit is not, as many think, that God created the heavens and the earth, but rather that at the beginning of his creation of the heavens and the earth, when everything had been a stupefying void, he said, “Let there be light.” This is, in fact, the first act of creation that we hear about in Bereishit . But what is interesting to me is that every creative act that follows—light and dark, night and day, dry land and oceans, plants and animals, and finally man fromdust—is described as an act of separation. What did God do when he saw that the light was “good”? He separated it from the darkness, and then proceeded to go on separating until the component parts of the cosmos assumed their pleasing and rightful order.
Rashi devotes relatively little space to this fact, and his concerns are essentially the moral ramifications of this initial separation of light from darkness: “According to its simple meaning,” he writes of God’s separation of light from darkness, “explain it as follows: He saw that it is good, and it is not proper for it and the darkness to be functioning in a jumble, so He assigned to this one its sphere during the day, and to this one its sphere during the night.” And why does God do this? Because light, as Rashi says, “does not deserve that the wicked use it, and He set it aside for the righteous, to [be used by them in] the future.” The moral implications of being able to “separate” in this way come to a
I must admit that I never got beyond parashat Vayeira in my Jewish home-schooling program. But of course I know the ending of the five books I started to read, twenty years ago: how Joseph, the favored descendant of Abram, was rejected by his brothers, was abandoned and ultimately led off into Egypt, where, eventually, his tribe prospered—although Egypt was, in the end, to become the land from which this family, that tribe, would make its long, arduous, unimaginable journey back to a “home” that, since none of them actually knew it, must not have felt like home at all.
As I have said, the first thing that happens in parashat Bereishit is not, as many think, that God created the heavens and the earth, but rather that at the beginning of his creation of the heavens and the earth, when everything had been a stupefying void, he said, “Let there be light.” This is, in fact, the first act of creation that we hear about in Bereishit . But what is interesting to me is that every creative act that follows—light and dark, night and day, dry land and oceans, plants and animals, and finally man fromdust—is described as an act of separation. What did God do when he saw that the light was “good”? He separated it from the darkness, and then proceeded to go on separating until the component parts of the cosmos assumed their pleasing and rightful order.
Rashi devotes relatively little space to this fact, and his concerns are essentially the moral ramifications of this initial separation of light from darkness: “According to its simple meaning,” he writes of God’s separation of light from darkness, “explain it as follows: He saw that it is good, and it is not proper for it and the darkness to be functioning in a jumble, so He assigned to this one its sphere during the day, and to this one its sphere during the night.” And why does God do this? Because light, as Rashi says, “does not deserve that the wicked use it, and He set it aside for the righteous, to [be used by them in] the future.” The moral implications of being able to “separate” in this way come to a
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