Bereshit בראשית
The Book of books starts with the beginning of beginnings: the creation of the universe and life. The story is told from two different perspectives, first as cosmology (the origins of matter), then as anthropology (the birth of humanity).
The first narrative (1:1–2:3) emphasizes harmony and order. God creates the universe in six days and dedicates the seventh as a day of holiness and rest. The second (2:4–3:24) focuses on humanity, not as biological species but as persons-in-relation. God fashions man, sees that “It is not good for the man to be alone,” and then fashions woman. The serpent tempts them; they sin and are banished from the Garden.
From then on, the human drama unfolds as tragedy. Cain murders his brother. By the end of the parasha, God sees “how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become” and “regrets that He had made man on earth.” God creates order, man creates chaos. Which will prevail?
In the four essays that follow, the first looks at divine and human freedom, the second at the three stages of creation. The third examines the origins of human violence, and the fourth uncovers a hidden story of love, born of the consciousness of our mortality.
The Book of Teaching
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…. (1:1)
It is the most famous, majestic opening of any book in literature. It speaks of primal beginnings, creation, and ontology, and for many it stands as an emblem of Torah as a whole. But not for all. Consider the surpassingly strange way that Rashi – most beloved of all Jewish commentators – begins his commentary:
Rabbi Isaac said: The Torah should have begun with the verse (Exodus 12:2): “This month shall be to you the first of the months,” which was the first mitzva given to Israel. (Rashi, 1:1)
What are we to make of this? The question is not merely aesthetic. Does Rabbi Isaac, or for that matter Rashi, seriously suggest that the Book of books might have begun in the middle – a third of the way into Exodus? That it might have passed by in silence the creation of the universe – which is, after all, one of the fundamentals of Jewish faith?
Could we understand the history of Israel without its prehistory, the stories of Abraham and Sarah and their children? Could we have understood those narratives without knowing what preceded them: God’s repeated disappointment with Adam and Eve, Cain, the generation of the Flood and the builders of the Tower of Babel?
The fifty chapters of Genesis together with the opening of Exodus are the source book of biblical faith. They are as near as we get to an exposition of the philosophy of Judaism. What then does Rabbi Isaac mean?
He means something profound, something which we often forget. To understand a book, one needs to know to which genre it belongs: Is it history or legend, chronicle or myth? To what question is it an answer? A history book answers the question: what happened?; a book of cosmology – be it science or myth – answers the question: how did it happen?
What Rabbi Isaac is succinctly saying in his enigmatic question is that if we seek to understand the Torah, we must read it as Torah – as law, instruction, teaching, guidance. Torah is an answer to the question: how shall we live? That is why he raises the question as to why it does not begin with the first mitzva given to Israel.
Torah is not a book of history, even though it includes history. It is not a book of science, even though the first chapter of Genesis – as the nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber points out – is the necessary prelude to science: it represents the first time people saw the universe as the product of a single creative will, and therefore as intelligible rather than capricious and mysterious.1.Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (New York: Free Press, 1952); see also Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 105–25.
Rather, it is, first and last, a book about how to live. Everything it contains – not only mitzvot but also narratives, including the narrative of creation itself – is there solely for the sake of ethical and spiritual instruction. For Jewish ethics is not confined to law. It includes virtues of character, general principles and role models. It is conveyed not only by commandments but also by stories, telling us how particular individuals responded to specific situations.
Torah moves from the minutest details to the most majestic visions of the universe and our place within it. But it never deviates from its intense focus on the questions: What should one do? How should one live? What kind of person should one strive to become? It opens, in Genesis 1, with the most fundamental question of all. As the Psalm (8:4) puts it: “What is man that You are mindful of him?”