An Introduction to the Book of Genesis

Living with the Times - The Parsha

“We must live with the times,” the Rebbe said.

The disciples, sitting around the table, eagerly awaiting the master’s words, were perplexed. “Live with the times? Isn’t that what the enemies of faith are always saying – The past is dead; long live the future? Surely we believe the opposite, that God’s word is eternal, that certain things do not change, that values and principles and laws are constant. To be a Jew is to be beyond time. What then does the Rebbe mean when he says, “We must live with the times?”

“What I mean,” said the Rebbe, “is that we must live with the Parshat Hashavua, the weekly portion of the Torah.”

Like so many Jewish stories, ancient and modern, this one, told of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, contains hidden depths. Wherever they are throughout the world, Jews read a weekly portion of the Mosaic books – the Parshat Hashavua. It forms the music of the Jewish year. Autumn is Genesis (Bereishit) with its tales of beginnings, the birth of the world, of humanity and of the Jewish people. Winter is Exodus (Shemot), the story of exile and redemption, slavery and freedom and the beginning of the long journey through the wilderness in search of the Promised Land. Spring is Leviticus (Vayikra), with its laws of sacrifice, sometimes remote to the modern ear, yet shot through with ethical grandeur and at its fulcrum the two greatest moral imperatives of all – to love our neighbour as ourselves, and the far harder yet ultimately more important command to love the stranger, the other, the one not like ourselves. Numbers (Bamidbar) ushers in Shavuot, the festival of revelation, and does so with the story of the Israelites in the wilderness, a fraught tale of backslidings and rebellions, perhaps the most realistic narrative ever told of the birth of a nation. Summer is Deuteronomy (Devarim), that magnificent book of Moses’s addresses in the last month of his life, his vision – never surpassed – of Jewish history and destiny as the people of the covenant, charged with living in faithfulness to God.

Jewish time is both cyclical and linear. We are part of nature and its rhythms – the cycle of the seasons and of a human life – as we move from birth through maturity to age and wisdom and sadness as we see the next generation, those who will carry on the story when we are no longer here. But we are also part of history – time as a non-repeating sequence of events, a journey in which no stage is exactly like any that has been or will be. Jewish time is like a fugue between these two themes, the eternal and the ephemeral, the timeless and the timely. That, I suspect, is what the Rebbe meant when he said we must live with the biblical portion of the week. It is that weekly encounter between the now and the then, the moment and eternity, which frames Jewish consciousness and gives us that unique sense of living out a narrative, the biblical story, to which we ourselves are writing the latest chapter.

That, at any rate, is how I have tried to live. Time and again, in the midst of troubled times or facing difficult decisions, I’ve found the words of the weekly Parsha giving me guidance – or, conversely, the events themselves granting me deeper insight into the Torah text. For that is what “Torah” means: teaching, instruction, guidance. Torah is a commentary on life, and life is a commentary on Torah. Together they constitute a conversation, each shedding light on the other. Torah is a book not only to be read but to be lived. One of the things that gives us the courage and wisdom to chart our way through the wilderness of life is knowing that we are not alone, that God goes before us in a pillar of cloud and fire, signalling the way. The way He does so for us is through the words of the Torah, to which every Jewish life is a commentary, and each of us has our own annotation to write.

The following essays, each short and I hope simple, are records of how I have tried to live with the times through a dialogue with the Torah. Each is self-contained, yet taken together they constitute one person’s encounter with the text that formed a people’s identity and shaped its sense of destiny. Jews are, supremely, the people of the Book. They found God less in the mysteries of the cosmos or the secret recesses of the soul than in words, God’s words to us, which ever since they were first spoken we have tried to decipher and apply to our lives. Wherever Jews were, they took the Torah with them. They carried it, and it carried them. Torah became, in Heinrich Heine’s lovely phrase, the “portable homeland” of the Jew.

If there is one shared feature of these essays, it is that I have tried to set the biblical text in the wider context of ideas. Many traditional commentaries look at the Torah through a microscope: the detail, the fragment of text in isolation. I have tried to look at it through a telescope: the larger picture and its place in the constellation of concepts that make Judaism so compelling a picture of the universe and our place within it.

I have called these studies Covenant & Conversation because this, for me, is the essence of what Torah learning is – throughout the ages, and for us, now. The text of Torah is our covenant with God, our written constitution as a nation under His sovereignty. The interpretation of this text has been the subject of an ongoing conversation for as long as Jews have studied the divine word, a conversation that began at Sinai thirty-three centuries ago and has not ceased since. Every age has added its commentaries, and so must ours. Participating in that conversation is a major part of what it is to be a Jew. For we are the people who never stopped learning the Book of Life, our most precious gift from the God of life.

Bereishit: The Book of the Beginnings

Genesis, the book of Bereishit, is as its name suggests, about beginnings: the birth of the universe, the origins of humanity, and the first chapters in the story of the people that would be known as Israel or (after the Babylonian exile) the Jews. It tells of how this people began, first as an individual, Abraham, who heard a call to leave his land, birthplace and father’s house and begin a journey, then as a family; it closes as the extended family stands on the threshold of becoming a nation. The journey turns out to be unexpectedly complicated and fraught with setbacks. In a sense, it continues till today. This is part of what makes Genesis so vivid. We can relate to its characters and their dilemmas. We are part of their world, as they are of ours. No other ancient literature has so contemporary a feel. This is our story; this is where we came from; this is our journey.

But this is not all Genesis is, and in reading it thus we risk missing its full significance. Maimonides makes the fundamental point that Reishit does not mean “beginning” in the sense of “first of a chronological sequence.”

For that, biblical Hebrew has other words. Reishit implies the most significant element, the part that stands for the whole, the foundation, the principle. Genesis is Judaism’s foundational work, a philosophy of the human condition under the sovereignty of God.

This is a difficult point to understand, because there is no other book quite like it. It is not myth. It is not history in the conventional sense, a mere recording of events.

Nor is it theology: Genesis is less about God than about human beings and their relationship with God. The theology is almost always implicit rather than explicit. What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story. It is a unique work, philosophy in the narrative mode.

So we learn about what exists by way of a story about creation. We learn about knowledge through a tangled tale of the first man, the first woman, a serpent and a tree. We begin to understand human freedom and its abuse through the story of Cain. We learn how to behave through the lives of Abraham and Sarah and their children. It is this that has helped to make Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, the most widely read and influential book in the history of civilisation. Only the gifted few can fully understand a philosophical classic, but everyone can relate to a story.

In Torah, form follows function. The fact that a piece of information is conveyed in a particular way is never accidental. The chosen genre, the literary medium, is there for a reason, and the reason is never merely aesthetic. Why then did the Torah adopt a story-telling mode for Genesis, its book of first principles?

Partly for the reason already stated: a story is universal. The Torah is a book written for all. One of the great themes of Tanach is its consistent battle against elites, especially knowledge elites. The Torah defines Israel as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) – a kingdom whose members all aspire to be, at least metaphorically, priests; a nation all of whose members are holy. Every religion has its own elites: priests, bishops, gurus, saints, mystics, shamans, holy men and women who form a distinct class set aside from society as a whole. Judaism is about the democratisation of holiness, the creation of a society in which everyone will have access to religious knowledge. Hence the importance of stories which everyone can understand.

Yet not understand at the same level: that is another feature of Genesis. Each of its stories has layer upon layer of meaning and significance, which we only grasp after repeated readings. Our understanding of the book grows as we grow. Each age adds insights, commentaries and interpretations of its own. The book’s literary style allows it to be read afresh in each generation. That too tells us something significant about the Torah’s view of human knowledge: The truths of the human condition are simply too deep to be understood at once and on the surface. Only stories have this depth, this ambiguity, this principled multiplicity of meanings.

Most importantly, only stories adequately reflect what it is to be human. Tell a story, even to young children, and they become instantly attentive. They want to know what happens next. In logical systems, there are no surprises as to what happens next: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. The conclusion is already implicit in the premises. But in a story, as in life, we never know what will happen next, because human beings are free. Will Eve eat the Forbidden Fruit? Will Cain disregard God’s warning? Will Esau kill Jacob when they meet after long separation? Will Joseph’s dreams come true?

More than a narrative device, the element of suspense reflects a central theme of Genesis: God’s gift of freedom to humanity. God created the universe; therefore God is free. By endowing human beings with His “image and likeness,” He gave them freedom as well. We may be, like the first human, “dust of the earth,” but there is within us the “breath of God.” We are shaped by our environment, but we can also shape our environment as well. We are created, but also creative. To a degree shared by no other life form known to us, we can choose how to act and how to react. That is good news, but also bad, as we rapidly discover in the Torah’s narrative. We can obey but also disobey; we can create harmony or discord. The freedom to do good comes hand-in-hand with the freedom to do evil. The result is the entire human drama as Judaism understands it.

Our fate does not lie in the stars, nor in the human genome, or in any other form of determinism. We become what we choose to be. Therefore, we don’t know what will happen next. If some form of determinism were true, human fate could be summarised in a system, Marxist, Freudian, Darwinian or other. Determinism, we believe, is not true, and the best way of showing this is by way of stories, in all of which the outcome is in doubt. We don’t know what will happen until it does. And, in Genesis, things never happen quite as we expect.

The story opens with the creation narrative. We discover the universe as a place of order and goodness, the result of a single creative will. Human beings are presented as the one exception to this rule. They can do evil and create chaos. At times – as in the generation of the Flood – they can endanger the entire future of life on earth. The Torah reveals this in a series of short, sharp vignettes. With Adam and Eve comes the first sin; with Cain the first murder. By the time of Noah, the world is “filled with violence.” In the age of Babel, humanity becomes guilty of hubris. No sooner have they discovered how to make bricks and build on a monumental scale, than they attempt to “reach heaven,” transgressing into God’s domain.

As humanity develops, so does its capacity for evil. Having revealed the ever-expanding scope of corruption – from self, to other, to the world as a whole, and then to heaven itself – the narrative shifts its focus. From humanity as a whole we turn to one family: Abraham, Sarah and their descendants. God, as it were, no longer expects all humanity to reach the moral heights. Instead He charges one family with the task of leading exemplary lives from which others will learn.

From chapter 12 until the end, the book is a set of finely nuanced variations on the theme of relationships within the family: between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, across four generations.

Not by accident is Genesis a book about the family. The family is where we learn emotional and spiritual intelligence. There is nothing simple or idealised about the families of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Leah and Rachel. There are tensions, rivalries, setbacks and unfulfilled hopes as well as love, kinship and loyalty. Only much later in Tanach do we discover that the family will turn out to contain the most compelling metaphors for the relationship between human beings and God Himself. He is our father, we are His children. He is our husband, we are His betrothed. Something, however, becomes clear in one of the most haunting passages in Genesis, in which Jacob wrestles with an angel and receives the name that ever afterward his children will bear: Israel, one who “struggles with God and with man and prevails”: The tensions within the patriarchal family are symptomatic of Israel’s later, larger battles, with God, with humanity, and with itself.

There is another significance to the focus of Genesis on the family. Unlike the god of the philosophers, the God of Abraham is a personal God. He is not an abstract concept: the first cause, the force of forces, the prime mover, pure Being. He is a God who relates to us as persons, sensing our suffering, hearing our prayers, a presence in our lives. And it is in personal relationships – first and foremost within the family – that He expects us to honour Him by honouring others, who bear His image no less than we do.

The protagonists of Genesis are astonishingly human. They are a world away from the heroes and heroines of myth. They are not mighty warriors or miracle workers. They are not rulers commanding armies and winning legendary victories. They are ordinary people made extraordinary by their willingness to follow God. We hear their hesitations and doubts, their fears and apprehensions. In the world of myth there is no clear boundary between the gods and human beings: the gods are all-too-human, and the humans are often portrayed as demigods. In the Torah, by contrast, it is as if the transcendence of God makes space for the humanity of humankind. By insisting on the absolute difference between heaven and earth – the distance the builders of Babel sought to abolish – the Torah allows us to see ourselves as we really are, infinitesimal, fallible and frail, yet touched by the wings of infinity.

By placing the stories of Genesis before the book of Exodus, with its story of the birth of the Israelites as a nation, the Torah is implicitly telling us of the primacy of the personal over the political. Exodus is about the big themes – slavery and freedom, miracles and deliverances, the rescue of an entire people from oppression and their wondrous journey through the sea and across the wilderness. It is about law and liberty and justice, and the nature of Israel as a nation under the sovereignty of God. But by focusing first on individuals and their relationships, Genesis reminds us of the complexity of the human heart, which no political order in and of itself can resolve: “How small, of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!” (Oliver Goldsmith). If we cannot create peace or justice or compassion within the family we will be unable to do so within the nation or the world. Not until Joseph forgives his brothers and is reconciled with them can the story move on to the larger canvas of history.

Framing the story of Abraham, Sarah and their descendants are three promises: children, a land, and an influence on humanity as a whole. Repeatedly Abraham is promised children – as many as the stars of the sky, the sand of the seashore, and the dust of the earth. Seven times he is promised the land. Five times in Genesis as a whole, with slight variations of terminology, the patriarchs are told that “through you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

Yet the more we read, the more we realise that these promises are not about to be fulfilled immediately. Three of the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel, find it hard to have children. Ownership of the land remains a distant prospect. The relationship between Abraham’s family and their neighbours is often fraught. There is no easy route from starting-point to destination. The way is long and hard. None of Genesis’s stories ends with a simple, “and they all lived happily ever after.” For these are not children’s stories. They are profoundly adult. They tell us that the journey is worth making – none more so – but it did not begin with us, and it will not end with us. “It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to stand aside from it.”

So, almost astonishingly, thousands of years later the three promises of Genesis remain the most pressing items on the Jewish agenda: children (Jewish continuity), the land (the State of Israel and its neighbours), and the relationship of Israel and the world (philo- and anti-Semitism). Genesis continues to be what it was at the outset, a book of first principles, the words in which, if we are truly open to them, we discover not only our ancestors but also ourselves.

Torah is God’s book of humanity, and each of us is a chapter in its unfinished story. Its words form our covenant with heaven. And as we listen and respond, we add our voice to the unbroken conversation between the Jewish people and its destiny.