…Jacob’s child by his second wife and first love, Rachel. Jacob – the man who loves more than any other figure in Bereishit – cannot help showing his favoritism, to the hurt and slight of the other sons. The vignettes we have of Joseph as an adolescent are (as Rashi notes) less than endearing. He tells tales to his father…
…– otherwise He would have limited His concerns to the individual and the soul. Judaism knows the faith of individuals. That is what Bereishit is about. The Book of Psalms is the eternal lexicon of the soul in dialogue with God. Judaism also knows the faith of humanity as such. That is the meaning of the first eleven chapters of…
…been a set of variations on the theme of sibling rivalry: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. The Psalm says: “How good and pleasant it is for brothers to live together.” Ps. 133:1 And in response, reading Bereishit, we are likely to add, “and how rare.” But now comes the second test, this…
…the people closest to God, has yet seen. What was it? The answer is that through Bereishit, God is the God of Creation, the God of nature, the aspect of God we call, with different nuances but the same overall sense, Elokim, or E-l Shaddai, or even Koneh shamayim va’aretz, Creator of heaven and earth. Now, in a sense, that aspect of God…
…the Torah – is: first separate, then join. The verb lehavdil, “to separate,” appears five times in the first chapter of Bereishit. God separates light from darkness, the upper and lower waters, sea and dry land. Separation is at the heart of Jewish law – between holy and profane, pure and impure, permitted and forbidden. In Judaism kadosh, holy, means separation. To…
…was that to Abraham, God said: “Because you are wholehearted, walk before Me” (Bereishit 17:1). But of Noah, the Torah says that he “walked with God.” Bereishit Rabbah 30:10 It takes courage to rebuild a shattered world. That was the courage shown by those who built and fought for the State of Israel in the years after the Holocaust. It…
…very carefully at the source, it’s source three (Bereishit 6:5), vayar Hashem ki rabba ra’t ha’adam ba’aretz, “God saw how great was the wickedness of humanity on earth,” vechol yetzer machshevot libo, “and all the inclination of the thoughts of his heart was,” rak ra kol hayom, “only evil the whole day, and God regretted that He had created man…
…is so much less in evidence in the earlier books of Shemot, Vayikra (with the exception of Lev. 19) and Bamidbar? The best way of answering that question is to ask another. Why is it that forgiveness plays no part – at least on the surface of the narrative – in the book of Bereishit?[5] God does not forgive Adam…
…Alter the idea of a type-scene, a drama enacted several times with variations; and these are particularly in evidence in the book of Bereishit. There is no universal rule as to how to decode the significance of a type-scene. One example is boy-meets-girl-at-well, an encounter that takes places three times, between Abraham’s servant and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses…
…Kohanim, Leviticus, the book of priestly things. It seems to have no connection with Exodus whatsoever. The answer, I believe, is profound. The transition from Bereishit to Shemot, Genesis to Exodus, is about the change from family to nation. When the Israelites entered Egypt, they were a single extended family. By the time they left they had become a sizeable…