TORAH SPARKS
Parshat Bereshit
October 22, 2022 | 27 Tishrei 5783
Torah: Genesis 1:1- 6:8 Triennial: 1:1-2:3
Haftarah: Isaiah 42:5-43:10
Torah SparkNotes
Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Parashah
The Torah tells a single story over and over again. Each time, the story starts with some sort of great potential tied to a few simple conditions, the main character makes a mistake, God punishes the main character, often with exile, and then God relents a little and the story starts over again. Each time the story is retold, it changes a little. Often we have different main characters. Sometimes we seem to have learned something. Sometimes things get worse with each retelling.
Our parashah contains this story told twice. We read the story of Eve and Adam first and then we read it again as the story of Cain and Abel. The stories follow the same plot outlined above. In the Garden of Eden story, Eve and Adam have the potential to live in a beautiful place with all the food they ever need and not to know death. They just need to follow God s condition of not eating from the tree of knowing good and bad. But they do. God rebukes them, giving them and their descendants punishments to endure that are less stark than the sure death God had initially seemed to promise. Adam and Eve are driven East out of their home, and the story starts again with Cain and Abel.
Likewise, Cain and Abel begin with great promise, to work the land and tend the sheep. They seem to have their livelihoods all set. But their interactions with God leave Cain confused; he does not follow God s advice about ruling over his desire, and kills Abel. God curses Cain, Cain protests, and God lightens his punishment, exiling him from his home, and the story starts again with his descendants.
The connections between these two episodes run deeper than just sharing the same story. Cain s infamous response to God reads I do not know. Am I my brother s keeper? Two words here carry the echoes of the Garden of Eden with them, knowing and keeping. Supposedly, by eating from the tree of knowing good and evil, Eve and her descendants should have gained morality, should be aware of what constitutes correct action. Of course, even having eaten from the tree, Eve and Adam still do not necessarily act morally. But they are presumably aware of what morality is. Cain, however, is claiming lack of this knowledge. After an entire creation story about how humanity gained knowledge like the divine has, Cain claims lack of knowledge. Moreover, he claims to lack knowledge about death. God asks where his brother is and the correct answer is dead. Cain replies that he does not know death. Cain denies the very punishment which his parents and all of humanity were given as a result of his parents mistakes.
God had set Cain up to experience the ways in which his parents were tested. Adam was put in the Garden of Eden to work it and to keep it. Cain is a worker of the land. But he refuses to be a keeper, or guardian, as we read in his infamous question. God also uses the same words with which God cursed Eve to warn Cain. To Eve God says, Your desire is towards your husband but he will rule over you. In response to Cain s disappointment about his rejected offering, God says cryptically that sin crouches at the opening and its desire is towards you but you can rule over it. In response, Cain murders his brother. Rather than redeeming Eve from her punishment, Cain adds to her suffering, turning her from the mother of all living things to the mother also of all dead things. As for punishment, the earth was cursed because of Adam. But Cain is cursed even more than the earth.
This story continues to be told. Our parashah, which starts with the infinite potential of creation, ends in Genesis 6 with the sons of God potentially raping people s daughters. It is enough to make you ready for the flood. But little by little, we ll figure it out. As we retell our story, we ll make progress. And no matter what, we ll have the opportunity to tell it again.
Torah According to God: The Creator, The Redeemer
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Haftarah
Sometimes we hear God speaking. Not being told that God spoke, not given a third person account of the event, we hear God s own words, God speaking personally. Even coming through the medium of the human voice of the navi (prophet), this is a powerful experience.
In the first haftarah of the year, we have that experience. Unlike the accounts in the Torah that are told in the third person the navi Isaiah delivers God speech, in first person, sharing His impression from the events, having experienced them Himself. Raise the sound and let the text flow through you. Feel the power of speech that can create a world.
Why are we treated to this awe-inspiring speech? Apparently because the audience needs to understand who God is. The navi, addressing the devastated people of Israel, must bring God s full power to the stage, eliminate all filters, to turn around the people who concluded following the destruction that now it is their turn to disappear from history.
Could God save them? The job of the navi in these chapters is to convince the people that indeed, yes, God is the only one with the power and the desire to do so. He who can create the heavens and hammer out the earth, He can save them as he has done once before:
Text: Isaiah 43:1-5
1And now, thus says the Lord, who created you, O Jacob, And He who formed you, O Israel:
Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; You are Mine.
2When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; And through the rivers, they shall not overflow you. 3For I am the Lord your God, The Holy One of Israel, your Redeemer;
I gave Egypt for your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in your place .
5Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your descendants from the east, and gather you from the west.
● God is speaking about a future redemption but is strongly referencing a previous one. What is the past event that the navi Isaiah is hinting at? How many hints at that event can you find in this short section?
● What is the power of pointing the people to that event at this time in history? (Many commentators, including medieval ones like Ibn Ezra, view this navi as living during the Babylonian exile, others read it as applying to the earlier Assyrian destruction led by Sennacherib.)
● Why do you think that this haftarah was chosen for the opening parashah of the Torah? If it was only a reference to the creation in the opening line, it could have eliminated the section above.
These chapters of Isaiah frequently reference two major events: The creation of the world and the Exodus from Egypt; a universal manifestation of God s power and a particular, national one. According to Isaiah, these are the foundational events of the Torah. Choosing a haftarah that brings these events together is not only offering an additional, different angle on the parashah, it is offering a different view of the Torah. This haftarah functions as an alternative introduction to the foundational text of the people of Israel, giving us the conclusion we should internalize in God s own voice: I am the One, before Me no God was fashioned, and after Me none shall be. (Isa. 43:10, translation: Robert Alter.) Now we are invited to spend the rest of the year learning the details.
Adventures in Mishnah with My Kids
(Berakhot 1:1)
Ilana Kurshan
The year my son turned ten and my twin daughters turned nine, I began studying Mishnah with each of them before bed. I used to read chapter books aloud to my children before they fell asleep at night, after the lights were out and the bedroom was quiet. But once their English was stronger and they could read to themselves, they preferred to get into bed with Percy Jackson or The Babysitters Club than to hear me read the next installment of Little House of the Prairie. After nearly two years of traveling by covered wagon at the rate of a chapter a night, I proposed that we pursue a different frontier. We would exchange Pa s team of ponies for a horse and an ox that could not be yoked together; we would forgo Ma s blackbird pie and instead slaughter the birds at the sacrificial altar. Setting aside the pioneers and their prairie, we would turn instead to the rabbis and their rules.
The Mishnah, the foundational collection of Jewish Oral law, dates back to the first two centuries of the Common Era and spans a vast array of topics not just agricultural law and sacrificial rites, but also prayer and blessing, Shabbat and festival observance, marriage and divorce, civil and criminal law, and ritual impurity. Each child chose which tractate we would learn together. My daughter Tagel was the only one who wanted to start at the very beginning, with Berakhot. And so one evening, after her younger siblings were asleep, her brother was at a friend s house, and her twin sister was still showering, I lay down beside her in bed with my paperback copy of tractate Berakhot and began reading.
Starting to learn Mishnah with Berakhot is not like starting to learn Torah with Breishit, because the world is created from nothingness, but the Mishnah begins in media res: From what time does one recite Shema in the evening? The Mishnah assumes that we know that it is a mitzvah to recite the Shema twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, based on the Torah s specification of when you lie down and when you rise up (Deuteronomy 6:7). The rabbis all agree that the evening Shema may be recited from the time when the priests would immerse in the ritual bath and enter to eat the terumah tithes that had been set aside for them, which was just after dusk. What time is that? Tagel asks me. I m not really sure, I tell her, because the Mishnah s way of marking time is so different from our own. The Mishnah was composed in the aftermath of the Temple s destruction, yet the rabbis continued to mark time based on Temple ritual and its associated purity practices. As I explain to Tagel, it s as if the Temple was destroyed and everyone else changed their clocks accordingly, but the rabbis continued to operate on Temple Savings Time.
The rabbis then turn to discuss how late one may recite the evening Shema. Three answers are given, each one later than the previous: Rabbi Eliezer says until the end of the first of the three watches into which the night was divided. It s like the time when you stop staying with the little kids, and Abba takes over, says Tagel. That s right, I tell her. Nearly every night, I go into the room where our six-year-old and three-year-old sleep, sing Shema, and stay with them for a while. At some point my husband comes in to relieve me. I wish they didn t need us to stay with them until they fall asleep, but at least now I know that Tagel understands the Mishnah.
The majority of the other rabbis disagree, arguing that one can recite Shema until the middle of the night. And Rabban Gamliel contends that a person may recite the evening Shema all the way until dawn. The Mishnah then recounts a brief story that elucidates Rabban Gamliel s position. One time Rabban Gamliel s sons came home late from a party and told their father that they had not recited the evening Shema. Presumably they suspected it was too late to do so. But Rabban Gamliel assured his sons that they had until dawn, as per his halakhic opinion. Moreover, said Rabban Gamliel, any time the sages ruled that a certain commandment could be performed until midnight, it could really be performed until dawn. Why then did the sages specify that it should be performed by an earlier point? So as to prevent the individual from sinning. According to Rabban Gamliel, the rabbis knew that if a person thought they had all night to say Shema, they might keep putting it off and ultimately forget.
It s like when you tell us to go to sleep now, says Tagel. Every night around eight o clock, you yell at us that we should be in bed. But we really have all night to sleep, until the sun rises and we have to get ready for school.
Not exactly, I tell Tagel. You really do need to go to sleep at the beginning of the night in the first watch, let s say because otherwise you ll be exhausted the next day. And there was evening, and there was morning but kids need sleep.
Still, I have to acknowledge that Tagel is on to something. With parents and children, there is always tension surrounding bedtime. The parents worry about the consequences of the child staying up past bedtime, or coming home too late at night. But the kids want to stay up, and then stay out, even later. The parent wants the child to be safe safe in bed, safe from the consequences of late-night revelry, safeguarded from sin. But the child wants just one more bedtime story, just one more beer. And so the child tests the limit: How late is too late?
I picture Rabban Gamliel and his sons up late at night discussing the laws of reciting the Shema. There is a reason I ve chosen to learn Mishnah with my children at bedtime and not any earlier. It would be difficult to compete for their attention in the daytime, when they are busy with school, sports, music, friends. But at night I have a captive audience. My kids, like Rabban Gamliel s sons, want to go to sleep as late as possible. They will ask one more question, and engage with the text more deeply, if it means they can push off their bedtime past the end of another watch.
Tagel adjusts her pillow and turns the page the next Mishnah is about how early one can recite the morning Shema. She wants to keep learning, but I know better. I m the one who will have to wake her up for school when the morning comes.