A Story Begins

A Story Begins
D’var Torah for Parashat B’reishit: Genesis 1:1—6:8
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
Oct. 21, 2011



With the dawn of humanity came wonder.

Cave drawings represent some of the earliest examples of our interaction with divine forces that we saw everywhere. Nature was divine, its machination willed by gods of sun, wind and thunder, gods of oceans and gods of the underworld. Every tree had its spirit; every phenomenon carried a message from beyond.

We had no science, but we already had rational minds that never stopped asking questions. With the advent of the Iron Age, written manuscripts began to keep record of our questions. Each eon added its own mysteries, its own attempts to resolve the disturbing unknown with theories, stories and sagas.

The idea of monotheism wasn’t invented by the Jews. The Egyptian king Ikhnaton introduced a new religion, one based around a single god, Aton.

What the Jews introduced to the world was a belief in one God, but posited that God in a new place. This God would be the Creator of everything. Not a multitude of gods; not one god supreme over others. One God period.

The question of the Beginning was always there. Was there a single moment in which Everything began? Or was “It,” the universe, everything we see and know, there all the time, all infinite, eternal, with no beginning and with no end?

Genesis, the first book of the Torah, proposes in its very first sentence that only God is, was and will be eternally eternal. Everything else came into being at God’s instigation. God created it all, there was indeed one Beginning, and everything else has been flowing ever forward from that one moment on.

The stories of Genesis are not meant to be scientific in the modern sense of the word. They do, however, explain in terms anyone can understand what the ramifications of this Beginning are—what lessons there are for us to learn from it, what objectives for us to reach.

Clever children sometimes try to stump me with questions about the Genesis version of Creation. Where were the dinosaurs? Did God invent baseball?

The truth of Genesis, however, isn’t in the numbers. That’s what makes it hard for us modern, enlightened, scientifically educated people to understand. Genesis looks at the world with a view to the values people hold and the morals they try to live by. It isn’t a system that is based on accurate measurements and increments, but rather on the binary system of right and wrong.

However, Right and Wrong are not seen by the Torah as inflexible and unyielding; a wrong can usually be made right again, but not before consequences set in. The Pharaoh of the Exodus stands in direct contradiction to this compassionate view: his very heart had become as stony and adamant as the storehouses he had the Israelites build for him. But the whole point of the Torah is that for us normal folk, forgiveness is always possible. It’s always possible to make things better. Or at least, almost always. Even Cain gets a second chance after killing Abel. Humanity gets several chances moreover.

It’s a compassionate God that the Torah presents to the world. A loving God who creates out of love, out of need and out of care.

To be sure—God can be fierce. We’re talking a pretty powerful force here, if God is the Creator of the whole Known Universe, of the whole “It” around us. Yet this ineffably overpowering source of energy can be channeled, its flood of energy can be stemmed and redirected. If the stories of Creation show God as an ominous and dark force, a presence that can crush as easily as it can create, it is so because at this part of the story, humanity has not figured out yet what its role is. There is much to learn yet. This is only the Beginning.


© 2011 by Boaz D. Heilman