Beginning Again With Dignity and Destiny

Parshat Bereishit always feels like more than the first parsha of the year.

After Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, it is the moment when inspiration has to become rhythm. We begin again, not only by reading the Torah from the beginning, but by asking what kind of human beings we are becoming and what kind of society we are trying to build.

There is something deeply moving about that. The Torah cycle does not allow us simply to have “high holiday inspiration” and then drift back into ordinary life. It asks us to bring those thoughts into a weekly rhythm. Week by week, parsha by parsha, we are invited to ask: what story are we living inside?

For me, that question feels especially urgent this year. I am increasingly focused on the theme of a good society, both for Israel and for Jewish identity. How do we strengthen Jewish identity in an age when much of the world seems determined to rewrite our story, weaken our connection to Israel, and deny the Jewish people the right to live our history in a real and practical way?

This does not have to be expressed in radical or extreme terms. A simple example is our daily prayer for the rebuilding of the Temple. What does that mean in our time? We are not ready for it. The world is certainly not ready for it. But are we no longer allowed even to say that Jerusalem is central to our faith? Are we no longer allowed to remember that the Temple Mount is not a political slogan but part of the deepest language of Jewish prayer?

Part of the challenge of our generation is that we have inherited political “status quos” that no longer reflect reality, history or justice. Decisions made after 1967, including the role left to Jordan and the attempt to freeze certain arrangements in place, may have been understandable at the time. But history changes. Facts change. Nations mature. And the Jewish people cannot be expected forever to live inside paradigms created by others, especially when those paradigms are now used to deny our own story.

That is why Bereishit matters. It gives us the chance to reset. Not only to begin the Torah again, but to ask what we want to gain from our weekly encounter with it. We all know the stories: Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the first city, the first failure, the first exile. Yet if we read them carefully, they are not children’s stories. They are the foundations of human civilization, moral responsibility and society itself.

On a personal note, I have developed a custom that I first learned from Rabbi Rashi Simon of the Kesher community in London: to choose a theme or commentator for the year and allow that voice to accompany the weekly parsha. This year, I have chosen two books to guide me through Bereishit and Shemot.

The first is Rabbi Shai Held’s The Heart of Torah, which brings a broad moral and spiritual lens to the parsha. His writing often asks what God wants from us, what kind of people we are called to become, and how Torah speaks to the building of a just and compassionate society.

The second is Rabbi Moshe Taragin’s Echoes of Rashi, which takes us back into the textual world of Rashi and shows how his insights continue to speak to our contemporary Jewish condition. Rashi roots us in the words. Rabbi Held pushes us toward the larger moral horizon. Between them, I hope to explore Bereishit not only as the beginning of the Torah, but as the beginning of a renewed conversation about Jewish identity, Israel, faith, society and responsibility.

I would be remiss not to add another of my teachers to this conversation: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. In his reading of Bereishit, Rabbi Sacks returns again and again to the theme of responsibility. The first chapters of Genesis are not only about creation, dignity and destiny; they are also about the human failure to take responsibility. Adam and Eve evade personal responsibility. Cain evades moral responsibility with his haunting question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” For Rabbi Sacks, Judaism is God’s call to human responsibility: to stop waiting for others to act, and to become partners with God in the work of creation.

Part of what interests me is that these voices come from very different Jewish worlds.

Rabbi Held writes very much from within an American Jewish religious and moral culture. His Torah is deeply concerned with ethics, compassion, human dignity and the kind of society that reflects God’s care for the vulnerable. He speaks in a language that many thoughtful Jews in the Diaspora, especially in America, will recognize: a Judaism that asks how faith shapes conscience, responsibility and moral imagination.

Rabbi Taragin writes from a very different place. He is rooted in Israeli religious Zionism, in the world of yeshiva, Rashi, Jewish history, Eretz Yisrael and the national return of the Jewish people to their land. For want of a better phrase, and perhaps a more loaded one, he writes from within the culture of the settlement movement. His Torah is not only about universal human dignity. It is about covenant, land, destiny, peoplehood and the drama of Jewish history unfolding in our own time.

Rabbi Sacks, in a different way, often stood between those worlds. He spoke the language of universal moral responsibility, but from within a deeply Jewish covenantal imagination. He could speak to the wider world about dignity, society and leadership, while still insisting that Judaism carries a distinctive responsibility to help build a world more faithful to God’s purposes.

That contrast is important to me. We all live with these tensions. We read voices that do not always come from our own camp. We encounter ideas that stretch us, challenge us, irritate us, refine us and sometimes force us to sharpen what we already believe. The goal is not to flatten the differences between these approaches. The goal is to listen carefully enough that each one deepens the other.

I may not agree with every emphasis in Rabbi Held’s writing. I may not agree with every emphasis in Rabbi Taragin’s either. But perhaps that is precisely the point. A mature Jewish worldview is not built by reading only those who confirm us. It is built by allowing different Torah voices to enter the conversation, while still standing honestly in our own place.

The examples from Rabbi Held, Rabbi Taragin and Rabbi Sacks bring this contrast into sharper focus.

Rabbi Held opens Bereishit by asking whether the Torah believes in human progress. His answer is subtle. The Torah gives enormous dignity to human creativity. Human beings build cities, develop agriculture, create music, discover metallurgy and form culture. Unlike many ancient myths, where civilization is simply handed down by the gods, Bereishit presents human beings as active partners in shaping the world.

That is a powerful idea. We are not passive creatures waiting for history to happen to us. We are builders. We create societies, institutions, music, technology, cities and culture. In that sense, the Torah believes deeply in human possibility.

But Rabbi Held also reminds us that the Torah does not believe in naive progress. Human beings can build cities, but Cain, the first city-builder mentioned in the Torah, is also the first murderer. Civilization can be magnificent, but it can also become violent, arrogant and morally empty. Progress without humility is dangerous. Culture without responsibility can collapse into corruption.

Rabbi Taragin, through Rashi, begins somewhere else. He asks not only what human beings can do, but why creation exists at all. Rashi’s reading of “Bereishit” does not treat the first verse as a simple chronological statement. The Torah is not merely telling us what happened first, second and third. It is telling us that creation has a purpose. The world was created for Torah, for Israel, for a mission that unfolds through history.

That too is a powerful idea, especially now. We do not live in a random story. The Jewish people are not an accident of history, and our bond with Israel is not merely political. We are part of a larger covenantal drama.

But Rabbi Taragin’s Rashi also adds humility. The beginning is not fully available to us. We enter the story already in motion. We do not possess the whole map. There are parts of creation, history and God’s plan that remain hidden.

Rabbi Sacks adds the bridge between these worlds: responsibility. If Rabbi Held reminds us of human dignity and moral creativity, and Rabbi Taragin reminds us of covenantal destiny, Rabbi Sacks reminds us that both must become action. The question “Where are you?” is not only asked of Adam. It is asked of every generation. The question “Where is your brother?” is not only asked of Cain. It is asked of every society.

Between these three voices, a remarkable tension emerges. Rabbi Held emphasizes human creativity, dignity and moral responsibility. Rabbi Taragin emphasizes divine purpose, Jewish destiny and the mystery of history. Rabbi Sacks insists that freedom becomes meaningful only when it becomes responsibility. One asks what human beings can build. One asks what creation is for. One asks whether we are prepared to answer God’s call.

That is exactly the tension we live with today.

It is not enough to speak only about universal morality, as if Jewish history, Jewish rootedness and Jewish destiny can be ignored. But it is also not enough to speak only about destiny, land and peoplehood, as if moral responsibility is secondary. A good Jewish society needs all three. It needs the dignity and ethical seriousness that Rabbi Held draws from Bereishit, the rootedness, covenant and national purpose that Rabbi Taragin draws from Rashi, and the responsibility that Rabbi Sacks sees as the foundation of leadership.

Perhaps that is the real beginning Bereishit offers us this year. We are called to build, but not to worship our own building. We are called to progress, but not to believe that progress alone can redeem us. We are called to tell our Jewish story, but with humility before the mystery of God’s larger story. And we are called to take responsibility, because without responsibility, dignity and destiny remain beautiful but incomplete ideas.

A Jewish society cannot be built on dignity without destiny, or destiny without dignity. But both remain abstract unless they become responsibility. Bereishit demands all three.

That, perhaps, is the work of this new Torah cycle: to begin again, not by escaping the tensions of Jewish life, but by entering them with greater honesty. To listen more carefully. To think more deeply. To defend our story without becoming hard-hearted. To pursue morality without losing our rootedness. To build a society that remembers both the image of God in every human being and the covenantal destiny of the Jewish people.

Bereishit does not give us a finished world. It gives us a beginning. The rest is the work entrusted to us.