Depth Over Breadth- Bereishit 5785

For those of us keeping track, we spent the last two days celebrating Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. These are two of my favorite holidays; Shemini Atzeret because it’s simply a “day off”, with no special rituals, and Simchat Torah because I love the joy of starting our reading of the Torah over again for another year.

In some circles of study, the Torah itself may not be studied as a text as often as other texts. In rabbinical school, I personally and others took more classes in Talmud and halacha than in Torah. I did have year-long and semester-long classes in each of the five books of the Torah, which involved reading the text and plumbing it and its myriad commentaries for meaning, but it’s a smaller text in length than the Babylonian Talmud, as well as other select texts. Nonetheless, each and every one of us are expected to “own the Torah”. 

Just because a text may be shorter relative to others, though, does not account for the depth and meaning that one can gain from it. The Torah has been examined, studied, interpreted, interrogated, and measured since the day that the Jewish people received it from G-d at Mount Sinai. To sum up some vital Torah statistics: a Torah scroll has precisely 187 chapters, 5,845 verses, 79,976 words, and 304,805 letters. The most common letter in the Torah is a “yud”, which appears 31,530 times. The least common letter in the Torah is a “tet”, which appears 1,802 times. Every column of the Torah has 42 lines, and every line in the Torah has about 30 letters in it.

Among our own sifrei Torah here at Temple Beth Sholom are what are called vav scrolls. These are scrolls of the Torah written in a way so that the very first letter of each column is the letter vav. The letter vav, when appearing at the front of a word, means “and”- as in, “first this happened, and then this, and then this”, and so on. This shows that the events of the Torah are not simply discrete, standalone happenings. Instead, each event is part of a broader narrative, a beautiful story that is the story of us, which continues to unfold.

Parshat Bereishit, which we read this Shabbat, covers a lot of ground. It details the creation of the world, the first people in the Garden of Eden, the tragedy of their progeny, and the genealogy leading from them to Noah and his family. But once again, there is depth and breadth to consider, and the Sages are never ones to go quickly for the sake simply of going quickly. In fact, the Tikkunei HaZohar, a mystical work of kabbalah, offers no less than seventy unique commentaries on just the very first verse of the Torah. Seventy commentaries on just seven words!

 The Torah magisterially begins:

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

“In the beginning, G-d created heaven and earth.”

The pshat, the plain meaning, of the text may seem clear to us. To put it in my own words: “Firstly, G-d created the world.” It’s a nice title for what the text subsequently describes in greater detail.

But let’s dive a little deeper. According to one interpretation, the word “bereishit” could be connected to the Hebrew word for “head” (“rosh”), which can then lead one to interpret the verse: “In wisdom– “reishit”- G-d created heaven and earth.” As one Midrash posits, G-d had a divine blueprint that was consulted before the very first act of creating light and darkness. This blueprint, the Sages assert, was the Torah itself, which they hold is primordial and predates the creation of the world itself. As one midrash says, G-d looked into the Torah and created the world.

The Torah also, it must be said, doesn’t have a “warm-up”. It immediately, with no preamble, challenges us to interpret and ask questions: Why is there water already before G-d creates light on day 1? What about G-d creating light on day 1 before creating the sun and moon on day 4? Why are birds and sea creatures created before creatures that live on land?

To ask simultaneously a seemingly simple, yet deep question: Why does the Torah start with the letter Bet? Why not Aleph, which is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet? The Midrash answers: if the Torah were to begin with the letter Alef, the Torah would begin with a curse: alef is the first letter of the Hebrew word aror, meaning “cursed”. The letter bet, conversely, is the first letter of the word bracha, meaning blessing. It was decided by G-d, then, that the Torah should begin with blessing, and be a blessing to all those who study it. 

These questions, among so many others, have caused much ink to be spilled by both classical and modern commentators. The very fact that Torah still invites so many questions, and that I get excited year after year after year reading the narrative of creation and everything that comes after, is nothing short of extraordinary. The fact that Torah is still being interpreted and pored over today is proof for me of what we say in the morning service every day- ha’michadesh b’tuvo b’chol yom tamid ma’aseh v’reishit. G-d is the one who, every day, continually renews the doings of creation.

The world is constantly changing and going through cycles of creation and destruction. At the end of today’s parsha, we learn that G-d’s initial foray of creating the world is doomed to end in failure. When G-d sees the evil that people are capable of- Adam and Eve’s eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, Cain slaying Abel, and the non-ideal behavior of their descendants- G-d decides to destroy the world that they had created along with everyone in it, with the exception of Noah and his family.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be discouraged at the failings of biblical characters, as well as our own shortcomings. Having just completed the cycle of the Tishrei holidays, we are in the first days of a new year which affords us ample opportunity for self-improvement. Perfection, that Edenic ideal, is not really attainable in many areas for us. However, we can always improve in some areas despite falling short. 

It’s been said that the great arc of the Torah, and the whole Tanakh, is that humans continuously don’t live up to G-d’s expectations, yet G-d nonetheless loves us and wants us to strive to do better. The text of Bereishit is reassuring us that we can do better. Furthermore, the text reminds us that although we ourselves are not divine beings, with all of our faults and foibles, we are still created in the divine image- b’tzelem elokim– and have it within us to do what is right and just in the world.