Sermon Archives

One Thing and One Thing Only
 

Rabbi Yehuda Amital z’l was a tremendous scholar and a sophisticated speaker but he spoke and wrote in a plainspoken style. And one of his plainspoken and pithy observations about Parashat Bereishit has been lovingly preserved among his students.

אני לא מבין שום דבר בפרשת בראשית - אני לא יודע מה זה תוהו, אני לא יודע מה זה בוהו.  אני לא יודע מה זה רוח א-לוהים מרחפת על פני המים.

מפרשת בראשית אני לומד רק דבר אחד - שהקב"ה ברא את העולם.

I do not understand anything in Parashat Bereishit. I don’t know what Toho is and I don’t know what Voho is (“unformed and void” in English?). I don’t know what a “Spirit of God hovering over the waters”means. I can only learn one thing from Parashat Bereishit. Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu, the Holy Blessed One Created the World.

I’ve wondered whether the pithiness of this observation was in some ways the product of Parashat Bereishit always occurring in the immediate aftermath of the holiday season, when he taught and lead tefilot in the yeshiva, and davened and sang and danced with fervor and energy for day after day after day. Perhaps it was exhaustion that led him to make his famous declaration.

If I had Rav Amital’s humble confidence and profound faith, I might step aside here and now and acknowledge what we don’t know and leave you all to contemplate the core truths of the opening verses of the Torah. 

But I do believe that it is worth unpacking precisely what remains mysterious in Parashat Bereishit so that we can pay close attention to what the Torah is committed to teaching us. 

Rashi, commenting on the very first words in the Torah declares

אֵין הַמִּקְרָא הַזֶּה אוֹמֵר אֶלָּא דָּרְשֵׁנִי,

This verse says nothing to us other than “explain me with midrashic elaboration” דָּרְשֵׁנִי - there is no plain-sense way to understand these opening verses of Bereishit. 

Rabbi Brovender, also a profound thinker with a penchant for pithy witticisms, once shared that all of the efforts to understand ma’aseh bereishit - Creation - in terms of modern physics and cosmology were, doomed to irrelevance as the physics inevitably become obsolete while the pesukim, the verses, remain unchanged. At the same time, these efforts are somewhat irrelevan. If, Rabbi Brovender mused, I was personally contemplating creating my own universe, then it would be important to know exactly how God went about doing it the first time. But, since that is not in the cards for any of us, what enduring and eternal  importance is there in understanding the stages of creation in this way?

The Torah is not a human book of cosmology. The Torah is not even a human book of theology. The Torah is a Divine book of anthropology and religious phenomenology. The subject of the Torah is human beings and our experience of living in the world that God created. If we look to Rashi and Ramban on the opening words of Parashat Bereishit we see their attempt to unpack the first of an infinite number of Divine teachings about what it means to live in God’s world.

Rashi and Ramban note that a more efficient starting place for the Torah would have been the twelfth chapter of Sefer Shmot where the first mitzvah is listed. The stories that describe the creation of the heavens and earth, the creation of humanity, and the creation of the Jewish people have a less obvious place in the Torah, not because the account of creation is not of the utmost importance to our faith in God, but because the details of the unfolding creation process are, fundamentally incomprehensible. In Ramban’s words כִּי כָל זֶה לֹא יוּבַן בִּינָה שְׁלֵמָה מִן הַכְּתוּבִים one cannot get a full comprehension of these matters from the verses alone and no number of  additional verses could possibly allow us to really understand.

The opening chapters of Bereishit, as Rashi and Ramban explain, set forth a pattern which is a paradigm for later history and for our relationship with mitzvot which will ultimately occupy most of the Torah. Sin leads to exile. Adam and Chavah were exiled from Gan Eden after they eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Kayin is made to wander after he kills his brother. The builders of Migdal Bavel are scattered to the corners of the earth after their cryptic, yet sinful, construction of the tower. Humanity is indigenous to Gan Eden. After that first expulsion we are sojourners and refugees wherever we live. 

כִּי־לִ֖י הָאָ֑רֶץ כִּֽי־גֵרִ֧ים וְתֹושָׁבִ֛ים אַתֶּ֖ם עִמָּדִֽי׃

This is the preface for the introduction of mitzvot to the Jewish people. Our flourishing as a people is a consequence of our ability to sustain the sort of society that the mitzvot create and nourish.

Post holiday fatigue is real. When yom tov ended, it seems just hours ago, but actually it was Wednesday, I was incredulous and a bit indignant that it would be Shabbat again so soon. Couldn’t we take a voucher for an extra Shabbos sometime in February and skip this one?  But it’s important that we not let our legitimate fatigue lull us into moving forward from the holiday season that just ended without a commitment to some long-term change and growth. What a waste it would be of all the effort we put into cooking and hosting and davening and dancing if we rush back to “normal life” the same as before. What a shame it would be to be seduced by the feeling of euphoria at the return of hostages if we didn’t take advantage of our relief at their return to inspire prayers of gratitude and serious commitments to maintain our focus and activism on the long-term sustainable welfare of Am Yisrael HaYoshev BaZion, our brothers and sisters in Israel.

Parashat Bereishit is beyond human comprehension. Indeed, every word of the Divine Torah contains layers of meaning that quickly transcend the human capacity to comprehend. But we live in a world that God created. We must live with the awareness that our lives are the product of a Divine will that we exist in this created world. And we live alongside other people who are also the products of that Divine creation. The implications of these core facts of existence are not simple. They take a lifetime of study to internalize and a lifetime of struggle to actualize. But, as Hillel might have said, “the rest is commentary, now go and study.”