Here’s my Torah commentary for Simchat Torah on B’resheet. Or listen to it!
Shabbat Shalom.
Our parashah for today is B’resheet, which is a Hebrew word that means “in the beginning.” This portion covers Genesis chapter 1 through chapter 6, verse 8. This is perhaps the most well-read and familiar of all the parashahs of the Torah; yet it is also the focus of more questions and mysteries than any other parashah. For those who believe, the foundation of their faith often starts with the words, “In the beginning, God created.” Yet for those who do not believe, their questions and doubts begin with the very same words.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God created. He created it all. While it may seem like a simple insight, it is also important. It is so important, in fact, that this is why so many Hebrew prayers and blessings begin with the words: baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech haOlam, which means, “Blessed are You, O L-RD, our God, creator of the universe.”
That is who God is. Our creator. Not only our creator, but the creator of everything, of all life. The L-RD is the creator, to borrow a book title from the late science fiction author and humorist Douglas Adams, of life, the universe, and everything.
The L-RD spoke, and everything that is came into existence, by the very power of Him speaking them. The L-RD utters ten phrases, and all that is, is. The interesting thing is, He did not need ten sayings to create it all; according to the Sages, as we find in:
Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, p. 49
With ten sayings God created the world, although a single saying would have sufficed God desired to make known how severe is the punishment to be meted out to the wicked, who destroy a world created with as many as ten sayings, and how goodly the reward destined for the righteous, who preserve a world created with as many as ten sayings.
While this insight into the ten sayings is interesting, what I believe is far more helpful is to realize that the first mention of Messiah comes not in the L-RD’s promises to Moses, nor his promises to Abraham, nor to Noah. The first mention of Messiah in the Torah comes as early as verse three, as we read:
Genesis 1:3
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Where is Messiah in that verse? Why, in the reference to light! But don’t take just my word for it. Let’s take a look at this tradition from:
Weekly Midrash, vol. 1, p. 18
The Torah tells us, “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ to reveal that God will ultimately illuminate Israel with the light of the Mashiach, of whom it is written, “Arise, shine forth, for your light has come.” (Jeremiah 60:1) – the light being, of course, the Mashiach.
So, as we can see, the gospel writer John was not alone when he suggested that the Messiah and the Father were one eternally, present at creation and in the mind of the Father before time even began. In fact, there’s a striking similarity between how Moses begins Genesis, and how John begins his gospel, as we read in:
John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing made had being. In him was life, and the life was the light of mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not suppressed it.
Notice that John starts out with very much the same word as the book of Genesis… In the beginning, or, in Hebrew, b’resheet. So Genesis is indeed a book of beginnings. The beginning of the promise of Messiah; the beginning of time; the beginning of the world.
In this beginning, the L-RD labors for six days and then establishes the seventh day as a day of rest. It is not, as some would suggest, that the L-RD needed to rest. He was setting an example for us, and commanding us to observe the Sabbath day from the very beginning of time. More importantly, he was setting an example of Adam. And it’s important to realize that the Sabbath is here, commanded by the L-RD’s example from the beginning of time as a festival of the L-RD to be held on seventh day.
Now some people might say, “But the Sabbath belongs to the Jewish people!” In fact, I know of a Messianic teacher who promotes that very idea; he teaches that there are ten commands for those who are Jewish, and only nine for non-Jews because the Sabbath is for the Jews alone. Yet here we are in Genesis, nearly 2,000 years before the L-RD called out Abraham, long before Isaac and Jacob, long before there was a “children of Israel,” and even longer before Moses received the Torah on Sinai, and here is the L-RD setting the example of the Sabbath day for an audience of one – Adam.
And this seven day pattern, as it turns out, will repeat over and over again; it has a prophetic component because it is a shadow of the L-RD’s plan for His creation. Did you know that the Bible teaches, and even the rabbis teach, that there are only seven thousand years of time in God’s plan?
Now, of course, like so much of this parashah, that goes against the conventional wisdom of the world, against science, which teaches, as Carl Sagan once said, that the universe is “billions and billions” of years old.
Yet that is not what God teaches. Let’s look at this tradition from the:
Babylonian Talmud 97a
The school of Eliyyahu teaches: The world is to exist six thousand years. In the first two thousand there was desolation; two thousand years the Torah flourished; and the next two thousand years is the Messianic era,
And what of the last thousand years? That is also spoken of in the:
Babylonian Talmud 97a
One thousand years out of seven shall be fallow, as it is written, And the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day,’
So you see, just as the work of God was over in six days, followed by a Sabbath day of rest, so too will the work of mankind last six thousand years, followed by one thousand years of Sabbath rest in which Messiah will reign and the L-RD will be exalted. We are given the key to unlocking this mystery in the word of:
II Peter 3:8
Moreover, dear friends, do not ignore this: with the L-RD, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day
Now, some people get hung up on the details. They will zealously pour over this verse, for example, and try to extract a hidden meaning from the word “like” versus the word “is.” Or perhaps they will look too closely at Genesis 1:1 through 2:3, as well as Genesis 2:4 and what follows, and they will buy into the claim made by some teachers that there are two creation accounts in Genesis. Or maybe they’ll listen to someone on the radio, or read some Web site that claims to be Messianic – until you read what they teach, anyway – and they’ll try to determine between which two verses of Genesis the war in heaven occurred.
And the truth is, a lot of that stuff can be fascinating. But the truth is also this: none of that stuff is actually in Genesis. I’m concerned about teachers who have so much time on their hands that they have to dream up theories about what happened between the verses of the Torah, rather than prayerfully wrestling with the Torah itself. I’m concerned about teachers who study Torah so little that they would assume there are two creation stories in Genesis, rather than recognizing the style of Hebrew literature, which is not always linear and chronological as we think of it, but is often organized in more of a point-by-point way. First the L-RD, through Moses, gives us a broad summary of the creation, then he delves into the detail, repeating part of it.
This sort of carelessness in study and teaching is what leads to bad theology. It’s what leads to people putting more stock in myths than they do into the text of the Torah itself. In fact, it could almost be considered a form of idolatry, an idolatry of ideas rather than images or gods. The Torah is the Word of the L-RD, after all, and if we’d rather spend time debating whether Adam had a wife before Eve, rather than appreciating all the rich Messianic significance, instruction by example, and prophetic symbolism of the account of the creation of all that is, then perhaps our time is being invested in the wrong area.
That’s idolatry. We should be investing our time, our study and our prayer in the words of the L-RD, and not some fringe teacher’s flights of fancy. Anything else leads people astray from not only the Word of God, the Torah, but also the Living Word of God, Messiah Yeshua.
That’s what it’s all about, right? I know that’s what the study of Torah is all about for me.
Shabbat Shalom.
Tags: B'resheet, simchat torah