This year, I am entering my second year as Vice President of Religion of Education, so my d'varim will be updated and revamped this year. I will include the same summaries that I wrote for last year, but I will also include a small piece of commentary that will take a closer look at one part of the portion. Some weeks it may be explaining my opinion on something in the portion, and others it may be just highlighting a cool detail (spoiler: there will be sorcerers in the Torah!). Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy what I have in store for this new year!
-Matthew Koltenuk
Bereshit summary:
The beginning of the Torah comes along with the beginning of Earth. To start this portion, God creates the world over the first week of time. On the first day, God creates light and then separates it from the darkness. On the second day, God creates the sky and uses it to separate the already existing water. On the third day, God gathers the water into one area, so that land can form in the other areas. God also creates vegetation; plants, fruits, seeds, and trees. On the fourth day, God creates the sun and the moon. They are created to tell time and to show a difference between night and day. On the fifth day, God creates fish and birds. On the sixth day, God creates animals and one man in God’s image. Then, God blessed the seventh day, Shabbat, made it holy, and rested.
Next, God creates the Garden of Eden and puts the man in it. God tells the man that he can eat anything, except fruit from the tree of knowledge. Then, God creates a woman for the man, to give man a “helper.” The man and the woman were naked, but they did not feel ashamed.
After this, a snake comes up to the woman and suggests that she eat from the tree of knowledge, and she does. She then gives some to the man, and he eats too. However, eating the fruit caused “their eyes to open,” and they realized they were naked, so they made loincloths. The man and the woman then hear God coming into the garden, so they hide because they were naked. This causes God to realize that they ate fruit from the tree. Since they broke the rules, he punishes each one of them. The snake is cursed to crawl on its belly forever, the woman is cursed to have pain while giving birth, and the man has to work to earn food. Then, the woman is named Eve (it doesn’t explicitly give a time when Adam is named), and God makes clothes for Adam and Eve. God then banishes them from the Garden of Eden.
Adam and Eve have two kids, Cain and Abel. Cain becomes a farmer and gives God a fruit offering. Abel becomes a shepherd and offers God his best sheep. God pays attention to Abel’s offering but not to Cain’s offering, which makes Cain sad. Cain then kills Abel while they are working, because he is mad. God then asks Cain where Abel is, and Cain lies and says that he doesn’t know. However, God says that he knows that Cain killed Abel. God then curses Cain to fail at farming and become a ceaseless wanderer. God also puts a mark on Cain to protect him, so that anyone who kills Cain would suffer 7 times as much as Cain.
The portion then goes on to list all of the descendants of Adam, all the way down to Noah. Next, God sets man’s maximum lifespan to 120 years. Finally, God realizes that men are not all good people, and he regrets that he made them. He vows to get rid of all men, animals, and living things. This is a sad way to end the portion, but the last line reads, “But Noah found favor with the Lord,” suggesting that humans might have one more hope in Noah!
Commentary:
One interesting part of this portion is found almost immediately, in the fourth verse of the Torah. I think that these introductory verses can show us the origin of one of our most simple beliefs- light is good and dark is bad. There are many appearances of this in society, whether it’s that people are scared of the dark (almost no one is scared of the light) while light is used for dramatic, positive effect in many movies and TV shows. We have lights in our buildings to help us see, and we have flashlights for times we know it will be dark. Being in a dark room can dampen the mood. Even in Star Wars, the bad guys are on the “dark side,” and in baseball, the dark, navy blue Yankees are the “Evil Empire” to the lighter-colored Red Sox fans. There are clearly many examples of light being positive and darkness being negative, but where do we get this from?
It turns out, this may originate from the Torah! The Torah says, “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:3-1:4) This was the first day of the world existing, and the first thing God did was to create light. That clearly shows that light was a priority for him. It’s also interesting word choice that God made light “good,” and that especially connects to my point mentioned above. In society, we just accept light as positive and dark as negative, and I think this is because the Torah literally says that light is good, and God made sure to create light to separate the infinite darkness.
No comments:
Post a Comment