Parashat Bereishit: Genesis 1:1−6:8
Sing a New Song!
This week was packed with emotions and endings and beginnings. We made it through our first High Holy Days season together, which I enjoyed very much, and I am excited to begin a new, our first full cycle of Torah with a full heart and open mind.
Besides dancing with our Torah scrolls and Dan Nichols, waving the lulav for rain – a prayer that was promptly answered – rejoicing in another version of Temple Beth El’s artsy and crafty sukkah, the momentous event of this past week was arguably the release of the twenty living Israeli hostages, as part of a ceasefire agreement that still feels fragile.
The war may be over for now and hopefully, the “land will be tranquil for many years” – though not believing in “eternal peace” just yet might express a healthy if somber dose of realism rather than pessimism.
In Biblical Israel, the fragile in-between state of “tranquility” was common. The small kingdom, later split into two even smaller entities, was often beleaguered or at the crossfire of imperialistic politics of one of the surrounding superpowers, Egypt, or Assyria, or Babylon.
The prophet Isaiah, from whose book the haftarah for Parashat Bereishit is taken, emerged during the 8th century BCE, when Assyria was the big threat “from the north” – the direction from where most hostile troops would come. Yet the book of Isaiah is very long, and many scholars hold that the chapters that contain the passages for this week’s haftarah were authored by a later scribe or school, probably around the Babylonian exile. In both cases, early Jewish societies oscillated between faith in divine help and Israelite resilience on the one hand and despair, grief, or skepticism on the other.
Amidst all these mixed emotions, the prophet urges the people to
Sing to God a new song,
praise from the ends of the earth—
You who sail the sea and you creatures in it,
you coastlands and their inhabitants!
Isaiah’s language here and in the surrounding passages is evocative of God’s creation of the world, the divine masterwork mentioned in the beginning of Torah.
Thus said the Eternal God
Who created the heavens and stretched them out,
Who spread out the earth and what it brings forth,
Who gave breath to the people upon it
And life to those who walk thereon:
I God, in My grace, have summoned you,
And I have grasped you by the hand.
I created you, and appointed you
A covenant people, a light of nations—
Opening eyes deprived of light,
Rescuing prisoners from confinement,
From the dungeon those who sit in darkness.
(Isaiah 42:5-7)
From darkness and fear to faith in redemption, from chaos to creativity, from mourning to dancing, from one year to the next: As we return and begin again, may we be nurtured by the words of Isaiah and Torah, comforted by the power of historic resilience, and inspired – despite hardship, loss, or skepticism – to sing, or at least to cautiously hum, new songs.
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch