The Genesis of Love In The Lonely Man of Faith, Rabbi Soloveitchik drew our attention to the fact that Bereishit contains two separate accounts of creation. The first is in Genesis 1, the second in Genesis 2-3, and they are significantly different. In the first, God is called Elokim, in the second, Hashem Elokim. In the first, man and woman are created simultaneously, “male and female He created […]
The Three Stages of Creation And God said, let there be… And there was… and God saw that it was good.” Thus unfolds the most revolutionary as well as the most influential account of creation in the history of the human spirit. In Rashi’s commentary, he quotes Rabbi Isaac who questioned why the Torah should […]
The Faith of God In stately prose the Torah in its opening chapter describes the unfolding of the universe, the effortless creation of a single creative Force. Repeatedly we read, “And God said, Let there be… and there was… and God saw that it was good” – until we come to the creation of humankind. […]
The Faith of God There is a deep question at the heart of Jewish faith, and it is very rarely asked. As the Torah opens we see God creating the universe day by day, bringing order out of chaos, life out of inanimate matter, flora and fauna in all their wondrous diversity. At each stage […]
The Art of Listening What exactly was the first sin? What was the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil? Is this kind of knowledge a bad thing such that it had to be forbidden, and was only acquired through sin? Isn’t knowing the difference between good and evil essential to being human? Isn’t it […]
The Genesis of Justice There are words that change the world, none more so than two sentences that appear in the first chapter of the Torah: Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all […]
Taking Responsibility If leadership is the solution, what is the problem? On this, the Torah could not be more specific. It is a failure of responsibility. The early chapters of Genesis focus on two stories, Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel. Both are about a specific kind of failure. First Adam and Eve. As […]
A Living Book It is the most famous, majestic and influential opening of any book in literature, “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.” What is surpassingly strange is the way Rashi – most beloved of all Jewish commentators – begins his commentary: Rabbi Isaac said the Torah should have begun with the verse, […]
The Faith of God There is a deep question at the heart of Jewish faith, and it is very rarely asked. As the Torah opens we see God creating the universe day by day, bringing order out of chaos, life out of inanimate matter, flora and fauna in all their wondrous diversity. At each stage […]
The G-d of Creation and the Land of Israel There are times when an ancient text seems to speak more directly to where we are now than to the time when it was first written. Rarely has that been truer than in the case of the famous first comment of Rashi to the Torah, to […]
