This is my D’var Torah for Shabbat on October 14, 2023. It’s the first Torah reading of the new cycle, Parashat Bereshit, and it’s one week since the beginning of the Hamas atrocities in Israel.
Last week on Simchat Torah, as we tried our hardest to celebrate especially for our youngest kids, knowing what we already knew, there was a verse I was chanting in the Torah that just gutted me even more. It’s the very last line attributed to Moshe in the Torah, his last words. The final line of Moshe’s blessing to the people said:
Happy are you, fortunate are you, people Israel, who is like you,
a nation saved by the Divine
your helping shield, whose sword is your pride.
Your enemies shall recant themselves to you
and you on their high places will tread.
Ashrecha Yisrael, mi chamocha, am nosha b’Adonai
magen ezrecha, asher cherev ga’avatecha
v’yika-chashu oyvecha lach,
v’atah al bamoteimo tidroch
And I thought in that moment, is it possible that not a single word or phrase of that Torah is true?
Not happy, not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. No Mi chamoacha, no callback to the moment of escape from Egypt, from danger into freedom, An enemy far from recanting, from going back on its essence — and who is treading on whom today.
Was even our own Torah going to be turned on us, to mock us, and on our holy day no less and in the presence of our sweet little ones. Or was this some kind of invitation toward even more faith, a faith that Torah can be as powerful as the weapons and mutated imaginations that define our reality right now.
And with those wonderings ringing in my soul we turned on Simchat Torah to the very first verses of the Torah, the first words of our parasha today, and they too seemed unreal: the creation of light in a reality hitherto dark and formless all the way down.
This is the week we are starting the Torah again. Against the backdrop of murder and kidnapping and mobilizing and bomb shelters, mourning and fearing for our loved ones and our people, this is the week we start again fresh. Each year when we get to Parashat Bereshit we’re supposed to have become better prepared by the chagim (fall holy days) for a new year of Torah, to be more receptive to it than ever before. Yet we know ahead of us is for certain a week of more death, and certainly weeks and who knows how much of 5784. What kind of strength will Torah have, this week and beyond, and what kind of strength and wisdom can it give us?
Parashat Bereshit begins with perfection, everything in its orderly place, and humans created in the Divine image, b’tzelem Elohim, and the first humans, placed in a perfect garden — with closeness to the Divine, the end of loneliness, and a charge simply to work and to protect their beautiful place.
Everything about the opening chapter was a revolution in human consciousness in its time, and I usually say in our time as well. But so quickly it all falls apart, and the parasha descends into exile, violence between brothers, and then violence enveloping the world. Until the parasha ends with only a single glimpse of hope, the birth of Noach: — zeh v’nachameinu, this one will comfort us, will turn us around, mi-ma-aseinu ume-itzvon yadeinu, from our actions and the sadness our hands have wrought, min ha-adadmah asher erera Adonai, what we’ve made out of this earth that the Divine has cursed.
This is not an easy parasha to begin with, a parasha about new beginnings and immediate troubles. I thought about going to other Torah this Shabbat for the comforting we all need. But maybe it is the parasha we need nonetheless.
On the first day, darkness hovers over the face of the deep seas and chasms, and God says let there be light, y’hi or — and there is. Vayehi or, light was, all of a sudden. And God saw the light, that it was good, ki tov, and immediately God separated the light from the darkness.
God wants light. And then God makes a decision to name the darkness. In the ancient world prior to the Torah, even in parts of the Bible composed earlier than the first chapter of Genesis, the creations stories would tell of realms beyond the reach of the gods, symbolized by deep and vanquishing waters and by endless darkness. But in our Torah God stakes a claim even to darkness. Gives it a name: laila.
Why would God want in on that? Especially if the light of the first verses is considered not physical light but Torah. Why would God want there to be something that is so profoundly opposite to Torah, as one of the first things in creation?
I can only think that there are two kinds of darkness. There is a darkness that says there is nothing in the world but violence, and even seeming goodness is just self-interest, or huddling together for safety and nothing more. Darkness is believing that is all there is, not just from time to time as we all do, but fundamentally all the time.
The Torah claims, I think, that darkness is something else. Some of it and maybe all of the moral darkness is made out of imagination and language and even out of connection, out of the capacity for organization and sustained effort — twisted for sure, and encased in the hardest and thickest klippot, cases of iron and hatred.
This kind of darkness is made of the same things as its opposite — as goodness, as light, as Torah. So God has no choice but to claim this darkness. And our hearts, connected as they are to all hearts with their roots in the Divine Heart, have no choice but to acknowledge it too.
And God is ambitious, and ambitious for the power of Torah against this darkness. Even knowing that it’s only through us, Divine image that we are but earthy nonetheless, that Torah will show its energy in the world.
So we have been taugh each day to say this blessing precisely when it’s actually light outside: Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohaynu Melech Ha-Olam, Yotzer Or u’Voray Choshech, Oseh Shalom u’Voray et Hakol. We thank God for fashioning light and creating darkness, making peace and creating everything.
On the fourth day, God comes back to work more on light, and God creates the sun and the moon. According to the midrash — and thank you to my friend and colleague Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal for pointing me to this Torah this week — the sun and the moon were originally made the same brightness, and both were charged to shine all the time. The moon approached God and said: Is it possible for two kings to serve with only one crown? And God said: Then go and make yourself smaller. The moon said: I raised a valid point, so why should I shrink myself? And God said: Go and share the day with the sun, and also rule the night by yourself. The moon said: What good am I that way, as a candle during the day that no one sees? And God said: Then go and let Israel count its days and years by you. And let people see that sometimes you are small, and sometimes you disappear, and sometimes there is no other light but yours.
As there are two kinds of darkness, there are two kinds of light. A bright and certain light, so obviously guiding and warming the world, at times of peaceful unity and justice — yes that is the light of the sun. But there is also moonlight, and Rabbi Rosenthal quotes a teaching from Rabbi Sharon Brous: That we Jews are moon people. “[T]he moon, like our spirits, is an object in motion. It will always come back around. For moon people, that is the essence of our spiritual mobility. … the moon teaches us that even when no light is visible at all, even in the deepest darkness, our hearts trust and remember that the light will shine once again. Maybe even tomorrow. And—though it seems impossible to imagine today—it will even eventually reemerge in its fullness. Orienting our calendar around the moon means that hope is a muscle we practice month after month, year after year, generation after generation. It is a muscle that gets stronger as we use it.” We Jews have had long experience exercising that muscle, and now we need to build it even more.
Sometimes Torah is a light powerful like the sun. Twelve years ago, the week of this parasha, Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier it had held captive for more than five years. It was among other things a testimony to the idea from our parasha that what Tzelem Elohim means is that we are accountable for the life of even a single individual, and the State of Israel did not break that faith with Gilad Shalit. That’s actually the Torah I taught for Parashat Bereshit right here on Shabbat twelve years ago.
Today, the light of Torah we need is more like the light of the moon. To continue to believe that the sanctity of human life is a powerful and guiding Torah, even during the weeks we are seeing more and more pictures of those who are captive and those being buried and more bombs. There is no Torah we can learn and go out and fix this with right now, even if we brought it to every minister and general and world leader. There is no Torah as that absolute a light. Still there is a Torah like the crescent moon that will help us locate ourselves, as I am trying to do right now with this Torah I am teaching, and Torah that will help us take a few steps in the right direction, even in the dark time we’re in.
In a few minutes we will bench Rosh Chodesh. We will anticipate the day this week when the moon disappears entirely and a new month commences, and we will beg God to give us a new month of blessing for us and for all the people Israel. How hard that prayer will be.
The name of the new month is Marcheshvan, which means “the eighth moon.” Eight is a special number. Marcheshvan is the only month of the Jewish year with no holy day at all beyong the new moon itself and Shabbat– no celebrations, major or minor, not even a minor fast. Tradition says this particular new moon coming this week, the sky left only with stars, will some year launch the month when the Mashiach comes, when the messianic era begins. The month is beyond saved for the biggest festival that could ever be, the light that doesn’t ever end.
It won’t be this month. I pray that with as much darkness as already grips our souls, with as much fear as we have, that we will help each other perceive the light of the moon, even as a sliver, and not lose all hope even as we acknowledge the power of the darkness, the darkness still claimed by God. I pray that we will find a Torah of moonlight to guide us, and remain committed to finding it. May our loved ones be safe, may our mitzvot be powerful in the days ahead, for ourselves and for them.
Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov.