Parashat Bereshit | Senior Rabbinic Fellow Joe Blumberg | October 18, 2025

Shabbat Shalom.

I actually love this moment.

When we arrive at Parashat Bereshit, I appreciate

the intensity of the spiritual journey that we've been on.

It is a long journey from Tisha, Be'Av way back in August

to a couple of days ago and it's it's really nice.

It feels normal to have kind of a normal Shabbat with no strings attached.

It's great.

I think we're all still kind of letting the experience

of the High Holidays settle into our souls.

It takes time, and I still feel like I hear

the singing bouncing off the walls from Simhat Torah.

And at the same time, I think we really need this invitation

that this Shabbat offers us to fully make that transition into the year ahead.

The year started a month ago, but really now we're we're getting into the work.

The time for intensive soul

searching and fasting and feasting and dancing has passed.

And we've put the Torah back on the table and we rolled it back to the beginning.

And now we get to the best part, which is starting to read again.

At first glance, the opening of partial sheet

seems to offer a completed story with a beginning, a middle,

and an end and the beginning of God's creating heaven and earth.

The earth was told who vivo?

Who unformed and void.

And God said, let there be light, and there was light.

And that's the beginning.

And from then on, God undertakes a process

of having a lot of separations

that turn chaos into order.

Light is separated from darkness.

Sky is separated from earth.

Water is separated from land

different types of plants and animals are created and distinguished.

That's the middle.

And ultimately humanity is created and distinguished from all other life.

As Tov my ode.

Very good. And God rests.

And that's the end.

Every year, the unfurling of the world in this way never ceases to amaze me.

Bri shines a light on the majesty of the universe with its miraculous

diversity, its relative orderliness, its predictability.

And there's a sense by the end of the first chapter, when

God blesses God's creation and rests for the first time,

that the world is fully set up, it's done.

Creation has been achieved, and God is ready for humans

to step into the spotlight on a fully assembled stage.

But every

time we come to who came these verses, my mind also wanders back

to that famous Shakespeare phrase the lady doth protests too much.

These verses are two orderly, all the separating

and the categorizing as a response to the so whoever who the unformed chaos.

While it reflects some realities in our world,

we know that it doesn't reflect the full picture of life,

which of course is so often anything but well organized and tied up in a neat bow.

We live disorderly lives in a world that does not always make sense.

And so the juxtaposition of our own chaos against the apparent order of creation

outlined in the first chapter of Grace sheet is really quite jarring.

In her book, The Beginning of Desire, doctor of Eve is Orangeburg suggests

that perhaps the narrative of this first chapter of Bree sheet

does not tell as orderly and complete a story as we might think.

She cites a midrash from Brace Sheet Rabbah,

which claims that creation was not actually finished by day six,

but that the process of creation stretches deep into history

all the way up to the present moment.

Because the first six days of creation actually introduced tensions

into the world that are still begging to be resolved.

She cites a midrash that on the second day of creation, on day two,

when the lower waters are separated

from the upper waters to create the earth and the sky,

the lower waters immediately yearned to be reconnected with the upper waters.

Rabbi Brashear said the lower waters separated from the upper waters only with

weeping, exclaiming, we too want to be in the presence of the king.

The very act which created one of the fundamental features

of our world, the differentiation between earth and sky,

simultaneously created a desire for return.

The lower waters missed being with the upper waters.

They missed being with God.

And Zandberg explains that these have dilute these separations

which are so crucial to building our world simultaneously introduced

this yearning for oneness, freshly moved

into the DNA of the universe.

And so, rather than calling what happens in the first chapter of Beresheet

creation, she calls it primal disintegration,

a process that's not only about the creation of order and finality,

but also about the insertion of tension and longing into the universe.

The Midrash is making a pretty bold claim

that our own feeling of yearning for more wholeness in this world is not only part

of our experience as humans, but also part of the very fabric of the created world.

The entire created world yearns along with us to return to wholeness.

To not have to exist in the disjointed and ionized reality in which we live.

When I first came across this midrash, I found it

kind of painful to come to the conclusion that we may, in fact

be living in a world that was in need of repair from the outset.

It feels like such a radical and unnatural claim for the Midrash to make,

and it brings up some pretty unwieldy theological questions, too.

Why did God create the world

with so much yearning and tension that needs to be resolved?

Why do we have to live in this unaffected world?

But at the same time, the Midrash resonated with me very deeply

because it validates the distance that we feel from that perfected world.

It's not just us.

Nature itself feels the distance.

This idea that we that the project of creation was not finished

by that first Shabbat appears most famously in a comment

that Rashi makes about the sixth day of creation, Your Majesty.

So we're putting aside the two for a fact.

That was the first midrash.

We're going to day six, the second midrash, and he links the sixth day

of creation to the sixth day of the month of seven, Shavuot,

which is the day that the Torah was given at Mount Sinai.

And in making this connection, he writes that all of the work

of the beginning of creation was held in a state of limbo.

This kind of primordial suspension that lasted from the sixth day of creation

to the sixth day of seven.

And only when the Israelites

stood at Sinai and finally accepted the Torah.

Did the world come into being.

So creation was almost finished on the sixth day,

but it was only fully realized when the Israelites accepted Torah at Mount Sinai.

I was thinking about this midrash in terms of music theory.

It's like the world has been stuck in a dissonant chord,

and it only resolves into a nice major chord.

When human beings stepped up to the plate and accepted their role as God's

partners on earth when they said not a save, and Ishmael acknowledged

that they had a role to play in

bringing about the justice and honesty and dignity that the Torah demands of us.

I think there's something really powerful about this idea

that accepting our responsibility to engage in God's world is the very thing

that can move our world out of the unfinished state and towards completion.

Our role in this framework is to see the gap between where we are

and where we wish to be, and then not just look at that gap,

but step into the gap and help God finish what God started.

Zandberg describes the passing of the baton from God to humans.

Really beautifully, she writes.

God speaks lovingly to his world

and then assigns it another creator.

It is apparently human consciousness in all its contingency

that creates the world.

In other words, the way we live

and act in this world isn't just a reaction to creation.

It is creation.

Through the choices we make and the stories we tell about who we are

and where we're going.

We are shaping creation itself, giving meaning and texture to

what would have otherwise remained inert and unfinished.

Creation is not a closed event that ended on the sixth day,

but an ongoing process in which every action

that we take continues to create our reality.

And our job is to listen for the call of all that is not yet finished.

All the injustice, all the yearning, the cries of those

primordial lower waters,

and to realize that we are the ones with the extraordinary privilege

and responsibility of ushering creation along its journey from brokenness

toward wholeness.

As much as we might wish to offload that role to God.

We have had that role, according to the Midrash

since Sinai, and we still have it today.

I think that this year, on this particular Shabbat,

less than a week after the release of the final living hostages,

reading about the beginning in light of this conception

of creation takes on a whole new meaning.

This is not only the first Shabbat of the new Torah cycle.

It is the first Shabbat of a new phase in the Jewish story.

It is a new beginning.

And we come to this beginning, just like the Midrash explains

the original beginning.

Aware of both the incredible possibilities of this moment

and the pain that's mixed in with those possibilities.

Like many of you, I cried tears of joy

as I watched the hostages return to their families,

and as they found their way, one after another, through those hospital

corridors and reunited with the people they love,

I felt a sense of hope that I have not felt in two years.

And I watched as within hours,

the headlines that celebrated the hostages return transformed into warnings

that the cease fire was already being broken.

An analysis about the immense work of healing and repair that lies ahead.

It's a strange feeling to have officially entered the day after.

It's a new beginning.

But it's not a clean slate.

We're eager to celebrate the finality of the deal,

but we're also deeply aware of all that is still broken and in need of repair.

After the last two years, Israel is in need of recreation.

Gaza is in need of recreation.

The Jewish people is in need of recreation.

This moment mirrors all of the complexity

of the creation story that emerges through the Midrash.

Fresh possibility intertwined with a longing

for wholeness and a call to take part in what comes next.

As we move from the regime into this new year and into this new phase

of the Jewish story, the question becomes, what kinds of creators do we want to be?

How will we step into that gap between what is in Israel and in America,

and in the soul of our people, and what could be?

How will we keep on creating what God started?

Will we be passive observers in this next chapter,

or will we, with courage and vision, pick up the tools of creation

that have been placed in our hands and begin to build a more just society,

a more compassionate people, a world that better reflects the divine image.

Doctors Thornburg concludes

her commentary on the first week of the creation story

with this comment about our role as co-creators in the world.

This is what she says.

Pray sheet describes not the

clarity's of origin and cause, but the potentialities of purpose.

There is no foundation.

The beginning of the pathway merely glimmers

in the future.

At some time and some place, a human being may create the world.

God now authors the work that will go

in search of authors.

Actively or passively, we are all those authors.

And the way that we respond to this moment and every moment in the year ahead.

May this Shabbat pray sheet, the Shabbat of beginnings,

inspire us to respond to the unfinished work all around us,

not with resignation and overwhelm, but with an appreciation of our role

and responsibility as co-creators with the divine.

And may we, through the lives that we lead in the coming year, help bring creation

one step closer to the wholeness that it has been yearning for

since the very beginning. Shabbat Shalom.