Shalom! I am Rabbi Jonathan Ginsberg of Skokie, Illinois. This is a Devar torah about the portion of Genesis, the first portion of the Torah Bray sheet. First question is, is it a scientific document? Well I need to tell you a joke in order to explain this. A fellow says to God “God, in your terms, how much is a minute in our terms?” And God said “A minute to me is like a million years to you.” Then he said, “Well then, a penny to you, how much is that to us?” And God said “A million dollars.” So the man said “God, can I have one of your pennies?” And God said” in a minute.’ So it does not mean necessarily that a day in our terms, in God’s terms, is a day in our terms, it could be a billion years. Genesis is not a scientific book and anyone who thinks it is just being ridiculous, it is not trying to be a scientific book, it is trying to say there is a sequence, like evolution of God’s creation, it took a while to go from nothingness and vagueness to the full universe we have and humankind evolving. If you look at it like a scientific phenomenon, human beings were created the very, very end of the 6th day. It took a very long time to get here, that does not change the fact that the Torah is trying to each us that God is the creator. That is the first starting point in the main idea. Now there are many, many valuable lessons of Genesis, I want to talk about a few of them. First of all, what does it mean when God says “Let us make man in our image according to our likeness?”
Who is God talking to? Well some rabbi said God is using the royal “we”, other say God was talking to the angels. I think what makes most sense is, we know the animals are there already, according to chapter 1 that God was talking to the animals, and said, let us make man in our image, I will make him part mammal, I will make him mammal like you and I will give them my spirit and that is what a human being is, and that is what we are. And Judaism says that we are consisting of those two forces, mammalian and God’s spirit, and we constantly have to negotiate hose two, we cannot be just God’s spirit, because we are in bodies, God did not want us to be that, God already had angels like that and God did not want us to be just animals. And so the whole commandment structure of the Torah is designed to help us mediate that idea. And, one of the other ideas of course is that human beings were at the crown of creation, but we are not allowed just to do whatever we want, Genesis does say that we can have dominion but it also says we have to be guardians, Shameer, guardians of the garden.
And we have to navigate carefully between those two ideas of using what we need in the world but being careful guardians and it seems like right now, we are not being careful enough guardians. Also, the bible says that in the story about God making Eve from Adam, it is trying to teach us, as it says. it is (foreign language), God made man and male and female, that is the essential equality and I will do another video on women in Judaism but basically men and women are viewed as absolutely equal, in God’s eyes, there is no inferiority or superiority, we have to construct a society where they are both protected equally. Now what about the Adam and Eve story eating the apple? I know that some traditions view that as the ultimate fall and sin of all humankind, Jews do not seethe story that way at all. There is a seductive sense of sin that occurs in the world, but that does not mean that all human beings are born sinful, well kind of the contrary, we believe human beings are born pure, but we have temptations because we are mammalian and those temptations can be, lead to excess. And so, we have to be careful and we have repentance, which I have another video on to explain how to come back to God once we have sinned. Now what about Cain and Abel? Well, here you have the most interesting question, one of the most interesting questions in history where Cain kills Abel out of jealousy and if you read the bible carefully, you see lots of brothers have problems, it is nothing new. And when Cain kills Abel, he tries to hide him.
God says “Where is your brother?” And Cain says “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God says, (foreign language) where are you? “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And God wants to know where we are and the answer to the question is yes, you are your brother’s keeper, we have a responsibility to every human being, to help safeguard and make the world a better place. And finally, we do not live in the Garden of Eden anymore, we do not, we live in the real world, we have to work, we have to serve God and the only time we will have a taste of the Garden of Eden again is what we call life after death, the holy blessed living in unison with God. Well that is some of the essential ideas of this story that starts off the Torah. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. it is the starting point for all religion and for all western society and all of the other great ideas of this portion that we, with which we begin the Torah, come from those words.
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