Mindful Torah...and more

  This week’s Parashah /portion is Bereshit . It takes its name from the first book of the Torah, Bereshit /Genesis, because it is the first parashah in that book. And so, of course, it begins with some of the most familiar words in our tradition B’reshit barah elohim ...In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The rest, shall we say, is history. Or at least religious mythology. As most of us have been taught through the years, God created Adam, the first man, on the sixth day. This was followed by the creation of the first woman Havah /Eve who was taken from Adam's rib. We all know the story. And yet, we don’t. In the first Chapter of Genesis we read that on day six “ God created Adam /the human in God’s own image, in the image of God was [Adam] created; male and female God created them.”  In other words, a singular human being, Adam, was created, but that Adam was male and female. It isn’t until Genesis Chapter 2 where we read that, after God has created all t...

This sermon being delivered tonight at my congregation, The Jewish Fellowship of Hemlock Farms (www.jfhf.org) in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. ----------------------------------- This evening is the start of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of a new Jewish Year. However, the day is not called Rosh Hashanah in the Torah, it was the rabbis who later assigned that name. In the Torah the day is referred to as Yom ha'Zikaron , the Day of Remembrance. But what is it that we are remembering on this day? According to the rabbinic tradition, Rosh Hashanah celebrates the creation of the world. To be more exact, it celebrates the creation of the Adam, the first human being. In the Biblical and Rabbinic tradition, the human being was seen as the pinnacle of creation. Yet, knowing what we do about human beings and human nature today, do we believe we are the pinnacle of creation? Do we believe that the world was created for our sake? Does the universe exist merely to be ...