Thinking Torah Blog

This week we begin Torah again as we start reading from Bereshit, the first parashah in Genesis. At this time last year, along with our Shabbat morning Torah study group, we began reading the Torah verse by verse each week. It took us nearly the entire year to get through these first six chapters of the Torah. It has been a wonderful experience! Needless to say, I've become quite familiar with this first parasha as I've prepped each week for Torah study. Of all the interpretations I encountered and brought to Torah study, the work of Phylis Trible left me with a deepened sense of hope and interest in the sacred creation myths we all know so well. Trible suggests that we've interpreted Eve's eating of the fruit all wrong for generations. Trible argues that eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil led to a cleaving between man and woman. The story's metaphor is about how these two human beings became estranged from each other. Trible published her book, "God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality," in 1978, but I think estrangement between people has only become a more significant problem since that time. We live at a time that promised to be connecting, but, as it turns out, we are lonelier than ever. Many of us live estranged from each other and even our most intimate family. Connecting with others, finding space to just be, and be together, is the most crucial tikkun (repair) we can engage in. It is the essential task we have as human beings and one we've been engaged in from the very first days of creation.