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Parashat Bereshit 5785 / פָּרָשַׁת

✷ to be read on October 26⎮24 Tishrei ✷

Bereishit (“In the Beginning”) is the first parsha in the annual Torah reading cycle. It all begins, of course, with the word. God creates the world and its creatures, including its first people, who eat from the Tree of Knowledge and are banished from the Garden of Eden. Farther down the road, their elder son, Cain, kills his younger brother, Abel. Cain is fated to a life of wandering.

In the Christian tradition, the expulsion from Eden is described as "the fall" and offers the basis for the theological conception of "original sin." In his D'var, Ben Harris describes how Judaism differently encodes the meaning and human consequences of what occurred when Eve and Adam disobeyed the divine prohibition against eating from the tree of knowledge. Harris argues that only through this act of rebellion does human freedom come to be: there must be a choice between obedience and disobedience, hence the people of Israel experience religiosity not primarily in terms of overcoming the sinfulness - the distance - that keeps us from the divine, but rather as an on-going argument with God ("God-wrestlers").