All week I have been dreading this moment of having to say something in front of the congregation. We have all been struggling with disbelief and anger, grief, fear, our hearts ripped open; emotions too raw to express in words. 

And of all Torah portions to read this week, we have Bereishit. The beginning. This is a parashah which lays out the core aspects of what it means to be a human being. As a Rabbi, I turn to our tradition, our words.

Let’s look at five details, five snapshots that tell us who we are and what we are here for.

First comes creation. God spends six days making heaven and earth. As the Torah opens, we learn that the primordial state is one of chaos—tohu vavohu—with the spirit of God hovering over the deep. Reading on, the earth and sky form when God pushes out the watery chaos, the forces of evil and destruction. God divides them above and below, and from side to side. There, those waters, with their monsters and evil dragons, wait, eager to rush back in to reawaken the chaos. As the final creative act, God forms human, male and female, in the Divine image. God blesses them, us, and assigns us responsibility of dominion over the earth, the sea, and all they contain. Humanity is God’s partner, our duty unique among the rest of Creation. Our job is to keep those waters of chaos and evil at bay, to allow the rest of the world to flourish.

The next snapshot is in the Garden of Eden. God forms the first human out of the dust, and almost immediately declares lo tov heyot ha-adam levado – “It is not good for the human to be alone.” The solution is to divide the human into two, male and female, to serve as one another’s companions. We learn that humans are social creatures. We rely upon one another in the most fundamental ways. 

The third snapshot is also in the Garden of Eden. God had planted the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with instructions to not eat from its fruit. You know what happens. The woman and the man eat the fruit, and thereby gain moral knowledge. They experience something new: shame, as they hide their nakedness from one another, and from God. Their punishment is to be expelled from the Garden. 

The fourth snapshot is of their children: Cain and Abel. When God favors Abel’s sacrifice, Cain is overwhelmed with jealousy and anger. God warns, “Sin couches at the door. It’s urge is toward you, but you can be it’s master.”

Cain does not master his rage, and he murders his brother. 

“Where is your brother Abel?” God asks.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” is Cain’s response. I believe his question is an honest one.

God does not answer the question with a simple yes or no, but with an expression of horror and disbelief. “What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground!” Cain’s punishment is to wander the face of the earth, marked with the sign of a curse. 

The final snapshot: Zeh sefer toldot adam —“This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, God make him in His likeness; male and female He created them.” What follows is a geneaology of the children of Adam and Eve, covering the ten generations to Noah. The Talmudic Sage Ben Azzai declares this verse to be the fundamental principle of the Torah. All human beings are descend from the same origin. All of us carry the divine image. All of us are brothers and sisters.

These five snapshots merge into a portrait of the human condition. We human beings are God’s partners in Creation. It is our responsibility to keep the waters of evil and chaos at bay. There is a moral purpose to the universe, and we play a critical part…

…and we are morally imperfect. We have the capacity to know the difference between good and evil. We have the capacity to overcome sin, but we are no longer living in Eden. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asks. It is the dominant moral question of the entire book of Genesis, perhaps even the Torah. The ultimate answer is “yes. I am my brother’s keeper.” But violence and bloodshed are a constant presence.

And despite this all human beings are brothers and sisters. And we are stuck in this world, outside of Eden, that is filled with love and hate, peace and violance, order and chaos, grief and joy. And we need each other. And God does not want us to be resigned. All of this from our Torah’s opening parashah.

We have been witness to all of these humanity this week. I simply do not have words to talk about Hamas’ murderous rampage one week ago, last Shabbat, the morning of Simchat Torah, other than to call it pure evil, the worst of what humanity is capable of. There have been those that have tried to say that “they are not humans. They are animals.” I disagree. They are humans, and we know all too well that humans are capable of such evil.

This is the forces of creation ripped apart by chaos. Human beings utterly shirking their obligation to be partners with God in creating order and goodness. The blood of our brothers and sisters still cries out from the ground. It demands our grief, and our response. 

We have also seen inspiring acts of human connection. Jews everywhere around the world experienced last week’s horrors deeply. Israelis immediately set aside their differences to come together in shared grief. They did everything imaginable to help victims, to protect and defend their fellow citizens. Jews around the world gathered in mourning and solidarity, demanding the freeing of our captive brothers and sisters. We have sent our financial support, and marshalled our political and social resources.

We have received outpourings of support from friends and allies around the world – those who rightly see the other as their brothers and sisters in shared humanity.

Astonishingly, there has been silence from too many, not to mention those who celebrate and cheer the torture, murder, and kidnapping of innocents.

Parashat Bereishit shows us exactly who we are, and it begs us to be who we are meant to become.

I have been thinking all week about how we are going to respond ritually to the demands of this moment.

This week has been filled with laments of grief, outpourings of rage, demands for vengeance, expressions of hope. Prayer helps us put what we are feeling into words. Prayer can sometimes be a statement of faith. Sometimes it is not a statement of faith but it is as a way of expressing ourselves when we cannot formulate the sounds on our own. It gives us the words when we do not have the words.

So, we are going to add prayers to our services. This morning, and probably for quite some time. This is what I could come up with for this morning. Our feelings and emotions may change in the weeks ahead and our prayers may change also.