Bereisheet, 5787 - Questioning Our Origin Stories

It is time to begin my new blog series. I've been trying to figure out - to paraphrase the Passover Haggadah - how to make this blogging endeavor different from all other blogging endeavors. I have written about the weekly Torah portion for nearly 20 years. It's time to mix things up and come at this from a new angle. This week, we are restarting the Torah reading cycle and are back at the Book of Genesis. My theme for all of Genesis is going to be "Origin Stories and Myths." The Torah text may be our launching point, but where we go from there is anyone's guess! Let's get started:

Genesis begins with, arguably, THE Origin Story; the creation of the world. In English, we often mistranslate the first words of the whole Torah as "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth." We'll get back to the mistranslated part in a minute. Where does this story come from? What facts and data is it based on? How can it be true? These are often our first questions when we - in society and culturally - pit science against religion. Who is "right" about how it all began? The Torah, however, is not trying to present facts. Remember that these are our ancient ancestors, thousands of years ago, looking around at their world and up into the vast sky and wondering, "how the heck did this all start???" It would have been thoroughly impossible for them to "know" the answers to their most fundamental questions, so they had to speculate, imagine, and create. My follow-up question then is, does that make their stories "wrong"?

I suppose that question depends on what you think is the real purpose of the Biblical text? This brings me back to my earlier assertion that we mistranslate the very first sentence in the Torah. Maybe even the very first LETTER! I won't get into the grammar of it (though feel free to reach out if you're interested in more detail), but the punctuation and the word choice essentially make it impossible to read the first words as "In the beginning." A much closer translation would instead give us: "When God began creating..." This tiny shift signifies so much! If we're talking about a beginning rather than the beginning, it completely changes the claims of the text. It is not, in fact, trying to offer an account of how EVERYTHING began, but just the beginning of our ancestors' own story as they imagined it.

If we look at it that way, how could their stories ever be "wrong"? It is no longer about fact, but rather creating cultural truth and yearning to know how it all began. The enterprise is about imagining and speculating why we are here on this earth, what God (if you accept that there is one) expects of us, and where we are going; as individuals and as a civilization. Seeing things this way allows us to realize that sometimes it isn't about correct and incorrect, right and wrong. Consider instead what narratives we tell ourselves. How do we view our time on this earth and what our lives are all about? And our narratives begin with Origin Stories... and also with really good questions. Seems like a pretty great place to start to me!