Two Minute Torah Podcast

Bereshit 5771 by Rabbi Elyse Winick

Shalom! Welcome to a new year of KOACH's Two Minute Torah, a project of the Department of Youth and Young Adult Services of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. This is Rabbi Elyse Winick, Associate Director for KOACH.

Bereshit bara elohim et hashamayim v'et ha-aretz. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Or, in the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth. Or, when God was creating the heavens and the earth. There are about as many translations of this seemingly simple phrase as there are translations of the Bible. We tend to take translation for granted as equivalent to the text in its original form, but in truth, translation creates meaning just as much as it is a point of access for something which is otherwise opaque to us.

When we think about the story of Creation, we picture the chaos and the void and envision a world formed out of and in the midst of the void. God as Creator. If you look closely, though, there are several things which seem to pre-date creation, things which appear to exist, rather than fall among the myriad parts of the world God brings into being.

Water is not created. It is separated, in order to form the world, but it does not own a moment, in our recorded telling, in which it comes to be.

God is not created. Indeed, God is present and creating from the outset.

And, similarly, time does not seem to be created. It is assumed -- for there to be a beginning, there must be time to measure.

Each of these presents us with a sense of something all encompassing, beyond measure, perhaps eternal. If we find a place of quiet in our souls, we can sense how each might wash over us, how we might lose ourselves and somehow be part of a larger, immeasurable whole.

Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that the first use of the word qadosh or holy is at the end of the creation story: How extremely significant is the fact that it is is applied to time: "And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy." He says further, 'When history began, there was only one holiness in the world, holiness in time."

It's worth noting that when Heschel refers to time, he's not talking about what we measure with our watches and our calendars, or what we complain of having too little of or wasting or running out of. He's talking about something larger, which begins before creation and will take us beyond the end of days. We use time as we know it to connect with this eternal quality, to draw the sanctity of time into the world we know and the lives we lead. Time, Heschel says, doesn't pass. We pass through time. Time does not run out. We run out.

There is a uniquely holy quality to these three which seem to predate creation. Of course, we say, God is holy. And we know that water as a source of life is also used ritually to restore sanctity when it is lost. And if you think about it, time, too, gives us a portal into that which is holy and sacred and helps us to bring holiness and sanctity into our day to day lives.

To consider, as we begin from the beginning -- where are the moments and the places in which we can allow our individual selves to be part of something larger and greater, to be swept up by grandeur and experience holiness? How can we ensure that we are doing our share to draw out the innate holiness in the world and the people around us? I imagine we often think we don't have the time to engage in such thinking -- but I'll suggest here that that may be the only thing we really have time for.