Two Minute Torah Podcast

Bereshit 5772 by Rabbi Elyse Winick

Shalom and welcome to KOACH's Two Minute Torah, a project of the college outreach department of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.  This is Rabbi Elyse Winick, Director of KOACH.  This could easily be called Two Minute Torah 5.0, as we enter our fifth year of presenting these brief Torah podcasts.  We hope you enjoying listening as much as we enjoy preparing them and we welcome your comments and submissions.

Where to begin?  One would assume, at the beginning.  Or in the beginning.  Bereshit opens so precipitously, suggesting nothing to precede it, the ultimate yesh me-ayin, creating something out of nothing.  But while the Torah may or may not be telling us a story that has no prequel, you and I most likely will approach this first parashah of the year vaulted into it from the last parashah of the year on the day before.  It is hardly yesh me-ayin, something out of nothing, for us.

We will stand in celebration, gasping as the Torah is raised above our heads revealing its final columns, only to rise again a few moments later, filled with anticipation as we marvel at the opening columns of a scroll weighted completely in the other direction.  In those moments, the Torah is for us like the moon, waning to nothingness just before it waxes full and with promise all over again.

A number of years ago I was standing for hagbah, the raising of the Torah after it is read, on Simhat Torah.  We had just concluded V'zot Habrakhah, the last parashah and we had not yet read the opening verses of Bereshit.  I was suddenly struck by a tremendous sense of anxiety and vulnerability.  We were without a Torah portion.  Yes, I understood that we would shortly begin to read again, but there was a real sense of emptiness, a vacuum created in the space between Deuteronomy and Genesis.

That is an extraordinarily unusual moment in Judaism.  It may even be sui generis.  Generally, when we find ourselves in a place one might describe as 'in between,'  that place or time becomes uniquely sacred.   The threshold between inside and outside – we place a mezuzah on the doorpost and give sanctity to a place which would otherwise be neither here nor there.  The arrival and departure of Shabbat, which would otherwise be vague and nondescript – we mark those moments with candlelight, transforming the terror of the ill-defined into something holy and honored.  And the moon, to which I referred earlier.  When it disappears from view, we mark the onset of a new month.  We retool our fear and make it holy.

But not now.  Not for those brief moments when we are without a Torah portion.  Those moments are a portal into tohu va-vohu, the primeval chaos which precedes God's organizing the world into manageable categories and our eternal quest for order.  In those moments we stand, naked before God, silently and unconsciously praying that the story, our story, has a next chapter. It's over in the blink of an eye and we are restored to the comfort of knowing exactly where we are, in the Torah, at least.

What if we focused on that moment, untouched by our attempts to call it by name and master it?  What if we allowed ourselves to plunge into the abyss, challenging ourselves to write the next chapter of our own story and the story of the Jewish people with passion and commitment, rather than allowing the tide to carry us along?  In Minister Robert H. Schuller's words, "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?" Bereshit will always be there to catch you.  But the future is in your hands.