Two Minute Torah Podcast

Bereshit 5773 by Rabbi Elyse Winick

Shalom and welcome to a brand new year of KOACH's Two Minute Torah, a project of the Department of College Outreach of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. This is Rabbi Elyse Winick, Director of KOACH/College Outreach and I'm delighted to wish you a sweet and wonderful 5773.

It feels a little hutzpadik to be preparing this Two Minute Torah - because we post at the beginning of the week, I'm writing this before we celebrate Simhat Torah. How audacious to drink from the wells of next year's Torah when this year's Torah has not yet been concluded.

But the exhilaration of a return to Bereshit, going back to the beginning, is enough to lure me in. The prospect of re-reading its stories, re-visiting its characters, re-discovering its potential for meaning draw me into a place of great anticipation, looking forward to being side by side with my community when we return to this well loved book. Like a child who insists on the reading and re-reading the same dog-eared text, to the point where they can recite the dialogue right along with the reader, I'm looking forward to the homecoming of Bereshit.

It's a text that is not without its challenges. This year, I think, I'll read Bereshit with an eye to reconciling at least one piece of the text with which I'm in conflict, one in each parashah. Those moments aren't difficult to find. Usually we either shrug them off or explain them away. This time I want to go deeper and find the rich potential hidden there.

The Creation story offers much to start with, but let's focus on one often misinterpreted moment - the creation of woman from the tzela of man. The text reads: So the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon the man; and while he slept, God took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot. And the Lord God fashioned the rib taken from the man into a woman and God brought her to the man. Because Eve is said to have been created from Adam's rib, we're given to consider her to be secondary to Adam. An appendage. Created from a superfluous place.

But that's not the only way to read it. The word tsela, as pointed out by Professor Anne Lapidus Lerner in her book Eternally Eve appears thirty eight times in the canon and in every other scenario but ours, it refers to the side, as opposed to the rib. While this may seem to be an inconsequential difference of translation, the difference is significant. A rib, we are left to believe , is a small and irrelevant part of the body. The side, however, implies greater gravity and equality. It has a far more wholistic feeling than the rib alone. And Adam's language seems to reinforce this notion: he refers to Eve as flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones . Even referring to himself as ish and to Eve as ishah implies a certain evenness to his assessment. We are one and the same, even as we are two separate entities.

Generations of treatment of women have rested on what may well be a faulty translation. Worlds can rise and fall on how we use language. 140 characters limit not only the content, but the quality of what we say. How do we ensure that what we say is what we mean? How do we ensure that what we say is worthy of saying? I don't imagine that the first person to translate tzela as rib meant to create an environment which led to a patriarchal system in the short term and perhaps even an absence of equal pay for equal work in the long term. But within the limitations of what we can actually control, we have an obligation to choose our words carefully, ensure that they convey truth and sincerity and use them as building blocks for the future, rather than tools of destruction.