Parshat Bereshit: Trusting Humankind

By MOUCHKA DARMON

I find it extremely interesting that the parasha that is by definition connected to creation, renewal and, therefore, positivity, alludes to the “Tohu VaVohu” (1:2) at its very beginning and concludes with the passuk that announces Hashem’s desire to send the Mabul, saying “Ki nichamti ki asitim” (6:7), “I wish I hadn’t made them”. From this long parasha, we generally remember two things: the creation of the world and the sin of the Ets Hada’at. Still, in my memories, Bereishit has always been my favourite parasha and I have always thought of it as a “happy” one. My question here would be how could we actually connect the different main topics of the parasha and what message can this parasha bring us? If we take the parasha as a whole rather than a successful amalgamation, what comes out of it?

Let’s start with the beginning. When I first studied Bible, my teachers translated Tohu VaVohu as “all mixed”. Ok, I was 5, they needed to be simple. Still, striving for simplicity made them wrong. You simply have to take a look at Rashi (1:2) to get a totally different definition of those two words. Rashi gives the word “Tohu” a sense of astonishment and stupefaction even adding the old French translation as dizziness like vertigo almost. Rashi explains that it has this meaning because men are always astonished and almost shocked when placed in front of the emptiness, of the void. It is true, indeed, that nothing scares us more than this; the emptiness, the naked space, the gap, the void. We even think of emptiness as a concrete expression of sadness. We fear it in our lives, and use it as a catalyst to fill our existence with as many things and people as we possibly can. So “Tohu” would be the void and is only enhanced by “Vohu” which Rashi says is the emptiness in the sense of loneliness. Imagine a world with nothing in it. Or if it’s two hard, imagine a naked planet. Think the Little Prince of St-Exupery. Even he needed a rose and a sheep.

The world therefore got created not from an “all mixed” weird modelling clay but rather from the “nada”. This is the reason why we say the prime characteristic of Hashem is that He has the capacity to make “Yesh MeAyin”, something from the nothing, while we, human beings, as incredibly clever and skilled as we are, can only create something from something else, and need a basis for that. However, it is us who Hashem put in charge of bringing this world to its fulfillment. It is us who He chose to be His people and do His Torah. It is us again, who He calls His children. It is said that when Hashem wanted to give us the Torah, the angels cried out to Him and asked Him why He would give it to us, human beings, so prone to sin, and not to them who would do everything perfectly and He answered that the whole reason was our free will, meaning precisely our inclination for the sin. We people the world in order to choose Torah OuMitsvot over our temptations.

This very powerful idea is nevertheless tainted by some irony due to the fact that Adam Harishon and Chava sinned within the first day of creation. The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains that according to the Midrash, Adam was created on Friday during the afternoon, and the commandment to not eat from the Ets Hadaat, literally the Tree of Knowledge, was only relevant until the beginning of Shabbat. That means that the forbiddance to eat from the tree was only relevant for 3 hours.

That leads to an obvious question, which is: how could Adam Harishon, who was a Tsadik, lived in the Gan Eden, and had directly been created from Hashem Himself, who literally blew into Adam his neshama, how can this man not be able to sin for 3 hours? The Lubavitcher Rebbe answers this question by saying that it is precisely the fact that the mitsva was so easy that made it so difficult. We tend to underestimate everything that seems too easy. We take them for granted. We wouldn’t make a special effort for them because we feel like they don’t need it. Within the kiyum mitsvot, we have two additional concepts to mitsvot which are the barriers we have to define in order to not do forbidden things, and the hidourim, which are a little bit more of a Chasidic principle that is meant to embellish the mitsva. For instance, most Chasidim do not eat kitniyot during Pessach, even though it’s not Chametz. A barrier that we define to not break a mitsvat lo ta’aseh is mouktse, for example. But Shabbos, not eating chametz are complex and vast mitsvot. We think that we need extra care for them because of their difficulty. That’s a mistake, the mistake that lead Adam Harishon to eat from the Tree. We need to respect every mitsva the same way, and to not make a difference between what we think is easy or tough, what we believe is relevant or not. The lesson of the sin of the Ets Hadaat is that we need to follow the mode of operation the Torah consists in. If we had always had, we would still be in Gan Eden. Torah is to be understood as a way of life, as containing all of the necessary steps and rules to win the game over. It is not our job to define what we want to take over what.

This mistake of under-estimating a mitsva is what leads Adam and Chava to get out from the Gan Eden. It also made Adam and Chava aware of their human condition, of their nakedness, as the passuk says “vayedu ki aroumim hem” (3:7), they knew they were naked. So here we have the idea of the fear of nakedness again and the need to clothe it. The next chapter talks of the birth of Cayin and Abel and relates the murder of Abel by his brother. We were in the Gan Eden a chapter ago, then we eat from a forbidden fruit, and here we go we have a murder. If there is one thing we can take from this succession of events is the concept of domino effect. The Torah states the idea of averah goreret averah just in the same way that mitsva goreret mitsva, a sin leads to a sin and a mitsva leads to another mitsva. The parasha ends with announcing the Mabul and it could seem like everything failed, the creation concluding to destruction.

The world was created from the empty and we have been placed in it to be continually building on it. However it is only up to us to go back to the void, or to create something bigger. The key here is to know and believe that we have been placed in this world and given such a choice to make because of the incredible value of the choices we make everyday. The sin of the tree is moreover here to teach us that there is no “little” thing in the service of Hashem or in the decisions we make everyday. We often think “Who am I to change the world? It is not my small action that is going to make a difference.” Well, Bereishit teaches us that a small question such as biting in a fruit can change history, even though we don’t necessarily have the privilege to know the consequence of each one of our actions. It is indeed a beautiful message that the story of the creation of the world is so full of men actions. It would have only be logical to dedicate the entire parasha to Hashem and Hashem only who is finally responsible for the creation of the world. However, the parasha is full of men, and not simply perfect Tsadikim but real, weak, vulnerable, able to fail men that finally look a lot like us. That is because we, as we are, with our weaknesses and failures, we participate in the constant building of the world, and we are responsible for filling in the nakedness, for continuing to create. We are responsible for deciding in which direction this world is heading toward, and each one of our actions, small or big, intentional or not, is a stone that is added to the huge building representing what this world fulfills. Therefore, it is a message of empowerment that the parashat Bereishit carries, and a rather powerful one. Finally, the parasha really starts with the words “Bereishit barah Elokim”, at the beginning, Hashem created, and finishes with “veNoach matsa chen beeiney Hashem”, and Noach found grace in the eyes of Hashem. Hashem created the world to put it in the hands of men, and puts His trust everyday into men. It is up to us to justify and deserve it. The good news is that as the year begins after the Holidays, we all have what it takes for that.