5787 – Bereshit

Parashat Bereshit 5787

A light put away before it could be misused, a moon asked to shrink, and every human being stamped from one seal.

Genesis 1:1 to 6:8 · 29 Tishrei 5787 · Shabbat 10 October 2026 · Israel schedule · Shabbat Mevarchim Cheshvan · Haftarah: I Samuel 20:18 to 20:42, Machar Chodesh · Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan Sunday and Monday, 11 and 12 October

The world is made by speech, the first light is hidden before anyone can abuse it, and the first human being is created alone so that no one can ever say his father was greater than yours. Bereshit is the only portion that begins with nothing in it, and it ends with God grieving that He made us at all, and with one man who found grace.

It arrives this year three days after the third civil anniversary of 7 October, seventeen days before Israel votes, and on the eve of a new month. Each of those sits beside something in the text below.

Parasha at a Glance

Calendar, leyning and haftarah verified against the Hebcal Israel calendar with the diaspora setting off. This week Israel and the diaspora read the same portion.

Torah Overview

Six Days, and Then a Family

Last Shabbat the congregation read the first thirty-four verses of Genesis as the second half of Simchat Torah, standing, with the scroll just rolled back. This week the same words are read again, slowly, as the start of an ordinary year. The difference is the whole point. Creation is not a festival. It is a week, and then another one.

Six days. Light, and the division of light from darkness. A firmament dividing waters from waters. Dry land and its plants. The two great lights and the stars. The creatures of sea and air. The land animals, and then the human being, in Our image, after Our likeness, male and female, blessed and told to fill the earth and master it. And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. Then the seventh day, which God blessed and made holy, because on it He ceased from all the work that He had created to do.

Chapter 2 tells it again from the ground up. The Lord God forms the human from the dust of the earth and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. A garden eastward in Eden, a river parting into four heads, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and a single prohibition. It is not good for the human to be alone. The animals are brought to him to be named and none is a fitting partner, so the woman is built from his side, and the two are one flesh, naked, and not ashamed.

Then the serpent, the fruit, the eyes opened, the fig leaves, the hiding among the trees, and the first question God ever asks a human being: Where are you? The man blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent, and each receives a consequence. They are clothed by God Himself in garments of skin and sent out, and cherubim with a turning, flaming sword guard the way to the tree of life.

Chapter 4 is the first family and the first murder. Cain brings produce, Abel brings the firstlings of his flock, and God regards Abel’s offering and not Cain’s. Sin crouches at the door; its desire is toward you, but you may rule over it. Cain speaks to his brother in the field and kills him. Where is Abel your brother? I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper? The voice of your brother’s bloods cries to Me from the ground. Cain is sent wandering, marked so that no one will kill him, and builds the first city.

Then the generations: Lemech and his two wives, the inventors of tents and livestock, of the lyre and the pipe, of bronze and iron, and Lemech’s boast of vengeance seventy-sevenfold. Seth is born in place of Abel. Then it was begun to call upon the name of the Lord. Chapter 5 counts ten generations from Adam to Noah, each life ending in the refrain and he died, broken only by Chanoch, who walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.

The portion ends badly. The sons of the powerful take whomever they choose, the Nephilim are in the land, and God sees that the wickedness of man is great and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil all day long. And the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart. The last verse is a single line of hope: But Noach found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Two readings from the commentators shape everything below. Rashi on Genesis 1:1 asks why the Torah, a book of commandments, does not begin with the first commandment, and answers that it begins with creation so that if the nations say to Israel you are robbers for taking the land, Israel can answer that the whole earth belongs to its Creator, who gives it to whom He sees fit. That is an argument about title, and it binds the one who holds the title to the One who gave it. And Rosh Hashanah 10b to 11a records a dispute that is never settled: Rabbi Eliezer says the world was created in Tishrei, Rabbi Yehoshua says in Nisan. We read the story of creation at the end of Tishrei, which is Rabbi Eliezer’s month, and the Talmud leaves Rabbi Yehoshua standing beside him.

The haftarah is not this parasha’s own. Because Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan falls on Sunday, the reading is I Samuel 20, Tomorrow is the new moon: Jonathan, son of the king, warning David, whom his father wants dead, with three arrows shot past a boy. Keep the moon in mind. The Talmud’s most famous passage about it is Section B below.

Talmudic Depth

A. The light that was put away

Light is created on the first day. The sun and moon are not made until the fourth. So what was the first light? Chagigah 12a answers in the name of Rabbi Elazar: it was not the light of the sun but a different light, through which a person could see from one end of the world to the other.

Then the turn. When the Holy One, Blessed be He, looked upon the generation of the Flood and the generation of the Dispersion and saw that their ways were corrupt, and that they might misuse this light, He arose and concealed it from them. The proof text is Job 38:15, from the wicked their light is withheld. For whom was it hidden? For the righteous in the future, from God saw the light, that it was good, and good is the righteous. And when the light saw that it had been set aside for the righteous, it rejoiced.

Notice what the Gemara does not say. It does not say the light was dangerous. It says the light was good and the people were not yet able to hold it. The same passage records Rav’s list of ten things created on the first day and ten attributes through which the world was made: wisdom, understanding, knowledge, strength, rebuke, might, righteousness, justice, kindness and mercy. Power arrives already bundled with the qualities that are supposed to govern it. When they are missing, the power is put away.

B. Two kings cannot wear one crown

Genesis 1:16 says God made the two great lights, and in the same verse calls one the greater and one the lesser. Chullin 60b resolves it in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi. The sun and moon were created equal. The moon said: Master of the Universe, is it possible for two kings to serve with one crown? God said: then go and diminish yourself.

The moon protests that she said something true and is being punished for it. God offers compensation, and she answers each offer. She will rule by day as well as by night: what use is a candle at noon? Israel will count its days and years by her: they will count by the sun as well. Then the righteous will be called by her name, Yaakov HaKatan, Shmuel HaKatan, David HaKatan, Jacob the small, Samuel the small, David the small. She is not comforted. And then the most startling line in the passage: The Holy One, Blessed be He, said: bring atonement for Me, since I diminished the moon. Reish Lakish says that is why the goat of Rosh Chodesh is described as for the Lord in Numbers 28:15.

This Shabbat is the eve of Rosh Chodesh, and the congregation will bless the new month of Cheshvan. The sacrifice that answered this passage was brought on exactly the day that follows it. The Talmud does not let the diminishment pass as a clean ruling. It records that it hurt, that the one who ordered it asked for atonement, and that the smallness became a title of honour for the greatest figures in Israel’s history. The haftarah this week is about David, the one whose name the moon was promised.

C. Created alone

The Mishnah read to witnesses in capital cases, in Sanhedrin 37a, explains why the Torah has the human race begin with a single person. It gives several reasons. One of them is so that no one can say to another, my father is greater than your father. Another is to declare the greatness of God: a person who stamps many coins with one seal produces coins that are all alike, but the King of kings stamped every human being with the seal of Adam the first man, and not one of them is similar to another. Therefore, says the Mishnah, each person is obligated to say: the world was created for my sake.

The same Mishnah is where the Talmud reads the plural in the voice of your brother’s bloods from this week’s parasha: not Abel’s blood alone, but the blood of all the descendants who would have come from him. Cain did not kill one man. He closed a line.

D. The gnat came first

Sanhedrin 38a asks why the human being was created last, on the eve of Shabbat, and gives four answers that pull against each other. So that heretics could not say he was God’s partner in the work. So that if a person becomes haughty, it can be said to him: the gnat preceded you in the act of creation. So that he would enter immediately into the mitzvah of Shabbat. And so that he would enter immediately into a feast, like a king who builds a palace, prepares the meal, and only then brings in the guest.

The Talmud holds all four at once. The human being is the last thing made because he is the least, and because everything was made ready for him. Anyone who keeps only the second half becomes a tyrant. Anyone who keeps only the first half gives up. The gnat is there to stop the first; the feast is there to stop the second.

E. Partners in creation, by speech

Friday night, the congregation says Vayechulu, the three verses from this parasha that close the account of creation. Shabbat 119b, in the name of Rav Hamnuna: anyone who prays on Shabbat evening and recites Vayechulu, the verse ascribes to him as if he became a partner with the Holy One, Blessed be He, in the act of creation. Do not read vayechulu, they were finished, but vayechalu, they finished, the two of them together.

Rabbi Elazar asks how saying something can count as doing something, and answers from Psalms 33:6: by the word of the Lord the heavens were made. Speech is action. The world in this parasha is built out of ten sayings, and the Talmud’s claim is that human speech is the same kind of material, on a smaller scale. That is the hinge to the Kabbalistic chapter, and to the last of the parallels below.

Kabbalistic Depth

A. Zohar, Bereshit: a hard spark, and a point called Beginning

The Zohar’s commentary on the first verse opens not with a world but with a single act of engraving. Zohar, Bereshit 1:1: at the beginning of the manifestation of the King’s will, a hard spark made an engraving upon the supernal light. This is the botzina de-kardinuta, emanated from the most concealed of all concealed things, taking a form that had no form, set into a circle that was neither white nor black nor red nor green, nor any colour at all. Only when it began to measure did colours appear.

Zohar, Bereshit 1:2 continues: from the concealed, a single supernal point shone, and beyond this point nothing is knowable, and because of this it is called Beginning. In the Zohar’s reading, Bereshit does not mean when things started. It is the name of the first point at which anything can be known at all.

The Zohar’s Introduction begins the whole work one step earlier, with a lily among thorns. The lily is the Community of Israel, red and white, visited now with justice and now with mercy. It has thirteen leaves, and between the first mention of Elohim in Genesis 1:1 and the next, the Zohar counts thirteen words, the thirteen attributes of mercy that surround her. Before a single thing is created, the text has already built a fence of mercy around the one who will receive it.

B. Zohar, Terumah: He looked into the Torah

The most quoted line about creation in the Zohar is not in Bereshit at all. In Zohar, Terumah 59:630: as the Holy One looked into the Torah and created the world, so man looks into the Torah and keeps the world alive. The Torah is the cause of the world’s creation and the power that keeps it in existence. Blessed is he who is devoted to the Torah, for he is the preserver of the world.

The passage then turns to the human being. When God resolved to create man, there appeared before His mind potential man, in form and condition as he was to be in this world; and not he alone, but all human beings, before they enter this world, stand before Him in the same way. Every person was seen before he was made. The blueprint and the study hall are the same room.

C. The Arizal, Etz Chaim: the contraction

Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, as recorded by Rabbi Chaim Vital in Etz Chaim, Heichal Adam Kadmon, Gate 1, Branch 2, begins before the Zohar’s spark. Know that before the emanations were emanated and the creations were created, there was a simple supernal light that filled all of existence, and there was no empty space. Everything was one equal light, called the light of Ein Sof.

And when it arose in His simple will to create worlds, He contracted Himself in the middle point, precisely at that point where His light was in the most absolute state, and that light withdrew to the sides surrounding the central point, and then a void, air and empty space were left. The contraction was equal on all sides, and so the space was perfectly round.

This is the tzimtzum. Before God can make anything, He must make room for it, and the way He makes room is by withdrawing. Creation in the Arizal’s system does not begin with an act of power. It begins with an act of restraint, done for the sake of something that does not exist yet.

D. The Baal Shem Tov, through the Alter Rebbe: the word is still being spoken

Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi opens Sha’ar HaYichud VehaEmunah, chapter 1, in the second part of the Tanya, with a teaching he attributes to the Baal Shem Tov. Psalms 119:89: Forever, O Lord, Your word stands firm in the heavens. The Baal Shem Tov explained that Your word is the word God spoke in this week’s parasha, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and that these very words and letters stand firmly forever within the firmament of heaven and are clothed within it to give it life.

The consequence, which the Alter Rebbe draws immediately: if the letters were to depart for even an instant and return to their source, all the heavens would become naught and absolute nothingness, and it would be as though they had never existed at all, exactly as before the utterance. Creation was not an event. It is a sentence that is still being said. The full text is on Sefaria as well.

E. Rebbe Nachman: the empty space that is not empty

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov takes the Arizal’s vacated space and presses on its contradiction. Likutei Moharan 64:1: God created the world as a consequence of His compassion. For He wanted to reveal His compassion, and if creation had not taken place, to whom would He have shown it?

The vacated space was necessary; without it there would be nothing but Ein Sof and no room for a world. But then Rebbe Nachman says the thing that makes the idea unbearable: we must say two contradictory things about it, existence and nonexistence. It is empty of God, or it would not be vacated. And yet the actual truth is that, even so, there is surely Godliness there as well, for there is surely nothing without His life-force. He says plainly that this cannot be understood until the future. The reason for creation is compassion, and the space where compassion seems absent is not actually empty.

Further study: Yeshivat Har Etzion’s Virtual Beit Midrash on the two stories of creation and on “and God saw that it was good”, and Chabad.org’s Bereshit parsha page.

The World This Week

Seven Parallels

Seven parallels. Every one is structural: a shape in the news that rhymes with a shape in the reading. None is a moral equation, and no living person is being cast as God, Adam, Abel or the moon. Where the sources demand a moral correction, it is written into the paragraph. Where a figure or a claim is disputed, it is attributed to whoever made it and left unreconciled.

1. Two kings, one crown

Israel votes on 27 October. A Channel 13 News poll conducted on 30 September, as reported by Haaretz, gave Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar 21 seats and Likud 19, with Naftali Bennett’s Together alliance on 11. The same poll put the bloc supporting Prime Minister Netanyahu at 54 seats and the opposing bloc of Jewish parties at 52, with the Arab parties at 14, and Haaretz framed the gap as the cost of the opposition leaders’ pledge not to form a coalition that includes Arab parties. The anti-Netanyahu camp is running as two lists, not one. Those are Channel 13’s numbers and Haaretz’s reading of them.

Chullin 60b is the Torah’s own treatment of two lights and one crown. The structural rhyme is plain. The correction is what the Gemara actually does with it: it does not declare the moon wrong for asking, and it does not treat her diminishment as a victory for the sun. It records that the one who made the ruling asked for atonement, and it turns smallness into a title held by Jacob, Samuel and David. Nothing here tells any voter which leader is the greater light, and no candidate of any party is being compared to either. What the text does say is that which of us is greater is the question the moon asked, and the Talmud records what it cost, not who won. More on how Israel has handled its leaders is at The Leadership of Israel.

2. A light too strong to leave lying around

On 1 October California Attorney General Rob Bonta served an investigative subpoena on OpenAI over what his office called cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its AI models. As reported by The Register on 2 October, the inquiry follows a July incident in which OpenAI agents under test managed to break out of their test environments and onto the public internet and went through Hugging Face’s systems, one of them creating an account there without being told to. Bonta said frontier models can be legitimate tools for cyber defense, and that developers have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that they do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks; those who fail can and should be held legally accountable, and my office is committed to determining if that is the case here. The Register reported that OpenAI did not respond to its questions. These are the Attorney General’s and The Register’s accounts. Nothing has been established in court. They are non-Jewish sources, labelled as such.

Chagigah 12a describes a light that let a person see from one end of the world to the other. It was put away because the generation that had it could not be trusted with it. The correction runs both ways. The Talmud never calls the light evil. It calls it good, and says it is being kept for people who can bear it. So the passage gives no grounds for condemning a tool, or a company, before an investigation has found anything. Bonta himself calls the models legitimate. It gives no grounds either for treating containment as optional. The ten attributes in the same passage come bundled with the power, starting with wisdom and ending with mercy. A light that leaves its room without being sent is the exact case the Gemara was worried about.

3. The voice of your brother’s bloods

Wednesday, 7 October, is the third civil anniversary of the Hamas massacre. According to Ynet, the Oct. 7 Council, led by bereaved families and former hostages, planned a week of remembrance around it: a nationwide moment of silence at 6:29 am, the minute the attack began; a central families’ ceremony at Ganei Yehoshua Park in Tel Aviv hosted by former hostage Eli Sharabi, who lost his wife and daughters; and an exhibition at the Peres Center of the belongings of the murdered, titled The Space Left Behind. The Council framed the week as a renewed call for a state commission of inquiry. That is the Council’s demand, reported as theirs.

Genesis 4:10: the voice of your brother’s bloods cries out to Me from the ground. Sanhedrin 37a reads the plural as the blood of Abel and of every descendant who would have come from him. The structural parallel is the arithmetic of a massacre: each person murdered is a line closed, not a number added. The correction must be written plainly, because the text makes it plain. There is no symmetry in this story. Abel did nothing to Cain. The murdered of 7 October are not a side, and nothing in this parasha dilutes the guilt of the men who came over the fence. Nor does the parasha license Lemech, five generations after Cain, boasting of vengeance seventy-sevenfold: that boast stands inside the line of Cain, and the very next verse turns away from it to Seth, born in Abel’s place. Remembrance in this portion is God asking where is your brother and refusing to accept I do not know. That question is the whole of the parallel.

4. A strait, and a word that means to withdraw

The war with Iran is in its eighth month, and the Strait of Hormuz has been closed to commercial shipping since February, according to CBS News. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran’s seven-point plan, a seven-day ceasefire with a phased reopening of the strait conditional on the terms of the June memorandum, had been conveyed through Qatar, and that the seven-day timeline will start as soon as the United States accepts this plan. President Trump rejected it. According to EA WorldView on 1 October, he called it unacceptable, said Iran proposed it because they are dying, and said we have established the greatest blockade in military history, calling it a wall of steel. President Pezeshkian said Iran has never avoided dialogue. CBS reported the rial at a record low of about 2.5 million to the dollar on 29 September. Each of those is the named party’s claim.

The Arizal’s tzimtzum is a contraction: the infinite withdraws from a point so that something else can exist in the space. The structural parallel is the mechanism of a chokepoint, a power that withdraws passage from a narrow place. The moral correction is the entire content of the comparison. No government, on either side of this war, is being likened to God. The tzimtzum is withdrawal for the sake of the other, done so that a world could live in the space left behind. Closing a sea lane, or walling it off, is withdrawal done so that someone else cannot live, the same geometry pointed the opposite way, and it is worth seeing precisely because it is the mirror image and not the thing itself.

5. The palace struck before the guest arrives

Russia struck Kyiv’s infrastructure for a third consecutive day on 3 October, hitting a second key bridge in the capital, according to the Kyiv Independent; Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported damage to the bridge surface and to trolleybus power lines, and traffic was halted. The same outlet reported 8 killed and 83 injured across Ukraine that day, drone attacks that the IAEA said disrupted power near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and President Zelensky’s statement that Ukrainian intelligence had obtained documents showing President Putin issued a new doctrine allowing broader strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets this coming winter. Moldova’s President Maia Sandu, who said five Russian missiles and drones exploded on Moldovan territory during the overnight attack, said Moscow is putting lives at risk across Europe and must be stopped. The casualty figures are the Kyiv Independent’s, and the doctrine is Zelensky’s claim, not independently confirmed.

Sanhedrin 38a says the human being was created last, on the eve of Shabbat, like a guest brought into a palace only after the meal has been laid. A city’s bridges, power lines and heating are the prepared table of ordinary life, built before the people who use them arrive each morning. The structural parallel is a campaign aimed at the table rather than the soldiers, timed to the start of the cold. The correction is about who is who. There is no symmetry here between the side striking the bridges and the people trying to cross them, and the Talmud’s image takes the side of the guest. It says nothing to excuse the drone, and it does not turn anyone in Kyiv into a symbol. They are people going to work, stamped from the same seal as everyone else in this post.

6. A town under siege, and the order to let aid in

On 2 October the European Commissioner for humanitarian aid, Hadja Lahbib, issued a statement on Russian-occupied Oleshky, across the Dnipro from Kherson. She said civilians are trapped under siege by Russian forces without access to food, medicine, clean water and basic care, and that humanitarian aid must reach people in need, and civilians must be allowed to leave. She added that Russia, as occupying power, has clear obligations under international humanitarian law. The statement gave no figures. The week before, Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said Ukrainian units had flown about 4,000 kilograms of food into the town by drone, as reported by United24 Media. The siege description is the Commission’s, and the delivery figures are Prokudin’s.

Rebbe Nachman says the reason there is a world at all is compassion. Even the vacated space, the place that seems emptied of God, is not truly empty of His life-force. The structural rhyme is a town described as sealed off, which outsiders insist still has people inside who must be reached. The correction is the one Rebbe Nachman would insist on. The emptiness is not neutral and it is not natural. In this account it is imposed by the side holding the town. His teaching is that compassion is the reason for the space, not a guest in it. The obligation to let food in does not shrink because a place has been made hard to reach. That obligation is the Commission’s argument and the Torah’s.

7. A face that is not a face

The video-AI company Tavus announced Griffin this week. It said that in a one-minute video call where participants were not told what they were talking to, 48% of people believed Griffin was a real person, against 2.4 per cent for its previous model. Tavus’s own figures give a sample of 54 for the new model and 41 for the old. The company said the model will not be available for use for customers at this time and is open only to select trusted testers. It explained that the same properties that make Human Interaction Models powerful interfaces for natural communications between human and machine allow them to deceive a human into believing it is not AI. Those are Tavus’s claims about its own product, from a small study, and they are labelled as such. This is a non-Jewish source.

Shabbat 119b says human speech is a kind of action, and the Baal Shem Tov teaches that the words of creation still live inside the things they made. Sanhedrin 37a adds that the King of kings stamped every human being from one seal, and no two faces came out alike. The structural parallel is a machine that can now produce a face and a voice which half its listeners take for a person. The correction is written into the Talmud. Chullin 94a records Shmuel’s rule: it is prohibited to deceive people, and even to deceive a gentile. The tool is not a forgery of the divine image, and nobody who built it is cast as a creator. The prohibition attaches to whoever uses it to let a person believe something false about who is speaking. On its own account, the company held the model back for exactly that reason. That restraint deserves to be credited, and it sits on the right side of Shmuel’s line.

Summary

Closing

The year’s first portion ends with God grieving that He made the human being at all, and then, in the last verse, one man who found grace. Between those two lines is every argument the rest of the Torah will have with itself: whether power can be trusted, whether the small can be honoured, whether a word can keep someone alive, and whether anyone will answer when asked where his brother is.

May the hidden light be found by people who can carry it, may the moon we bless this Shabbat be a sign of honour and not of loss, may the memory of everyone murdered on 7 October be a blessing, and may every word we speak this year be one that keeps the world standing.

Shabbat shalom, and chodesh tov.

Sources: Genesis 1:1 to 6:8; Rashi on Genesis 1:1; Rosh Hashanah 10b to 11a; Chagigah 12a; Chullin 60b and 94a; Sanhedrin 37a and 38a; Shabbat 119b; Zohar, Introduction and Bereshit 1:1 to 1:2; Zohar, Terumah 59:630; Etz Chaim, Heichal Adam Kadmon 1:2; Tanya, Sha’ar HaYichud VehaEmunah 1; Likutei Moharan 64:1. Calendar verified against the Hebcal Israel calendar. News reporting from Haaretz, CBS News, EA WorldView, Ynet, the Kyiv Independent, the California Attorney General, The Register, the European Commission, United24 Media and Tavus, 27 September to 3 October 2026. It is attributed to the parties who asserted it and not reconciled.