5787 – Bereshit

A Light Put Away, a Moon Asked to Shrink

The world is made by speech, the light is hidden before anyone can misuse it, and the first human being is created alone so that no one can ever say his father was greater than yours.

Genesis 1:1 to 6:8 · Shabbat 29 Tishrei 5787 · 10 October 2026 · Israel schedule · Shabbat Mevarchim Cheshvan · Haftarah Machar Chodesh

Parasha at a Glance

	Israel, 29 Tishrei 5787
Date	Shabbat, 10 October 2026
Parasha	Bereshit, the first of the fifty-four
Torah	Genesis 1:1 to 6:8
Maftir	Genesis 6:5 to 6:8
Haftarah	I Samuel 20:18 to 42, Machar Chodesh, because Rosh Chodesh begins the next day
Shabbat Mevarchim	Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan is Sunday and Monday, 11 and 12 October
Molad Cheshvan	Sunday, 9:43 am and 2 chalakim
Next parasha	Noach, Shabbat 17 October 2026

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

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. 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, Cain 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. The anti-Netanyahu camp is not one list but two. Naftali Bennett leads the Together alliance, merged with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid. Gadi Eisenkot leads the new Yashar party. According to an analysis published by Eurasia Review on 24 September, Eisenkot rejected Bennett’s March proposal of a joint list, declining to serve as the junior partner, and the two signed only a surplus-vote agreement. The same analysis reports a Channel 12 poll of 8 September giving Yashar 25 seats to Likud’s 21, and a Channel 13 survey of 17 September giving Yashar 22 and Likud 18. Those are those outlets’ numbers.

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 his flight back to Rome from France this week, Pope Leo XIV told reporters, as quoted by the Irish Times: I do think that the concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI, should be taken seriously. I don’t think that that is fake news, as some have said. The same report says the remark contradicted President Trump, who had told the UN General Assembly the week before that fears about artificial intelligence endangering humanity were a hoax. This is a non-Jewish source, reported as the Pope’s own assertion, set beside the President’s.

Chagigah 12a is a story about a light that let one see from one end of the world to the other and was put away because the generation that had it could not be trusted with it. The correction runs in both directions. 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 comfort to anyone who says a powerful tool is a hoax, and none to anyone who says it is a demon. Its question is only whether the people holding it have the ten attributes that came bundled with creation, starting with wisdom and ending with mercy.

3. Every coin a different face

In an interview aired on 16 August on the October 8 podcast with former hostage Rom Braslavski, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said, according to the Times of Israel, that Israel should carry out targeted killings in Gaza of 30 to 40 every night, and that they’re not worthy of life and they’re not even people. This week the singer Bono compared him to Heinrich Himmler. Ben Gvir replied, as reported on the Times of Israel liveblog of 29 September, that the Jews are done apologizing for their right to live.

This parasha is where the human race is stamped from a single seal, and Sanhedrin 37a is where the Mishnah insists every coin comes out with a different face. The correction has to be stated in both directions, because there are two errors here and they are not the same size. Israel’s right to fight Hamas, which murdered and kidnapped its citizens, is not in question, and the Torah is not a pacifist document. But the claim that a category of human beings is not even people is the one sentence this parasha exists to refute. That is not an outsider’s objection. It is the Mishnah that the court read aloud to witnesses before they testified in a capital case, so that no one in the room could forget what a single life weighs. And the comparison to Himmler is false as well. Himmler ran the apparatus that murdered six million Jews; a minister’s words, however wrong, are not that, and setting them side by side empties the Shoah of meaning. The gnat preceded all of us.

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

The war with Iran is in its eighth month. According to Fortune on 30 September, Iran says it has received a United States response to its peace proposal; President Trump has said the proposal would not be acceptable and that Iran is failing very badly; President Pezeshkian has said Tehran will make every effort to bring the agreement to fruition; and the rial fell to about 2.5 million to the dollar on 29 September, from about 2.2 million twenty-seven days earlier. Fortune reports Iran offering to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within a week if the United States lifts its blockade, releases frozen assets and waives oil sanctions. 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 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 is withdrawal done so that others 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. A drone into the Academy of Sciences

On 28 September a Russian drone struck a building of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in central Kyiv. CBS News reported at least seven people killed across Ukraine that day, including a woman at the Academy; Meduza reported at least two killed at the Academy building. The figures differ by outlet and are left that way. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Ukraine will have to pay a price for its actions of recent months, and Russia’s Defence Ministry said it struck data centres and military-related infrastructure.

Zohar Terumah: as God looked into the Torah and created the world, so a person who looks into it keeps the world alive. A house of learning is, in the Zohar’s terms, part of the load-bearing structure of the world. The structural parallel is a strike on a building whose whole purpose is study. The correction is about who is who. There is no symmetry here between attacker and attacked, and the Zohar’s passage takes the side of the ones in the study hall. It says nothing to excuse the drone, and it does not turn the Academy’s scientists into symbols. They were people at work, stamped from the same seal as everyone else in this post.

6. Four tonnes of food into an emptied town

Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin announced on 27 September that Ukrainian units had flown about 4,000 kilograms of food by drone across the Dnipro into Russian-occupied Oleshky, to 100 locations, as reported by United24 Media. According to that report, regular food deliveries stopped at the end of May, around 6,000 civilians remain, including about 200 children, and Russia has blocked humanitarian organisations including the UN; Prokudin says Russian forces have shot down supply drones and confiscated or resold the food. Those are Prokudin’s claims as reported.

Rebbe Nachman says the reason there is a world at all is compassion, and that 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 cut off from everything, reached anyway. The correction is the one Rebbe Nachman would insist on: the same machine is carrying bombs a few kilometres away. The drone is not holy and it is not wicked. The use is the whole of the moral content, and the text refuses to let the emptiness of a place be the last word on who is still inside it.

7. Killed for speaking on the radio

In Butembo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province, Marie-Celestin Karondwa, a local leader of the governing UDPS party, was beaten to death after appearing on a radio programme that promoted Ebola prevention. According to the party, as reported by ThePrint on 28 September, attackers beat him, looted his belongings and burned his house, and he was an innocent victim for having defended the party’s position on the existence of the Ebola virus disease. Government figures cited in the same report put the outbreak at 8,067 infections and 3,901 deaths.

The Baal Shem Tov teaches that the words of creation are still being spoken inside the things they made, and Shabbat 119b says human speech is a kind of action, enough to make a person a partner in creation. The structural parallel is a man whose words were for keeping people alive. The correction must not be left for the reader: this was not one side of a debate meeting the other. Words that tell people how to survive a virus are the kind of speech this parasha is built from, and the people who answered them with fists and fire did not win an argument. They killed a man for trying to keep his neighbours alive.

Summary

Thread	Where it is said	What it holds
Why begin with creation	Rashi on Genesis 1:1	The land is held by title from its Creator, which binds the holder to the Giver
Tishrei or Nisan	Rosh Hashanah 10b to 11a	Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua disagree on the month of creation, and both stand
The hidden light	Chagigah 12a	A good light put away because the generation would misuse it, kept for the righteous
Two kings, one crown	Chullin 60b	The moon is diminished, God asks for atonement, and smallness becomes a title of honour
Created alone	Sanhedrin 37a	One seal, and every coin a different face; the world was created for my sake
The gnat came first	Sanhedrin 38a	Created last because least, and last because the feast was ready
Partners by speech	Shabbat 119b	Saying Vayechulu makes a person a partner in creation; speech is action
A point called Beginning	Zohar, Bereshit 1:1 to 2; Introduction 1:1	A hard spark engraves the light; thirteen words of mercy surround the lily
He looked into the Torah	Zohar, Terumah 59:630	Torah is the blueprint of the world, and its study keeps the world alive
The contraction	Etz Chaim, Gate 1, Branch 2	The infinite withdraws to make room for what does not yet exist
The word still spoken	Tanya, Sha’ar HaYichud VehaEmunah 1	The Baal Shem Tov: the letters of creation stand in the firmament and sustain it now
The space not empty	Likutei Moharan 64:1	The world exists for compassion, and the vacated space still holds His life-force

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.

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, and may every word we speak this year be one that keeps the world standing. Shabbat shalom, and chodesh tov.

Sources verified against Sefaria and Chabad.org. Calendar verified against the Hebcal Israel calendar. News items are attributed to the parties and outlets who asserted them and are not reconciled.