The Book of Genesis is comfort food for the Jewish people. Like a good bowl of mac and cheese, or a Tim Horton’s donut, or, my personal favorite, a bowl of Cheerios, we start out with things so familiar we could almost recite the stories in our sleep. The seven days of creation – ahhh! The Garden of Eden – oh! And even Cain and Abel – been there, done that. We arrive on day one in a world that is very much under control of a benevolent creator. God is in the first three words – Breishit Barah Elohim, “In the beginning God created,” culminating with “And God saw everything he created and, behold, it was – Tov Me’od – very good.” After months and months of reading about our wanderings in the wilderness, we have finally arrived back home.
This is not to say, our journey ahead is easy or straight forward. The characters we meet from Adam and Eve onward are complicated, often frustrating human beings, who make the wrong choices, and often disappoint our expectations. But these are only hors d’oeuvres, for the longer, more challenging story of slavery and redemption. Comfort food, after all, is not meant to be ingested in large doses. If we eat too much of it, we end up with a stomachache. But, after three weeks of intensive holidays, easily digestible morsels are very much appreciated. And, as any Torah scholar knows, the exact fruit on the Tree of Knowledge will always be a mystery, but the way it feels in our collective stomach is most certainly not. Chow down, you deserve it. And you’ll need all the strength you can store up for the year ahead.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex