Bereshit – Once Upon a Week

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Yehuda Bachana.

Today we start a new series, called “Once Upon a Week”, where we will study together the weekly Torah portion. In this series, we will dive together into the Word of God, seeking for God’s great treasures and knowledge.

Our Torah portion begins with the story of creation. In the beginning, God created… The first thing we learn about God – He is a Creator. He created the heavens and earth. There is only one Creator, who made everything – good and bad.

The text which is close to our Haftara, from Isaiah 45:7, says that God created everything, and there is no other God besides Him. He created light and darkness, good and evil.

Bible translators to different languages didn’t like the idea that it is God who created evil, so they often substitute the word “evil” with less provocative synonyms, like darkness or calamity.

However, our Bible says, that there is only one force in the universe, one force that rules over everything, and everything obeys Him. There is no war between good and evil, no additional entity that made all things bad, like evil, pain, darkness, war, or deceit.m

Everything obeys God. He is the only creative power, and there is no one else besides Him.

God created everything, He made:

Our Torah portion also tells us that God’s power goes beyond the “present”, beyond the “now”. God is the one who created the laws of time and space, He controls these laws and is not limited by them.

The book of Joshua tells us about the miracle that happened during the battle of Joshua against the Canaanite kings of the South, during the conquest of the promised land. In the heat of the battle, Joshua asked God to make a miracle and to stop the sun:

And this is exactly what happened. The sun stopped and didn’t move an inch until Israel’s victory over its enemies.

Some commentators say, that when God stopped the sun and the moon, He stopped all other celestial bodies, so that the cosmic order would remain unchanged. Other commentators claim that the sun didn’t really stop, but rather God shined “another light” upon the children of Israel.

This is a very interesting commentary, because light was created on the first day, while the sun, the moon, and the stars were made only on the fourth day. The light of God existed before the sun and the moon.

As the book of Genesis begins with the light, the Bible ends with the light of God, shining upon the New Jerusalem, in the Kingdom of Heaven. There will be no need for the sun and the moon in this kingdom, and there will be no more night, because God is Light, and He Himself will be the Light in His kingdom.

If God really shined “another light” upon the people of Israel during the miracle of the “sun over Gibeon”, then it clearly points to the Messiah, who is also light. And we will talk about the light of the Messiah later.

Let’s go back to the book of Genesis and to the story of creation. One very important word that appears many times is the word “good”. It teaches us that the entire creation of God is good and even as it is written: “very good”:

In the first chapter we read about light that casts out darkness, we read about flowers and trees, about animals in the fields… Creation began with good, with optimism, with attraction to light.

The creation takes six days, and is completed by the end of the first chapter. Chapter 2 starts with the sanctification of the seventh day – the Sabbath. Today the meaning of the Sabbath is a source of disagreement, a controversial topic, between Jews and Christians.

Which day is holy – is it the Sabbath or Sunday? And what does the Sabbath mean for us, as Jewish believers?

Here I want to point out, that since we are Jewish, the Sabbath is important and meaningful for us. Through the Bible, keeping the Sabbath is an important commandment.

It is also mentioned several times in the New Testament. For example, in Luke 23:

From the beginning of the creation, from the beginning of this world, Saturday (Sabbath) was a special day, a day of rest, a day that elevates our souls. It exists to remind us about the future — the “eternal sabbath” in the world to come.

In Genesis 2 we read:

Today, Saturday (the Sabbath) is the holy day of Israel, but God gave the Sabbath to all mankind, to the entire creation long before Abraham and Judaism. He actually gave the Sabbath to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the fall, before sin.

Moving on to the middle of chapter 2, there hides a small verse, verse 15, that is essential to our understanding of who we are. It deals with the most important questions of human existence: who am I, why did I come to be, what is my purpose in life?

God placed us in the center of His creation, to keep and to maintain it. Our purpose in this world is to be “servants” and “gardeners” — maintenance workers, who take care of God’s creation.

That’s why God made us in His own image. From this we learn that God created us with tremendous abilities. Abilities to adapt, to invent, to calculate and even create. God created us in such a way, that we can be worthy servants of His amazing creation.

As we continue to read, we get to the prohibition to eat from the tree of knowledge, to the fall and the sin of the first man.

We fell from the grace of God, we were cast out from the Garden of Eden, from the kingdom of God. And we as people, as mankind, continue to fall away, continue to drift apart from God. And as we drift away, we develop hard feelings of hate, fear, and disappointment.

We often feel jealous, insignificant or helpless, but all of it is based on our selfishness, on our inner fears, on “me” always being in the center of things, we often think: “what will it do for me, why not me, or where am I in the picture?”

Our actions today are still controlled by the same selfish attitude and jealousy, that led to the first murder, when Cain killed his brother Abel.

The Torah portion ends in a harsh tone, as human abilities, talents, and creativity turn towards evil.

Here I want to make a pause and look into our Haftara – Isaiah 42, although the traditional reading starts from verse 5, I would like to look at the beginning of chapter 42 — the song of the “Servant of God”. The motif of “the Servant of God” is very central in the Bible and many commentators have written about it.

Judaism and Christianity disagree about the identity of this Servant. According to the Christian point of view – the Servant of God is Yeshua the Messiah, which is especially clear in Isaiah 53. In the Gospel of Mathew, chapter 12, Yeshua the Messiah is called the Servant of God as a quotation from Isaiah.

Judaism, on the other side, sees mostly the anonymous descriptions of the “Servant of God” as speaking about Israel as a collective, as some texts call Israel and Jacob “God’s Servant”, like in Isaiah 49 and chapter 44. But it doesn’t always fit the text grammatically, so it is more likely that sometimes the “Servant of the Lord” is Israel, and sometimes — the Messiah.

The Haftara connects to our Torah portion, as both speak about God as the Creator of everything. He created this world, mankind, and the nation of Israel, and the purpose of the “Servant of the Lord” is to be the light to the nations and to bring humanity closer to God.

The Haftara ends (according to Sephardic tradition) with verse 21:

The world has to learn about God. The traditional understanding is that Israel, the Servant of the Lord, is called to teach the Word of God to the entire world.

As Messianic Jews, we see Yeshua in these verses, because Yeshua fulfilled this calling. The Bible is translated into every language and is spread to all the countries in the world, all of it is in the name of Yeshua the Messiah. It is because of Yeshua our world knows God and knows His Word and His Will.

The connection between the Torah portion and the New Testament is especially clear in John chapter 1: “In the beginning was the Word”. The wording of this passage reminds us of the dramatic opening of the Bible. We believe that God created the world through His word – He spoke and it came to be.

In the beginning light was created by the first word, and the main focus of the first chapter of John is light, the light that defeats the darkness. The same way as the light brings order into the world and ends the chaos, John also speaks about the light that can’t be defeated by darkness.

Light is the symbol of good, light represents wisdom, happiness, spirituality and holiness. Isaiah, In his famous prophesy about the last days (chapter 2), prophesied that nations from all over the world will come up to Jerusalem to hear and to learn about God:

And immediately after that, the house of Jacob is asked to walk in the light of God:

Who is this Light of the World? Yeshua said:

This text connects us to the Haftara from Isaiah 42:6:

In the first chapter John witnesses that Yeshua is that light. He is God’s answer of redemption.

He is that light, promised to us all through the Scriptures, for example in Psalms 56:14:

Yeshua is the “Light of Life”.

Shabbat Shalom.