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Our Rabbi's Message
December 21st 2007
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelToday we complete the Book of Genesis. Much happened in the weeks of our journey. A world was created and destroyed and created again. Adam and Eve found a home in the Garden of Eden and then were exiled from that home. Their first two sons did not get along well and the older murdered the younger. Cain, the remaining son tried to build a new world, which was corrupted. Generations later that world was destroyed by flood. Only Noah and his family survived. Noah acted immorally as soon as the flood waters abated. He had three sons and cursed one of them to be a slave for all generations. The world again filled with idolatry and godlessness. At another nadir of goodness Abraham was born and found God. He tried to prove his love of God by sacrificing his son, Isaac. Fortunately Isaac survived and continued to live in the Promised Land that God had given to Abraham and his generations. However he never spoke to his father after the aborted sacrifice. Isaac was tricked into bestowing blessing upon Jacob and created another interfamily feud. Jacob the son who was blessed by trickery had twelve sons, but clearly showed his love to only two of them. Ten of those sons tried to kill Jacob's favorite, Joseph. They sold him into slavery instead, but fortune shined upon him and he arose from slave to viceroy in Egypt. His brothers and their father suffered famine and were forced to move to Egypt, and like Adam and Eve were in exile from their Garden of Eden, the land Israel. And the book ends.
Nothing seems right. Israel is in Egypt. The sons are subservient to a foreign power, and living among peoples who hated them. The Certainty of the Promised Land became a dream. The second youngest son is the inherited leader of Jacob's clan, and he did not speak Hebrew.
The world that God created from nothing had gone nowhere. When Genesis ends, creation was a little more negative than the neutral condition of nothing at the beginning of the Torah. It seemed that things could not get worse - but they do.
One pressing question remains. Will the Children of Israel ever make their way from Exile to Redemption? The rest of the Torah never quite answers that question.
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