Shabbat Message from Rabbi Forman - 10/20/06

Beginnings are laden with the excitement of the new and the uncertainty of the unfamiliar. This week's Torah portion, Bereshit, is the very first one in the book of Genesis. It opens with words "In the beginning…." This brief phrase has, for millennia...

been the paradigmatic expression linked with any new endeavor. Not surprisingly, both of the words “Genesis” and “Bereshit” suggest what the book or portion contains: stories of beginnings. Not only is the myth of six-day creationism presented, but so, too, does Genesis contain stories describing the source of rainbows, the origin of language, the birth of the quest to understand God, and the foundation of the Jewish people.

Some beginnings, though, don’t turn out as planned. How true this was for Primo Levi, an Italian Jew born in 1919 who shortly after training to be a chemist was interred in Auschwitz by the Nazis. After his liberation, he became one of the most widely read authors on the Holocaust. Before he chose to end his own life in 1987 he wrote the following poem.



“In the Beginning”



Fellow humans, to whom a year is a long time,

A century a venerable goal,

Struggling for your bread,

Tired, fretful, tricked, sick, lost:

Listen, and may it be a mockery and consolation.

Twenty billion years before now,

Brilliant, soaring in space and time,

There was a ball of flame, solitary, eternal,

Our common father and our executioner.

It exploded, and every change began.

Even now the thin echo of this one reverse catastrophe

Resounds from the farthest reaches.

From that one spasm everything was born:

The same abyss that enfolds and challenges us,

The same time that spawns and defeats us,

Everything anyone ahs ever thought,

The eyes of every woman we have loved,

Suns by the thousands,

And this hand that writes.



[13 August 1970 - Translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann]



These searing words endure as reminders to us that in the briefest moment of beginnings everything that now is was created at that same first moment. So much is contained in a beginning!