10.11.26 – Ayecha: Where Are You? Part 1

This past week, we started our venture into the book of Genesis. 

Today, I want to give you an overview of how Genesis and Scripture work. Many view Genesis as just an anthology of moral stories and cautionary tales that we learned in Sunday School: "Try to be a good guy, like Moses was. Do not disobey God, like Adam and Eve."

Many of us treat the laws and stories in the Torah just like that—like isolated episodes. Week after week, we hear about the laws of sacrifices, the story of the Golden Calf, a little mini-series on Joseph and his brothers, and all the other stories that we often treat as isolated events. Could it be that these are not isolated? Could it be that they are all part of one large story? If you have been with me long, you know that some of the passages in the Torah connect to each other in surprising ways, structurally and linguistically. Parallels to the Tree of Knowledge pop up everywhere, as do certain themes like repeated sins and their redemption. Inquiring minds want to know: "Is there more than just the literary connections between a handful of stories?" What if the Torah, like any good book, has a plot, with each story flowing seamlessly into the next and building up to climaxes and epic resolutions?

There is only one problem, though. Just as George Orwell does not begin Animal Farm by writing, "The following is a metaphor for the birth of communism using lovable barnyard animals to represent different communist leaders," God does not come right out and tell us what His book is about. Just because the author may not spell the plot out for us does not mean it is not there, just waiting for us to discover it.

Last week's parsha, Bereshit, has a couple of famous episodes: the Seven Days of Creation/restoration story, the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge story, Cain and Abel, and a bunch of random genealogies all the way down to Noah.

But why are these stories all here? Is it just a day in the life of Adam and Eve? Storytime in Eden? How do these stories fit together, and why are they the stories that the author, God, chooses to tell? While the Torah is largely written in chronological order, it is very specific about which stories it chooses to include and not to include. We never hear about when Adam learned to make fire, how he prepared his food, dinnertime conversations at the table, how they prayed, or any details of their lives, let alone how they knew how to be master gardeners.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis cover two thousand years of history, and these are the only stories that God chooses to tell us. It seems that maybe these stories are more essential to the overall storyline of the Torah—they are not just important historical events. So is there a way we could ask the text itself? Like, "Hey, text! Do you think of yourself as isolated stories? Or do you think of yourself as a unified story?" How could we ask the text? Does it leave us any clues? Yes, God always does (Prov. 25:2).

"It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter."
(Prov. 25:2)

Are you ready to take the journey? It will surely determine why you stand in life where you are. 

Shalom,
Alan

www.lightintorah.org

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