Parashat B’reshit
Genesis 1:1 – 6:8
Although we have just commemorated the beginning of a New Year, we are soon to celebrate the last of the great holidays of this Sabbatical (Seventh) month of the Jewish year – Sukkot and Sh’mini Atzeret. Thus, this stretch of festival has a sense of conclusion to it, a sense of culmination. Indeed, some interpret the meaning of the name “Sh’mini `Atzeret” to be “the eighth day of culmination.”
Yet, beginnings are an important part of our celebration, for we have worked out our annual cycle of reading the entire Torah so that it will begin as we culminate our festival. We will start reading from “B’reshit” – from the Beginning, once more. Sukkot thus makes us do things that will help us experience a new start. A new start of what, though?
Of course, once we finish with the holidays we begin the New Year as a mundane set of days that follow upon each other. But that will happen only after the end of the holiday. What new start does the holiday of Sukkot, itself, commemorate and relive?
The answer is found in our prayers from the New Year: “Thus says the Eternal: ‘I recall for you the love of your youth, your betrothal love – your following after Me into the wilderness.’” (Jer. 2:2) The new start we celebrate and relive is the beginning of our love affair with God, when we went with God, out of Egypt and into the desert.
Many of us have had the pleasure of encountering young people at the start of their lives together. Their love overwhelms all the small details that can seem like problems for those less enchanted. For example, many couples remember with great fondness their first home together, even if it was a very humble abode, lacking many of the amenities that they would never think of dispensing with now. “But that tiny studio apartment in the fifth floor walk-up! How wonderful it was, then, because we were in love!”
During Sukkot we dwell in temporary structures – sukkot – that, more than any of the other specific mitzvot (commandments) of the festival, give the holiday its name. Many meanings have been advanced for the observance of this mitzvah. But surely one of the meanings has to do with our sense of new beginnings during this time. In a way, those ramshackle booths are precisely meant to conjure up for us memories of our first humble but loving homes that we shared with our partner at the very start of our relationship, when we first moved in together.
Older, forgetful folks might shake their heads at our first flimsy place. But the loving couple defiantly draws closer and responds: “Hey, so the roof leaks; but it’s ours!”
Hag Same`ah v’Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Greenstein
image: “Holding hands couple” © Patricia Wong altered and used with permission via Creative Commons License
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