Jonathan Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the British Orthodox Synagogues. He has published about 10 books and maintains a website www.chiefrabbi.org. We have featured another of his books as MUST READ: To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility. This series is his running commentary on the five books of the TORAH.
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Publication Date: September 1, 2009 | Series: Covenant & Conversation
The Torah is an encounter between past and present, moment and eternity, that frames Jewish consciousness. In this first volume of a five-volume collection of parashat hashavua, Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks explores these intersections as they relate to universal concerns of freedom, love, responsibility, identity and destiny. Rabbi Sacks fuses Jewish tradition, Western philosophy and literature to present a highly developed understanding of the human condition under God s sovereignty. Erudite and eloquent, Covenant & Conversation allows us to experience Rabbi Sacks sophisticated approach to life lived in an ongoing dialogue with the Torah. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, 2009.
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Some excerpts from Rabbi Sack’s Genesis commentary:
- The Book of books starts with the beginning of beginnings: the creation of the universe and life. The story is told from two different perspectives, first as cosmology (the origins of matter), then as anthropology (the birth of humanity) The first narrative (1:1-2:3) emphasizes harmony and order. God creates the universe in six days and dedicates the seventh as a day of holiness and rest. The second (2:4-3:23) focuses on humanity, not as biological species but as persons-in-relation.
- In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth . . . (1:1) It is the most famous, majestic opening of any book in literature. It speaks of primal beginnings, creation, and ontology, and for many it stands as an emblem of Torah as a whole. But not for all.
- To understand a book, one needs to know to which genre it belongs: Is it history or legend, chronicle or myth? To what question is it an answer? A history book answers the question: what happened?; a book of cosmology — be it science or myth —answers the question: how did it happen?
- The first chapter of Genesis . . . contains a teaching. It tells us how to be creative —namely in three stages. The first is the stage of saying “Let there be.” The second is the stage of “and there was.” The third is the stage of seeing “that it is good.” Even a cursory look at this model of creativity teaches us something profound and counter-intuitive: What is truly creative is not science or technology per se, but the word. That is what forms all being.
- Creation begins with the creative word, the idea, the vision, the dream.
- “Life and death are in the power of the tongue,” says the book of Proverbs (18:2). Already at the opening of the Torah, at the very beginning of creation, is foreshadowed the Jewish doctrine of revelation: that God reveals Himself to humanity not in the sun, the stars, the wind or the storm but in and through words —sacred words that make us co-partners with God in the work of redemption.
- “And God said, let there be . . . and there was” —This the second stage of creation, is for us the most difficult. It is one thing to conceive an idea, another to execute it.