Torah Reading: Genesis: Chapter 1 through 6:8
Haftarah: Isaiah 42:5 to 43:10
This diary supplements the excellent diary of A DC Wonk, published earlier this week.
With the right wing's assault on science, a number of diaries here on Daily Kos have been devoted to the Genesis creation story, and I, in addition to A DC Wonk, have contributed my own. However, I want to focus instead on Genesis 5:1, here it is in the King James Version:
This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him.
What follows is what Huckleberry Finn called the "begots" - a male genealogy from Adam to Noah. So, what is so special about this introductory sentence to a boring genealogy? Answer lies below the orange squiggly.
Rabbi Hillel argued that that the most important sentence of the Torah was Leviticus 19:18: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." We read in the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a:
[I]t happened that a certain heathen came before Shammai and said to him, "Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot." Thereupon he repulsed him with the builder's cubit which was in his hand. When he went before Hillel, he said to him, "What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn it."
And just a few year's later, Hillel's near contemporary, Jesus of Nazareth, would say (Mark 12: 28-31):
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
But
Rabbi Simeon Ben Azzai of the early Second Century CE would disagree with Hillel and, by implication, with Jesus as well, for he taught that the words of Chapter 5:1, "This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him," were the most important words of the Torah. How so? The King James and most other English translations translates the Hebrew word "adam" in that sentence as "Adam" - the guy in the Garden of Eden. That is likely a mistranslation, or, more likely, ignores the allegorical nature of Genesis chapters 2 and 3. For the Hebrew word "adam" first appears in Genesis 1:27 (again KJV):
So God created man [adam] in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Thus, when the word adam is first used in the Bible, it refers not to a guy named Adam, but to all of humanity, male and female. The same word is then used in Chapters 2 and 3 to refer to the fellow in the Garden of Eden, but I would submit, as did Rabbi Simeon ben Azzai, that, in Genesis 5:1 "adam" again refers to all of humanity, male and female alike.
So what was Rabbi Simeon ben Azzai's point? Why did he consider these words the most important line of the Torah? Because these words teach us that we are descendants of common ancestors, and that every human being on this planet is the brother and sister of everyone else, and it behooves us to love all of our brothers and sisters and to care for them as the brothers and sisters they are - a point that so much of the Christian right and their Republican allies ignore. And it should be noted that while the earth is over 4 billion years old and certainly not 6,000 years old, modern science has come to believe that we do come from common ancestors - known as Mitochondrial Eve - although any Garden of Eden was in East Africa and not Mesopotamia.
For all observing the end of the Jewish holiday of Succot, and Simhat Torah, a Chag Sameach - a happy holiday.
And, finally, lets try to start this series up again. Please volunteer for one of the upcoming parshas:
October 25th: Torah reading Noah, Genesis 6:9 to 11:32 and Numbers 28: 9-15. Haftarah Isaiah Chapter 66. (This Shabbat is also Rosh Hodesh, the first day of the month of Chesvan. Therefore, there is the second Torah reading and special Haftarah that mentions Rosh Hodesh. The penultimate line is repeated to end on a happy note.)
November 1st: Torah reading Leck Lecha, Genesis chapters 12 to 17. Haftarah Isaiah 40: 27 to 41:16.
November 8th: Torah reading Vayera, Genesis chapters 18 to 22, Haftarah Second Kings 4: 1-37.
November 15th: Torah reading Chayei Sarah chapters 23 to 25:18, Haftarah First Kings 1: 1-31.