The First Verse in the Torah - a Jew's Spiritual Weapon for Our Times | Shabbos Bereishis 5786

00:00 After Simchas Torah, we come to Shabbos Bereishis. We begin again. There is a feeling of renewal, of freshness. After all the great festivals and special days of the seventh month comes Shabbos, Shabbos Bereishis. We begin reading the Torah again, studying it again, and we are all renewed. On Simchas Torah, we all danced with the Torah in joy. We thanked Hakadosh Boruch Hu for all His goodness and kindness: He chose us from among all the nations and gave us His Torah. Every Jew dances with the Torah, and then, after Simchas Torah, we have to begin the year again—to take the Torah, open it, study it, and live with it. We all know the Alter Rebbe’s teaching that we must live with the weekly parsha. In other words, it is not enough to study it; we also have to live it. That is the essence, the central message of Chassidus. A person must live with the parsha, not just study it. Especially with Parshas Bereishis, we are meant not only to study it but to live it—to begin anew. As is known, the Baal Shem Tov said, and afterward all our Rebbeim, the leaders of Chabad, taught us in connection with Shabbos Bereishis, the well-known saying that the Rebbe would also repeat in the name of the Tzemach Tzedek: How a Jew positions himself on Shabbos Bereishis is how the entire year goes. So usually, when people speak to us about Shabbos Bereishis, they explain how important it is for a person to set himself in place on Shabbos Bereishis, because that is how the whole year will go. After all, Bereishis is the creation of the world. The Torah tells us, “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world and every detail of creation. He created man as the crown of creation, and knowing this gives us strength, courage, and fortitude to understand our purpose in the world. It becomes even more striking when we study Rashi—the famous Rashi with which the whole

02:17 Book of Bereishis begins. In fact, the whole Torah begins with this well-known Rashi: Rabbi Yitzchak says that the Torah should have begun with “This month shall be for you.” Why, then, does it open with Bereishis? Because “He declared to His people the power of His works, to give them the heritage of the nations.” Rashi is teaching a five-year-old child how to study the Torah according to pshat, its straightforward meaning. So Rashi begins immediately with this explanation in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak, telling us that the Torah really should have begun with “This month shall be for you.” It is a very simple question. The Torah is a book of law. The laws begin with “This month shall be for you,” when the Jewish people are leaving Egypt, or preparing to leave Egypt. Moshe Rabbeinu then conveys the laws to them in the name of Hakadosh Boruch Hu: sanctifying the new month, followed by Pesach, the matzah and maror, and everything connected with the festival of Pesach. That is where the Torah really begins, and where the entire Torah should have begun. All the other stories are very, very important, but not as part of the Torah. They are not matters of law or mitzvos; they are history. Nevertheless, the Torah opens with Bereishis. Rashi tells us, citing the Midrash in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak, that the whole reason the Torah opens with Bereishis is: “He declared to His people the power of His works, to give them the heritage of the nations.” In other words, if the nations of the world come and say to the Jewish people, “You are robbers! You stole the land from us. It is our land, the land of the seven nations; we were there first. Who are you to come and enter our land, the Land of Israel?” we tell them: The whole earth belongs to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. We tell them what is written in the Torah: “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.” The world was created by Hakadosh Boruch Hu. He created the heavens and the earth and everything in them,

04:18 and all their hosts, and He gave it to whomever He saw fit. At first He gave it to them; afterward He took it from the nations of the world and gave it to the Jewish people. That is the message of the entire first part of the Torah. What a remarkable Rashi, a truly extraordinary Rashi. We read it today, about nine hundred years after Rashi wrote it—and the Midrash dates back even earlier, some two thousand years—and think about those words. It is extraordinary, because a person often asks: How can it be? Does the entire Torah begin just to answer empty, foolish complaints that a non-Jew might make, complaints with no basis in reason? Is that what the Torah is meant to begin with? It is a very simple question. Yet Rashi says this, and Rashi teaches it as the straightforward meaning of the verse. That means this is what is important to know from the very first passage a Jew studies in the Torah. He needs to know this Rashi and understand its message. Now the question we need to understand is: Why is this message so important that the Torah, which should have begun elsewhere—with “This month shall be for you” and the mitzvos given to the Jewish people—instead begins with the story of the world’s creation? It teaches us just how important this message is. The point about the conquest of the Land of Israel—that the whole earth belongs to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, that He created it and gave it to whomever He saw fit, first giving it to the nations of the world and afterward giving it to us—is so important that it forms the foundation of the entire Torah. How do we really explain this? The Rebbe spoke about it at many farbrengens. I was privileged to hear some of them from the Rebbe himself at farbrengens I attended as a young bochur, over the course of several

06:21 years. The Rebbe would speak about this point at great length, explaining and clarifying it, especially in our time, when we see how relevant this Rashi is, how important it is, how alive it is in our own days—particularly in recent days, right now. A Jew needs to know, as part of the Torah, as its beginning and its foundation, that the entire world was created by Hakadosh Boruch Hu. It was Hakadosh Boruch Hu who chose to arrange the world so that He first gave the land to the nations of the world and then handed it over to the Jewish people. That is our history, the plain history of the world: Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world. “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.” At that point, the Jewish people did not yet exist. In fact, there was no human being. On the first day of creation there was no human being yet, and even after six days, when Hashem created Adam and Chava, there was still no Jewish people. Only in the year 2448, when the Jewish people left Egypt, was the Jewish nation born, and then we also received the Torah. Nevertheless, Rashi comes and studies with a young child. As the Rebbe would often say, Rashi lived in France and studied with a Jewish child living there during the dark, difficult times of exile, during the Crusades. As is well known, that was Rashi’s era. The Jewish people suffered terrible persecution at the hands of the nations. But Rashi is not shaken by any of that. He tells the young child who is beginning to study in cheder, and explains to him: Know this—“In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.” Nothing happens by chance. Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world and the heavens, created the earth and every detail in heaven and on earth, and He created it for a purpose

08:25 special. And it is no coincidence that Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world in such a way that for more than two thousand years, the world existed without the Jewish people. The world passed through twenty generations: ten generations from Adam to Noach, and another ten from Noach to Avraham. Only after twenty generations did Avraham Avinu arrive. As it is written, “He made everything beautiful in its time.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu made everything at the right moment, at the right time. Only after twenty generations, around two thousand years after the creation of the world—as is known, Avraham Avinu was born in the year 1948 from creation—did Avraham Avinu come into being. And only several generations later, seven generations after Avraham Avinu, did Moshe Rabbeinu arrive. Then the Jewish people were born: they left Egypt, were told, “This month shall be for you,” and received the Torah. Rashi says: You should know that this is no coincidence. This is how it was meant to be. “He declared the power of His works to His people, to give them the heritage of the nations.” What is the message here? It is a tremendous message: Hakadosh Boruch Hu specifically wanted the world to be this way. First, it would be a world of the nations, a material world, a coarse physical world. That is what Hakadosh Boruch Hu wanted. And a Jew would turn the mundane into the holy. A Jew would take raw matter and give it form, turn the physical into the spiritual, darkness into light. That is the purpose of creation. In the words of the Zohar, the purpose of creation is to turn darkness into light and bitterness into sweetness. That is why there is darkness first. That is why there is materiality first. The world was created, and Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the Land of Israel and first gave it to the seven nations—the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, and so on. Those nations did what they did in the Land of Israel: physical, material things, with no connection to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Then a Jew comes and takes physical things

10:41 and makes a mitzvah out of them. He makes them a matter of halachah; he does them for the sake of Heaven—“Let all your deeds be for the sake of Heaven.” “Know Him in all your ways.” That means taking the land of Canaan and turning it into the Land of Israel, conquering the seven nations and transforming them into the seven holy middos, as explained in Chassidus and Kabbalah. What does the whole subject of the seven nations represent? This is the first Rashi, the first message of Parshas Bereishis. It teaches us that when a Jew reaches Shabbos Bereishis and begins the year, we have been through all the holidays. We were in shul and celebrated, sang, and took part in all the different periods of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkos, and Simchas Torah: the Days of Awe and the days of joy, days of love and days of reverence. And now a Jew is ready to go out into the world and begin the year. So we are told: “Bereishis—G-d created the heavens and the earth.” Remember the creation of the world, and remember the purpose of creation. Now you will encounter the wider world; you will go out into the street. This year we had almost no workdays. The whole month was holidays and Shabbos, Shabbos and holidays, going from Shabbos to a holiday and from a holiday to Shabbos. After Shabbos Bereishis, the weekdays will begin, the ordinary days. A Jew might then think: Such a vast world, such a physical, material world, a world surrounded by the nations. And besides, there are the seventy wolves that want to devour the sheep, as the Midrash famously says. So the weekly parsha tells us, and Rashi conveys the message to us—this powerful Rashi gives us the message. We must know and remember that “He declared the power of His works to His people, to give them the heritage of the nations.” The whole purpose of the creation of the world, the whole purpose of Hakadosh Boruch Hu first giving the Land of Israel to the seven nations, was “to give them the heritage of the nations”: so that a Jew would take the heritage of the nations, the reality of the world,

12:49 and transform it, making it into the Land of Israel. From the physical, material world, he is to make a world of holiness, a world of light, a world of Torah, a world of mitzvos. That is really the whole story of Parshas Bereishis. And so Rashi goes on to say: “Bereishis”—Rashi says the word Bereishis calls for interpretation. Grammatically, in the Holy Tongue, the words do not quite fit together: “Bereishis, G-d created.” Because in Hebrew, when you say “bereishis,” you have to say: the beginning of what? The beginning of creation, the beginning of making, the beginning of... “Bereishis” is a word that goes together with another word. A word seems to be missing here in the Torah. The beginning of everything? The beginning of what? “G-d created.” Something is missing here, Rashi asks. So Rashi says that here, too, we need a Midrash. And this Midrash is connected to the previous one. “Bereishis,” Rashi says, means “for the sake of the Torah and for the sake of Israel.” A Jew needs to know this as the basis and foundation of the entire Torah. At this point, as we said, there is still no Jewish people and no Torah. At the beginning of creation, a vast world is created, and it will be more than two thousand years before the Jewish people, the Torah of Israel, and the Land of Israel come into the picture. Nevertheless, at the very first moment of creation, the verse tells us: Know this—“Bereishis,” Rashi tells us, means “for the sake of the Torah and for the sake of Israel.” Know that this entire vast thing, this whole story and this whole reality, is all for the sake of the Jewish people, so that they can fulfill the Torah and make the world a dwelling place for Hakadosh Boruch Hu. When we have this message, we have the strength to go out into the world without fear, without embarrassment, to stand firm and know what our role is, what our purpose is, and what we need to do. A Jew has no reason to fear the world. A Jew has no reason to be embarrassed before the world. A Jew simply needs to proclaim it—to proclaim it aloud, with vitality and with joy—and to know

14:57 that every part and every detail of creation exists so that we can make that place a dwelling place for Hakadosh Boruch Hu, by using all of creation for the G-dly purpose that the Torah tells us how to fulfill. That is the most important message we should take from these days, especially at this moment, in these recent days when we are witnessing and seeing all the great upheavals taking place in the world—and all the more so in the Land of Israel. We are beginning to see the first glimmers of light, the light of the Geulah. Still, as the verse says, “At evening time there will be light.” There is still a mixture of light and darkness. There is still a great deal of confusion and fear. But when a Jew knows that we know the truth, and we are not embarrassed to proclaim the truth—to proclaim it before every nation and make it known to the entire world—that “He declared the power of His works to His people, to give them the heritage of the nations”; when a Jew knows that the purpose of creation is to make the world a dwelling place for Hakadosh Boruch Hu, and that a Jew is a light unto the nations, then this is what will bring us, soon, in the coming days, to see with our own eyes the complete Geulah. And all the nations of the world—indeed, all of creation—will cry out: “And Hashem will be King over all the earth; on that day Hashem will be One and His name One.” May we see it with our physical eyes today, immediately, right now.