This Week’s Torah Portion: B’reishit (Genesis 1:1-6:8)

The Big Bet which Begins each Torah scroll with the word B’reishit is clearly not an accident. God really seemed to want to make a point of beginning the Torah with the letter Bet. This assumes, of course, that God wrote that first letter, with a quill pen and a deep brown ink upon a parchment scroll, just as scribes have done in writing that first word of Torah again and again for thousands of years.

There is a mystical midrash, a legend of our people, which teaches us that God considered beginning the Torah with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet which is Alef. God decided against the Alef because Alef is the beginning of the word Aror, which means “curse”, whereas Bet is the beginning of the word B’rachah, which means, blessing.

May each of us write our works upon this earth for blessing and not for curse, and may we together become repairers of the breach – builders of a better world.