“We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden”
(Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock,” as recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
In beginning to create the universe, God made all manner of places. The greatest of these was the Garden of Eden. Joni Mitchell wrote of the urge to return to that idyllic place, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young turned her song into an anthem of nostalgia for a utopia we have never known. The Jewish approach is different. We return to the Garden not to stay there, but to learn how to build a better future.
This week we scroll the Torah back to the start. We are back to Bereshit, commonly known as Genesis. The Hebrew word can be read as “in beginning,” not “in the beginning.” The annual cycle of Torah readings takes us backward only so that we can move forward. Creation was never a finished product. From the very start, the universe was launched into a perpetual process of beginning.
Re-reading the Torah teaches us to look forward. Our purpose is to begin again, not to return to the past. We do not go back to Eden. We repair the world to create Eden anew.
Our liturgy makes the same claim every morning. In the Yotzer Or blessing, we praise God, ham’chadesh b’tuvo b’chol yom tamid ma’aseh v’reishit, who in goodness renews the work of creation every day, continually. The prayer does not describe creation as something that happened once, long ago. It describes creation as something happening now, and the word it uses for creation is our word: Bereshit. Each sunrise is another “in beginning.”
These days I wallow in reports that AI will kill us all, or my fear that antisemitism will send Jews searching for safe havens. Yet scrolling back to the beginning of Torah reminds me that each day is a chance to start anew.
Leonard Cohen understood this. His song “Anthem” opens with a call to start again and not to dwell on what has passed. Cohen does not pretend the world is whole. He sings that everything is cracked, and that the cracks are how the light gets in. We do not begin again because the world is perfect. We begin again because it is broken, and the work of repair starts in the broken places.
And so we begin to begin again.
Rabbi Evan J. Krame
If this reflection resonates with you, consider sharing it on social media—or simply take a moment to reflect on how you can create a better community.
