In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Bereshit ('In the beginning', Genesis 1:1-6:8) opens the Torah with two accounts of creation, the garden of Eden and the first transgression, the story of Cain and Abel, and the long genealogy from Adam to Noah, ending as human wickedness grows on the earth.
The two creation accounts of Bereshit generated one of the classical tradition's most productive exegetical puzzles, and the answer proposed by the medieval commentator Rashi, that the second account (Genesis 2) supplies detail rather than repeating the first, became the dominant harmonisation in rabbinic Judaism even as modern source-critical scholarship reads the seam differently, attributing the two accounts to distinct literary strands later combined by an editor. The portion's early chapters also carry the first recorded instance of a divine question that already presupposes guilt, God asking Cain "where is your brother," a formula later Jewish ethical literature treats as a model for how responsibility for another person is framed rather than a request for information. Bereshit's closing verses, describing human wickedness as having filled the earth, set up the flood narrative of the following portion, Noach, and rabbinic literature reads the pairing as establishing a pattern that recurs across Genesis: creation, corruption, and divine response, repeated at smaller scale in the stories of the Tower of Babel and the destruction of Sodom later in the book.