Bereshit

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.

Bereshit is read on the first Shabbat after Simchat Torah, so that the community that has just finished the Torah begins it again at once, expressing the idea of unending study. Its opening word gives the book of Genesis its Hebrew name, Bereshit. Traditional Judaism holds the Torah to be a single revelation given through Moses at Sinai; modern historical-critical scholarship, following the Documentary Hypothesis and its successors, instead analyses the text as woven from earlier sources edited over centuries. The two readings coexist in contemporary study. The two creation accounts of chapters 1 and 2, one ordered and cosmic, one intimate and earthy, have been read harmonistically by traditional commentators and as distinct sources by critical scholars.

Because Bereshit opens the annual cycle immediately after Simchat Torah closes it, the portion carries a liturgical weight beyond its content: the custom of calling every eligible male to the Torah on that day, so that no one present goes without an aliyah, means Bereshit is read start to finish with unusually broad congregational participation. Its Hebrew title gives the entire book of Genesis its Hebrew name, a naming convention, first significant word rather than descriptive title, that holds across the whole Torah and distinguishes Jewish usage from the Greek-derived English book names. The portion's genealogy from Adam to Noah, often skipped over in general reading, is treated in rabbinic literature as doing real narrative work: the recorded lifespans, sharply higher than anything in later biblical genealogies, are read by traditional commentators as evidence of a world not yet worn down by the moral decay the flood was sent to answer, a decline modern scholars instead read as a feature borrowed from the long royal lifespans of older Mesopotamian king lists.