In the Beginning...

Shabbat Shalom - Bereishit - 10.17.25

Next week, I’m launching The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah into the world. It’s hard to believe this is my fifth book. Harder still to believe how much my life has changed in just four years. Someone recently asked me what book changed my life, and I answered honestly, “The Matzah Ball.”

Maybe it’s because I’m in this strange in-between place right now—promoting but not writing, building Jewish Joy Con—that I’ve been thinking a lot about Jewish creativity.

How appropriate, then, that this week, we return to the beginning of our Torah with Bereishit. The book of Genesis opens with God swooping down over some primordial sludge and creating. Interestingly our commentators worry less about the oozing sludge, and instead, focus on one simple question: “Why start the story here?”

They spend a lot of time debating this, actually. Rashi says that a much better place to start the story would have been Exodus 12:2, when the first commandment is given to Israel. Rashbam says it’s foreshadowing of later chapters. Ibn Ezra goes on a long diatribe about semantics. But as an author, I have a very different take on the matter.

God simply knows His audience.

And who amongst us doesn’t love a good story?

If God were to have opened our Torah, as Rashi suggested, with laws—who would have cared enough to listen? It would have been boring, hard to connect to, words without heart. And so instead, He formed a world out of chaos, birthed Nephilim alongside humans, brought down rains that caused floods, crafted a thriller between brothers, before writing a tale of unrequited love.

God didn’t begin with rules. He began with relationship. With the simple truth that before we can care about what’s right or wrong, we have to feel something.

And that’s what I love about four years of sharing my books, reaching across the chaos and the void to say “I am here” and also “you are not alone.” Reaching across the void to be seen, and also, to see each other. Because in the beginning, before there were laws, or people, or light… there was story.

Shabbat Shalom.