1. B'RESHIT

A sermon for Kol Nidre 5768
By Rabbi Burt Jacobson

My fiancé Diane and I set aside the last Sunday in July as a day to spend together. Our plan was to drive to Marin County, and to hike on Mt. Tamalpais. It was a lovely sun-drenched morning. After I woke up, meditated and prayed, and had eaten my breakfast, I turned my cell phone on. There was a message from my brother Stuart who, with his wife Jean, were vacationing in Colorado, staying in a cabin in the mountains.

"Hi! Just calling to say I love you. This morning I was sitting on the porch looking out over the valley a few hundred feet below, and a butterfly came up and landed on my hand. I watched as the butterfly scoped out my hand with his tongue -- for about two to three minutes. Then, it flew away. Within seconds a bee flew up to me, about two feet away and, hanging in the air, wings flapping in a blur, directly facing me, looked at me for a minute or longer, turned maybe 150 degrees and looked into the window of our cabin for another minute or so, turned back to me for another minute or two and then flew off. Well, I love you. Take care . . ."

BEFORE THERE WAS A BEFORE
By Arthur Waskow, David Waskow, & Shoshana Waskow

[Copyright © 1984 by the authors. All rights reserved. These stories of the Creation were originally written in 1974, when David Waskow was ten and Shoshana Waskow was seven. They were published in 1984.

[To get a copy of this book, see the note at the bottom of this excerpt. The note at the end also includes comments on the book by Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, and Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

[What follows is the introduction to this midrashic story of the Creation. It is followed by each of the Seven Days of Creation. – AW]

Rabbi Arthur Waskow

On Deciding Whether To...

Beresheit/ in the beginning
God was lonely, suffering
though everything in the universe was held within.
Unfulfilled, overpowered by chesed-energy
God breathed out, kissed out, sent it

Rabbi Arthur Waskow

B'reshit: how do we begin again?
In this week's parasha, there is a whole learning to be gotten from Chava's name change: Before they eat from the Tree, what impresses the two humans most is how much ALIKE they are: "

Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Genesis: Brothers' War, Brothers' Peace
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Suddenly the room we were in and the story we had read joined into the same moment of time. Here we were, cast out of Eden, down from the peaks of our