In My Flesh and in My Bones: Bresheet 5786
Image: Image of a mountain goat on a cliff in Israel tinted golden with a golden yellow border and the words “welcome HOME” in dark sepia in the foreground.
13 October 2025 | Welcome Home to the 20 Living Hostages Who Arrived in Israel This Morning
Bresheet, Genesis, the first Torah portion, opens with God speaking the world into being. We experience the creation of the first human - and humans, the first appreciation, the first blame, the first attachment, the first detachment, the first birth, the first favoritism, the first jealousy, the first killing, the first death, and the first regret - God’s regret. This intense all-things-at-once parsha concludes with God considering the option of destroying everything God had so recently created, regretting having made it, and then reconsidering because of Noah in whom we are told God found favor. In Bresheet we also have a talking snake, an ever turning fiery sword, a strange verse about divine beings marrying human women, and the Nephilim - the offspring of the divine beings and human women who were the “heroes of old”. And God says the human lifespan is 120 years. There is, one could say, a lot going on.
Full disclosure: Yes, I am writing a d’var Torah. However, I only slept two hours last night and I’m not going to take the time to super polish it up. If you want to come along with me in this one, get ready for a little bit of a rough ride. What I have here are mostly unedited thoughts.
Bleary eyed and overcome with emotion, I read through this parsha twice this morning.
Both times, my heart kept skidding over two words:
Vayomer Elohim.
God said.
God spoke.
God spoke and there was light and darkness and twilight and dawn.
God spoke and there was separation and expanse.
God spoke and there was sea and dry land and vegetation and insects and animals and us.
God spoke and there was a world. God’s words have creative energy.
Who was God speaking to?
Who was listening?
Creation itself?
No one?
Us?
Were we already listening?
I am writing and sharing this just hours after the last 20 living hostages returned to Israel. I only slept two hours last night because I stayed up waiting for them with Israeli friends.
Over the night and in the early morning hours I read and listened to a lot of words from Israelis and Palestinians and Jewish and Arab leaders. I’ve been listening for words, looking for words, that speak to me. I found some, but honestly . . . mostly I just . . . took them all in.
For over two years now, I have not said much publicly about what I think about the politics of the Middle East.
Who would I be speaking to? Who would be listening? What would I even have to say.
In May 2024 I wrote this and published it. I think some people read it.
It still says most of what I have to say.
This is not a d’var Torah about politics in the Middle East.
At the same time, I think everything in shared life - public life - is political.
Okay, so, what about speaking to God?
Well . . .
For over two years I have also been praying and praying and praying.
Many of my friends have been praying, too.
Melina, in Jerusalem, has been praying day by long never-ending day.
Yesterday when I led the online IKAR Morning Minyan I shared Melina’s words:
Day 737
G-d in heaven, who counts the tears of the captives and gives us strength, hope, and comfort as we count the days.
Today is 737 days, which is 105 weeks of our counting on behalf of the precious souls who remain in captivity.
Please assure our beloved siblings that light still exists, they are not forgotten, and that we are waiting for them with outstretched arms.
Please slow our heartbeats and steady our shaking hands as we call out to You in the midst of unbearable longing and anticipation.
Please uplift us with the relief of good news and glimmers of hope, no matter how seemingly small.
Please bless those who will never experience a joyous reunion with those they’ve lost with love, comfort, and support that know no bounds.
Please grant ALL who have suffered over the past 737 days with the sustenance of a deep breath, the grounding of a dreamless, uninterrupted night of sleep, the warmth of home, and the security of peace.
Please. Let them go. Please. Bring them home.
May we soon stop counting days of sorrow and begin counting days of healing.
Amen
Then I added:
God in Heaven, who counts all tears, we also pray for the people in Gaza who are - right now - trying to get home. Who are traveling through unrecognizable streets and shattered neighborhoods. Please shelter them from the dangers and the pain in the rubble and debris. Strengthen their bodies, fill their hearts with courage and resilience, comfort them in their grief and their loss.
May everyone pursuing a just peace and a merciful justice find rest amid the devastation.
Renew our spirits with the promise of a better tomorrow.
And we all say,
Amen.
When we pray - when we speak to God, who is listening?
What worlds are we creating?
In Genesis 2:23 the human “ha’adam” speaks. In our story God has just made a fitting companion for him and the human has something to say. The human declares this one “bone of my bones” and “flesh of my flesh.” Etzem mei’atzamai uvasar mibsari.
עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי וּבָשָׂר מִבְּשָׂרִי
Very provocatively, these two humans are described in verse 24 as “naked” in translation, but the word is עֲרוּמִּים/ arumim, which is also in the next verse 3:1. In 3:1 it is in this form - , arum /עָרוּם where it is translated as shrewd or cunning because now it describes the snake and the people are about to eat some forbidden fruit. Fascinating language, but this would be cut if I were editing because I want to stay in verse 23. In verse 23, the human - ha’adam - spoke, and we know that words create worlds, and the human declared there was a connection, an intimate connection, a flesh and bone connection between these humans. Way back in 1:27 we learned these humans are also created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. I feel like that matters, too, maybe it says something about our spiritual intimacy with God being threaded into our spiritual and physical intimacy with one another. Maybe.
Several years ago I shared a d’var Torah that at its core was about my core - about my bone marrow and the blood it makes. Now, I don’t know how often you think about your bone marrow, but I can tell you honestly that in 5,268 days I have not stopped thinking of mine. My bone marrow is a gift from a stranger. There is a man from Germany I’ve never met who gave me some of his bone marrow and helped save my life. In some physical and metaphysical way we are of the same “bones”. I’ve read recently that after enough time my other tissues are also taking on some of the DNA of my gifted bone marrow. That means he and I are also in some physical and metaphysical way of the same flesh.
That also makes me a chimera - an organism composed of cells from different genetic origins, like a mythical creature with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. Okay, well, kind of. Fun Fact: Any two people’s genomes (complete set of genetic material) are going to be 99.6% the same. All human genetic variation exists in that remaining .4%. This is what happens when I’m not editing, but I do think these freely associating ideas thread back in. It may take a bit to get there.
It’s very difficult to read the Torah in a straight line, and I don’t even know that it’s that helpful. When I read the Torah, it often feels to me that everyone and everything is speaking in riddles. God, humans, serpents, donkeys. Let’s be honest, even the rocks. Don’t get me started on the messengers. In Chapter 3 of this parsha, the serpent says the woman isn’t going to die, and everyone listening to the teller spin this story knows every living being dies. Is it a lie, has it just not happened yet, or is it a riddle? The serpent says only divine beings know the difference between good and bad, and everyone listening knows they have the capacity to know the difference . . . and to ignore it. The serpent asks, “Did God really say?” And listening we need to ask, “Who gave the serpent speech, anyway? Whose words is the serpent speaking? And . . . why?”
What the serpent’s words instigate is devastating. Moments ago ha’adam, the human, said we two humans are bone of the same bone and flesh of the same flesh. Now that same human points blame. Says, “I only did what I did, what You said not to do, because of that one.” And that one, that other human, points at the serpent - says, “It was only because of the serpent that I did what I did.” They all spoke, and now there is וְאֵיבָה in the world. Enmity. Personal hatred. (Gen. 3:15) Words create worlds.
It falls apart so fast.
God speaks more and the ground is cursed (Gen 3:17), the humans are banished from the Garden (Gen 3:23), and a fiery every turning sword is guarding the Tree of Life. (Gen. 3:24) Abel and Cain are conceived and born and God speaks in riddles to Cain whose gift God had just spurned and says, “Surely, if you do right, there is uplift. But if you do not do right sin couches at the door; its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.” (Gen. 4:7) And then, maybe the worst:
Genesis 4:8
וַיֹּאמֶר קַיִן אֶל־הֶבֶל אָחִיו וַֽיְהִי בִּהְיוֹתָם בַּשָּׂדֶה וַיָּקם קַיִן אֶל־הֶבֶל אָחִיו וַיַּהַרְגֵהוּ
Cain said to his brother Abel and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.
That calamitous white space we typically fill with ellipses.
We don’t know what Cain said to Abel.
We don’t know what world Cain intended to speak into being.
We do know those words spoke Cain into becoming a killer.
We know now his brother Abel is dead.
We don’t know, and God has a question:
וַיֹּאמֶר יְיְ אֶל־קַיִן אֵי הֶבֶל אָחִיךָ וַיֹּאמֶר לֹא יָדַעְתִּי הֲשׁמֵר אָחִי אָנֹֽכִי
God said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” And he said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9)
Am I my brother’s keeper, asks or says Cain. We’ve been translating vayomer as said and the Torah doesn’t have punctuation marks.
Hashomer achi anochi
Hashomer. Keeper. Guardian. Watchman. Protector.
Sometimes I hear Liddy teaching her adult students English and I hear her teaching about non-count nouns. Blood is a non-count noun because it refers to a mass or substance that is not individually countable. It is treated as a singular mass, so you would say "the blood in my veins" rather than "the bloods in my veins". That’s true almost always in Hebrew, too. But not in what comes next. דְּמֵי is plural. “Dimay” is bloods and God wants to know:
וַיֹּאמֶר מֶה עָשִׂיתָ קוֹל דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ צֹעֲקִים אֵלַי מִן־הָאֲדָמָה
“What have you done? Your brother’s bloods cries out to Me from the ground!” (Gen. 4:10)
Rashi says these bloods are the bloods of the descendents he would have had.
Or else perhaps that Abel had been stabbed and was bleeding from multiple wounds.
My donor’s marrow is now both his marrow and my marrow. The blood it makes is his blood and my blood. His blood became . . . bloods. I also received 36 blood transfusions during leukemia treatment and my bone marrow transplant. That means the bloods of 36 more people have also become part of my body. In some sort of physical and metaphysical way, my blood is plural. Like Abel, I have bloods, too.
Today I got to thinking, maybe there is another way that Abel has “bloods”. There is probably a Sage who has thought this before me, but I haven’t found them yet. If you know of something, please tell me about it. Typically, our individual DNA - the DNA that is only .4% different from any other human in the world - comes from two sets of DNA, right? Two parents. Abel’s DNA came from the two humans in the story who conceived him - Adam and Chava. (You may know Chava as Eve - Chava is her Hebrew name.) I have a student who lives in a southern state who was recently talking about her ancestry as her “blood”. Mother’s ancestry - one bloodline. Father’s ancestry - another bloodline. Adam’s blood and Chava’s blood. Dimay. Bloods. Okay, but wait. Adam and Chava’s bloods didn’t come from separate ancestries - they were one being split in two.
וַיַּפֵּל יְיְ אֱלֹהִים ׀ תַּרְדֵּמָה עַל־הָאָדָם וַיִּישָׁן וַיִּקַּח אַחַת מִצַּלְעֹתָיו וַיִּסְגֹּר בָּשָׂר תַּחְתֶּנָּה
So God cast a deep sleep upon the Human; and, while he slept, [God] took one of the sides (מִצַּלְעֹתָיו) and closed up the flesh at that site. (Gen. 2:21)
That means for the purposes of this story, Adam and Chava have the same blood.
Does that mean - for the purposes of this story - Cain and Abel also have the same blood?
Maybe this is lack of sleep talking, you tell me, but what if - within this story - the plural blood crying out from the ground is brother-blood. THEIR blood. Plural. Cain’s and Abel’s? In the next verse, Genesis 4:11, God either declares or explains that because of what Cain has done he will be cursed “more than the ground that opened its mouth to receive your brother’s bloods from your hand.”
וְעַתָּה אָרוּר אָתָּה מִן־הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר פָּצְתָה אֶת־פִּיהָ לָקַחַת אֶת־דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ מִיָּדֶךָ
But what if within this story, and I know, I know, there is a possessive thing going on there in the Hebrew and brother is singular, but let’s read this verse expansively . . . what if the implication here is that when Cain killed his brother BOTH of their “bloods” ran into the open mouth of the adamah - the earth? What if we chose to understand this verse as brothers’ bloods? ‘Cause check that word for earth - adamah. Same root as Adam. What if somehow killing his brother so disrupted ancestry and descendancy that it’s not only Abel’s potential descendents crying out through his blood in the ground, but all of their descendents and potential descendents crying out? Cain’s and Abel’s? And just wait . . .
Of course, Cain is condemned to being a ceaseless wanderer on the earth.
כִּי תַעֲבֹד אֶת־הָאֲדָמָה לֹא־תֹסֵף תֵּת־כֹּחָהּ לָךְ נָע וָנָד תִּהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ
“If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth.”
Or so it says, but then in verse 16 Cain settles in the land of Nod east of Eden. In his lineage we learn of a woman, Na’amah, in Genesis 4:22. Rashi and Rambam both teach that we are told about her because she is the unnamed wife of Noah. So riddle-me-this: Is he actually wandering or is he spiritually or metaphorically wandering? If one of his descendants is Na’amah and she had children with Noah, then a remnant of Cain continues in the lineage of what becomes the Jewish people. And if that is the case, it makes sense to me as well because one way we are taught to understand the entire Torah is as a response to Cain’s question. Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and the Torah answers emphatically, “Yes!” over and over and over again.
Vayomer Elohim.
God spoke.
God spoke and there was light and darkness and twilight and dawn.
God spoke and there was separation and expanse.
God spoke and there was sea and dry land and vegetation and insects and animals and us. God spoke and there was a world . . . and humans.
This Torah portion is our theological origin story. It was never intended to be a scientific explanation of how the universe came to be. We know that, and we don’t need to read it as if it is. In it we have humans cavorting with gods and a god who regrets like a human. Every word is a riddle and so are most of the letters and I don’t know who or what God was speaking to in the very beginning of our story and these days I’m not sure who or what I’m speaking to or with when I pray. That’s okay. I am absolutely certain there are many more things that I don’t know than there are things that I do. I pray anyway.
I pray because as I watched and read all night the words and the letters started to blur together like blood flowing into the ground, and while I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard God, I have heard someone answer “yes” when asked if he might have a metaphorical sibling on the other side of the world and whether or not he is that sibling’s keeper. I hear that “yes” every day in every beat as our bloods - mine and his - flow through my heart. Some people want to say that “yes” is love. The feeling of love. Maybe. I don’t want to be the person arguing against love, and still, what I see is commitment. A decision. A choice.
As we’ll see next week, in our story God felt regret and chose Noah and Na’amah while also choosing to destroy nearly everyone and everything else. I feel like I get it. I look at the world and when my own responsibility for creating it overwhelms me I also regret it and frequently feel that I’d like to burn it all down. It’s a choice, for sure. One that leads to God making the commitment never to flood the earth again - no matter how much God wants to. Cain felt jealousy, and probably also some very deep and valid resentment in his relationship with God, and chose to hurt Abel - whether or not in the context of the story Cain knew his actions would result in death is unclear, how would he have even known what death was? Isaac and Ishmael have a lot to work out to bury their father together. We don’t know how they feel about each other, but we see what they do, we see their commitment to making a way forward. What about Jacob and Esau’s reunification? Is it love? Or is it a commitment to there being enough space in the world for both of them? Sometime in December we’ll read about Joseph. We only get a glimpse of the layers of feelings he had in his relationships with his brothers, and he chose to feed and shelter them. We have the model of Aaron, Miriam, and Moses who probably didn’t always like each other, maybe they didn’t always love each other . . . they always chose each other. We have Esther, a Benjamite, and her commitment to the whole of the Jewish people, mostly Judahites. Eventually, we get Jonah and the reluctant commitment that leads to him saving Nineveh.
I don’t want to make assumptions, but you’ve read this far and I realize it’s probably not satisfying and I feel the need to say, I’m sorry.
I don’t have solutions to the riddles.
I wrestle with these texts, I share ideas, and I’m not sure what they answer.
I don’t know how we continue to move forward, to find life together.
We won’t do it if we aren’t committed to it.
In my mental travels as I’ve thought about all of this today, some words of John Adams keep tugging at my brain. He wrote, “There are only two creatures of value on the face of the earth: those with the commitment, and those who require the commitment of others.” Not everyone will have this commitment, and not everyone will be able to hold onto commitment at the same time and all of the time. Maybe it’s like singing in a choir and holding a long note - we’ll need to take turns.
It’s going to feel strange tomorrow when I wake up and don’t pray for the hostages still in captivity in Gaza.
Don’t get me wrong, though. While who or what I’m praying to feels like a riddle right now, I have plenty I am always praying for. And those former (baruch haShem) hostages still need those prayers. It’s also just not a big leap for me to look at other humans, including humans I don’t love or don’t even like, and see that we are bone of bone and flesh of flesh and blood of blood. I’ve made a commitment, and in case the words of my prayers really can create worlds, I’ll keep saying them. As much as I create those words, I know they also create me.
Chag Sameach for now.
Shabbat Shalom soon.