In the Cleft of the Rock
Book Sample

The Five Books of Moses

The Book of Genesis
Sefer  Bereshith

And God created the human in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth...”
   
Genesis 1 : 27-28

From the literal edge of time and space to the innermost depths of the human heart, the Book of Genesis speaks of everyone and tells of everywhere.

Creation and covenant, Eden and exile, fratricide and flood; the God of Genesis calls and tests; His creatures argue and submit. Genesis is the story of a father who trembles and of a son who wrestles. In Genesis, brothers become each other’s keepers, and mothers, daughters, sisters and wives step beyond the boundaries to bring creation closer to redemption.

Doves and ravens, jealousy and disguise, bitterness and betrayal; Genesis is the deepest of wells from whose waters are drawn the secrets of cosmology, history, anthropology, psychology.

Genesis is a masterwork of shifting light that asks more questions than it answers, inspiring readers throughout the millennia to probe, comment, paint and compose. Its very first words, writes Rashi, the 11th Century giant of biblical commentary, cry out ‘explain me!’

The Book of Beginning opens with cosmology and global catastrophe but soon zeros in on the familial dramas of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Lot and his wife and daughters, of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah, of Hagar, Ishmael, Esau, and Dinah, of Judah and Tamar, of Joseph and his brothers.

The other four of the Five Books of Moses are concerned with the Israelite nation and the laws that define it, but the Book of Genesis predates the nation, predates even Moses. Yet without it, the nation and its laws could not have been born.

The stories of Genesis are archetypal; they hover with God’s spirit on primeval waters; they are the breath of life in man. We hear the names, and we are stirred. We stand with Abraham on God’s mountain, with Isaac beneath the knife, with Rebekah behind the veil, with Joseph in the pit. And beyond and within them all is the act of creation, darkness on the face of the deep and light called forth, with the sky and the sea and heavenly lights, and life.

In its bursting forth from nothing, the Book of Genesis is more than a beginning, more than the kernel of creation. In the vastest of oceans it is the pebble whose ripples extend from then until now.

* * *

Lech Lecha : “Go forth”
The Awakening

Genesis 12 : 1 – 17 : 27

You hid Your face in the solar wind, in the stellar song, in Your symphony of stars, You buried Your voice...

While the world fills the void with frantic rant and babble, Abraham listens. Amid fetish and delusion, from the dissonance of squabbling gods, big cars and shopping malls, Abraham strains to hear the song buried in deep space, the scrawny cry from the edge of time. This is not madness, nor is it random static. This is not the ghost in the machine. The voice is out there, waiting to be heard.

Ayeka, comes the call. Where are you? While the world drowns in the flood after the Flood only Abraham, lonely man of faith, hears the Voice that moved among the trees, walking in the Garden in that first evening breeze. It stirs the breath within him, and he hears it calling from beyond the wall.

Listen friend, incline your ear. Forget your people and your father’s house... Abraham, enchanted, hears and crosses over. There is no turning back.

God meets His friend Abraham on the road to Canaan, and history begins. This is a new way of being human, a chain of becoming that links the first dawn with the last. Abraham fine tunes his senses, listening for voices carried on the river flowing out of Eden; the shame of the parents, the cries of the sons, the silence of Noah, the babble beyond. With his nephew and his sister wife he walks a winding path, groping in the dark for the place where sound melts into sight.

And the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth...’ My angels stand like statues, says the Lord. My people move, they stumble and they rise again, they overstep the mark and double back. They carve My songlines in their hearts, imprint them on the land. To be human is to walk.

So Abraham, the world’s first pilgrim, walks on into the deepening shadow of the mountain, into a darkness shaped by questions yet to arise.

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