Tishrei 24, 5784 / 8 October, 2023

Welcome to my new blog! If you have found your way here I hope you enjoy my thoughts and musings about the journey I am on. Please interact and message me with comments and questions. I would love to get discussions going. The only rule is to keep things civil! You’re free to disagree or agree but please do so agreeably!

The sun sets and a new day begins! The sun sets and a new yearly cycle commences! At the close of Simchat Torah, Jews all around the world roll up the Torah scroll. Then the scroll is reopened and begins to be unrolled as another yearly cycle of weekly Biblical readings gets underway. 

At a deeper level this reveals the eternal God who even created time itself. One year has been unrolled and the next awaits unrolling. The one seated on His heavenly throne sits as the precision sculptor of time itself. Eons of ages flowing from one into another all connected beyond the grasp of the human mind by the immense boggling complexity of the divine hand. 

In Hebrew thinking the new day begins with the sun setting. How strange to our western Gregorian Calendar ears to hear that the new day begins with darkness.

As the scroll begins to be unrolled we are faced with the consummate mystery:

“In the beginning” – Was there something before? When was this beginning? What does it mean to be ‘in’ the beginning?

“God created the heavens and the earth” how did God do this ? More importantly who exactly is this God?

Jeff Benner has an incredible Mechanical Translation of the book of Genesis from the Hebrew. You can find it at: https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/mt/translation1.html

He translates Genesis 1:1 as follows:

“in the summit Elohiym fattened the skies and the land”

My first thought is of a huge, burly farmer fattening up his cattle to produce well bred livestock!

“Summit” – this conveys something as the head, top or beginning of a place, such as a river or mountain, or a time, such as an event. The best or most important. The point at which something starts; the origin and source.

What a fitting place to begin the new year of Biblical readings. We begin in mystery and wonder. It’s a beginning humbled by the thought that this time next year we may have nudged forward a nanometre in the cosmic scheme of things but mystery will still be there looming large over our limited thinking. In a world intoxicated with the ideology that the human mind is the measure of all things we are reminded that we are but dust. However, we begin hopeful. This wonderful creator surely wants relationship and friendship with his creation.

Our family had a good friend growing up who became one of the most eminent material scientists of his time. There were maybe a handful of scientists worldwide who could equal his prowess. He once told my parents that we actually really know next to nothing about the material universe. What a humble statement from such a learned man and a fantastic reminder that beyond our meagre knowledge and understanding we exist and live our lives in the heavens and earth created by God.

© Stephen Paul Jacob