Parshat Beresheet: Rabbi Maggid Jhos Singer

About the episode

Parshat Beresheet 5787
Released October5, 2026
Beresheet 1:1–6:8

Haftorah:  Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Guest: Rabbi Maggid Jhos Singer

svara.org/person/jhos-singer

* * *

Support Left at Sinai! https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-left-at-sinai-progressive-parshat-hashavuah-podcast

Transcript: arianakatz.com/leftatsinai

Sponsor an episode by giving at the link above, then filling out this form: bit.ly/leftatsinaisponsor

Host: Rabbi Ariana Katz | arianakatz.com | @rabbiariana

hinenubaltimore.org | @hinenubaltimore

fortimessuchasthesebook.com | @fortimessuchasthesebook

Editing: Ev Bowen

Music: Gevurah by Molly Bajgot | mollybajgot.com | @mollybajgot

Art: Liora Ostroff | lioraostroff.com | @lioraostroff

Transcript

Well, hello there, and welcome to Left at Sinai, progressive commentary on the weekly Torah portion. My name is Ariana Katz. I'm a congregational rabbi, mother, writer, and organizer in Charm City, USA, Baltimore, Maryland.

Left at Sinai is committed to liberatory Torah, Torah that affirms life and liberation for the Jewish people and all people. So here you'll hear feminist, queer, trans, anti-colonial, anti-Zionist Torah. You'll hear Torah committed to disability justice, fat liberation, Black liberation, and Palestinian solidarity. But you're going to hear it woven into the analysis of the text, not just plopped on top into a forced reading of the Parsha.

There are 70 faces of Torah, so many ways to interact with and understand Torah. I also imagine one of those facets of Torah is a mirror reflecting you back witnessing you and the world that you love and long for in the text. It is such an overwhelming honor to learn with the amazing guests who will be opening up our text for us each week introducing us to another of its facets.

And thank you, dear listener, for joining us. Please leave comments and write in with your perspectives on the Parsha, info in the show notes on all of that. Simchat Torah, the last holiday in the new year cycle, ended just last night. We danced in circles with the Torah. We read the last verses of our scroll and immediately turned back to the beginning of the book.

And because our learning has such energy and power and potential in it, we have the custom of dedicating our learning in honor or in memory of someone or some place.

This week's episode was sponsored by Meir Gomzu, Ever, Mindel, Shannon, and Alex, in honor of our wife, mother, and bubbe, Linda Katz, on her milestone birthday. They said, "Linda is an incredibly strong person who has shaped our lives in so many unbelievable ways. We only hope that we have given her back a small portion of what she has given us." Ad meah ve'esrim, bubbe. Thanks, fam, for sponsoring the first episode. If you wanna sponsor an upcoming episode of Left at Sinai, you can head to bit.ly/leftatsinaisponsor. And now let's la'asok bedivrei Torah, immerse ourselves in words of Torah

This week's parsha is Parshat Bereishit, Bereishit 1:1 through 6:8, and I am thrilled today to be joined by the wonderful Rabbi Jhos Singer.

Rabbi Jos Singer currently serves as a Jewish educator in both formal and community settings. He is a gifted writer and preacher with decades of congregational and communal leadership under his belt. As an out trans man, Jhos is deeply committed to the Jewish edict to Lech Lecha, to manifest one's deepest integrity. He was ordained by Rabbi Gershon Winkler in 2002 as a maggid, literally one who tells, as part of the lineage of itinerant Jewish storytellers, preachers, and spiritual advisors. He holds a BA in music from UCLA as well as an MA in Jewish studies from the Graduate Theological Union. He received rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Benay Lappe, the Rosh Yeshiva of Svara, a radically traditional Talmud study program. When not studying or teaching Torah, he finds wisdom in pop culture, mixology, home gardening, and taking in a fine afternoon with friends and family over a lavish meal at his western Sonoma woodlands home. Thank you so much, Rabbi Jhos, for teaching us Torah

RJS: I'm psyched. Are you kidding? Thank you

RAK: So we are at the very beginning, or somewhere in the middle if you believe there is no beginning and ending in Torah, which by the end of this project I'm sure we all will. I am wondering where we pick up here in Bereshit 1:1. If you can give us a quick rundown of what happens in this week's parsha.

RJS: You bet. So surface level, the world comes into existence, and we get the first stories of the world. It includes the first murder, the first attempt to overthrow God, whole bunch of really fun things, and it takes us all the way up to the first utter frustration of Hashem, who decides, "Let's scrap this whole thing start over." And so the second parsha starts with that redo. this is phase one. This is plan A that's where we're starting. I feel like the the stories of Bereshit loom so large in in theologies both Jewish and otherwise, and it can sometimes be intimidating to jump in and find a foothold in any given year. Do you stay in the first verse of the Parsha? Do you skip to the end and just read about the, the Tower of Babel? There is just a, an overwhelming amount of material, which we will perhaps long for when we get to Numbers. I am curious in this lushness, where, where are you finding yourself in the garden of Bereshit this year? What's calling your attention? We are in such a world time of deconstruction that I find an awful lot of hope and promise fact that things break, and they go away, and something new comes. And just as you said at the beginning here of the habit Judaism to repeat stopping, literally reading the last verses and immediately following with the first verses of the Torah, creating this circuitry, that really touches me. I'm so grateful that we have a tradition that says, "Yeah." It, you know, I mean, Hadestown, I will now quote Hadestown that, looks at these Greek myths that, that play with similar ideas of the impossibility of being human. And even though we know that the story always ends in death, we keep having birth. We keep birthing. We keep starting over. Even though we know that love, even if it's pure while both people are still on the planet, that every love is gonna end, but we do it anyway. Even though we know it's gonna rip us to shreds one of these days, but we do it anyway because that's who we are. break, and we can be fixed. We can heal. We can turn wounds into scars and keep going. and I'm holding in that a lot this year

RAK: It does feel important when we start Bereishit. There's something like, it feels like passing through a birth canal somehow, where on the other side the angel has done a zhwoop on our top lip, and we have forgotten the last year of Torah. Because without that collective forgetting, it's kind of excruciating to hold Moses' death from minutes before alongside with the creation of the garden. And I'm wondering, is that just my experience of being like, "Okay, Moshe, we'll come back to you in a minute. I'm gonna lay it down." Like, are you carrying Moshe and Bereishit Bara, the first words of the Torah, together, or do you also, like I do, just say, "Okay, we're gonna separate these two"?

RJS: Oh, I I love this question. I love this image and it's gonna launch me into what my great passion this particular parashah is. If you read the Torah literally as the Zohar teaches us, you should be ashamed at yourself because reading the Torah literally is like falling in love with somebody's clothes. And you can imagine, y- you see somebody and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I just am so drawn to you." they're like, "Oh, that's great. I'm drawn to you, too." And you go and you have coffee and you can't stop talking, and it's so awesome, and they invite you back to their apartment. Can you imagine if at that moment, instead of going in for a, an embrace or a kiss, you walked into their closet and just started embracing their clothes? You just started rolling in their clothes or putting their clothes on. what reading the Torah literally is doing. You're falling for the garments, to quote the Zohar Bereshit comes along to begin the process of getting the clothes off Of getting that full body press. And then you, like even once you come into intimate contact with another human being who is opening themselves to you, that's not enough either. You want their heart, you want their soul. You want the, the intermingling to not just be limited to the physical world, you want the intermingling to be on some plane that you don't even 100% understand. So it has to start right from the beginning if we are, if we're gonna buy the rabbi's notion that the Torah is completely festooned in very attractive garments, and that it's our task to get past the garments, to get past the flesh, to get past the bone, and to go all the way to the soul. soul of The soul of the Torah is where our connection to the divine occurs. So the rabbis come up with this amazing idea. Let's not read this thing literally. Let's not literally build a temple. Let's not literally kill animals. Let's figure out what is the real temple, the temple that isn't made manifest with bricks and mortar and slave labor. Let's figure out what the real sacrifice or offering is that isn't taking the life of another creature, but maybe taking the life out of our hatred. Maybe, bringing the life of our gratitude and sharing it The genius of this was that not only did we not have to do those things anymore, we didn't have to have the hierarchy of the priesthood, we didn't have to have bulls and blood and guts and muck and schlepping and all the things. had a Torah, we had a temple that was literally portable. And if in a time when, a book was a scroll and it weighed, 30 pounds and it was heavy, even a lot less heavy than a temple, but still to schlep, right? And very expensive. I think they're expensive now, even more expensive then. Then the way you encounter it is letter by letter, word by word, committed to your own heart. And you, if you go with their theory, then you need to, then every letter counts. they say it in multiple ways, right? Rashi in the 11th century says, "There is not a single word that is not crying out, Darshani, interpret me, check me out, baby. I'm hot. You want this." And if that's true, then it's true of the first letter of the Torah. So we could spend this entire time talking about the fact the Torah, which comes to teach us oneness, the Torah which at its center of its center, its soul of its soul says, Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Listen, y'all, God wrestlers, this force that is enlivening you, is Echad. It is one. It is oneness So you would certainly think That if it's oneness that we're trying to learn, that the very first letter of the Torah would help us know that. And the fact that ancient Hebrew was both a numerical and a phonetic system, each letter has a numerical value. Aleph, the first letter, having the numerical value of one, should have been the first letter of the Torah. if you only learned one letter, if you only got as far as the first letter of Torah, it should able to teach you everything you need to know, is oneness. That's what this whole tradition is here to give us. But it doesn't. Famously, it starts with the absolute antithesis of oneness. It starts with a bet, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, whose numerical value is two. And two is the exact opposite of one. Two is anything but one. Why? Why, why, Why? The rabbis ask why, why, why did this Torah begin with two? We hate that. And this introduces to us the paradox of being human and experiencing self and other as an endless series of binaries, as an endless series of otherness of me and you not being you This endless series of separations and fractures and bifurcations. It's right there. First letter tells us that. And yet, the Torah is beckoning us to find oneness, beckoning us to get to echad, to get to one, to get to aleph. Pff. Really? You're gonna start us with the hardest possible lesson? hardest possible lesson of going from me and you, never the twain shall meet except maybe a little, a n- a little canoodling every once in a while. Yeah, that's right. The Torah says, just looks at us and goes, "Oh, punk, I know it's really hard." It's a really hard thing to live in a world that you experience as broken, as shattered, as divided, as a set of separations, and yet know in your kishkes, know in your guts, know in your innermost understanding that it's one To know. To know it And we get little glimmers along the way. You get that little glimmer when you're physically comfortable in your body, and you're outside on a beautiful summer night, and it's a new moon, and it's dark, and you look up and you see that rich array of sparks of light surrounding this little planet. And you go ... and you get that, "Yes. It is all one. It really is. Oh, yeah, I'm just a little grain of sand on a big beautiful beach. It's incredible. Yes, I love it. Yes." We get those little moments of like this is what's real is when the ego falls away and when the f- y- when the temporality of this life falls away, and you feel that eternal energy of which you will, are, and will always be a part. We get these little glimmers of that oneness But our Torah is like, yeah, but baby, you're gonna experience it as two. of the time, you're gonna be tucking your arms in close, protecting yourself, aware of the skin that separates you from the rest of the world, highly aware of the set of experiences that you and only you have experienced, highly aware of your differences, and you'll make much of it too, by the way, humans. We make much of it. We know it's absurd, and yet we make much of it. So we gotta start with bet. We gotta start with division because that's how you're gonna experience the world most of the time We're gonna meet you where you're at And then we get the first word, Bereshit, which means what the heck anybody knows. Nobody knows what this word means. It is a hapax legomenon. for those of you out there who are word nerds, you need to know. If you don't know what a hapax legomenon is, I am thrilled to be the one to get to tell you what it is. It is a word that occurs in a text once and only once. And this word Bereshit, as you see it, the first word of the Torah, is a hapax legomenon. You're never gonna see it again. That tells you something too That's us, right? We're all hapax legomenon. We come into this world once and only once as we are now. Maybe our spirit comes in many times. That's a whole bigger conversation. But this one, this Joe Singer sits here today, is a one-off, as are you, as we all are. Bereishit, one-off. Love that. that. Torah's like, got us. Torah's doing the little two fingers, l- the little two-finger eyeball, I see you. It's just going, "Yeah, I see you. I see you. Come on, let's go. We're g- we're on our, we're on our journey to oneness." And, I shared this with you before, that I got completely addicted to this line for about three months about 25 years ago. And I was like, I don't... This is frustrating me. It makes me so angry." The Torah starts with bet. And then I found it made a lot of rabbis upset, too. There's tons of writing about it. You wanna, for a good time, Google "Why are the rabbis mad that the Torah starts with bet?" You have to be a certain kind of person for that to be a And you'll get so many different things supplied when you start, why are the rabbis angry? Yeah, you'll get all kinds of interesting, you know, advertisements about books on the Hebrew alphabet, the mysteries of the Hebrew alphabet. We are sitting with this dichotomy right out of the starting block, and we are being to find our way to wholeness and oneness and full integration with all that is. And it's not on the surface. not obvious. If we translate that first verse, the way it's most often translated is, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."  What I first noticed when I started to plunge into this was not just that it started with a word that isn't really a word. It's a poorly constructed grammatical word. For grammar nerds out there, it's a smichut. It's a word that needs to be attached to a noun. It basically could mean in beginning of, and then there should be some kind of a noun. But it's not, it's followed by a verb, and that's a problem. So it starts even with a dropout. In the beginning of something, we don't know what, then created. So that's an issue right there. But I wasn't sophisticated enough, honestly, grammatically, to even have known that was a problem. The problem for me was much more surface. The problem for me was that even taking the line absolutely literally the way that it's most often interpreted that God created a divided universe. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. They're not the same thing. I thought w- I thought we were What? that's a real problem for me. No, I wanted it to just say in the, you know, God created the whole universe. There was a way to say that, that even could have started with aleph. But no, that's not what it says. Because, again, it's meeting us where we are. We experience heaven and Earth as two polar opposites. We experience them as differences, as brokenness, as division, as separation And I was like desperate to find wholeness in this line. If I only ever learned those seven words, Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'aretz  Shouldn't there be some hint that oneness is there? So I did a really basic thing. I just thought it doesn't start with an aleph, but maybe there's a lot of alephs in this line. looking at each word, and I looked at Bereshit. There's an aleph in Bereshit. Amazing. Bereshit Bara. There's an aleph in Bara. Elohim. There's an aleph in Elohim. Et. an aleph in Et. right. This is looking good. I'm four words in, and I got an aleph in every word so far. So, Oh my gosh, there's a hidden aleph. This is so great. I'm like, "I got it. I got it." I can't wait for the next word. Hashamim. No. No aleph. but Hashamim means heaven. Certainly that oneness should be in heaven, shouldn't it? Wouldn't that be the exact place you would find it? And yet it's not there, so I was a little heartbroken, I have to say. Sat there crestfallen for a couple of weeks, but I kept going. Ve'et, there's an aleph there. Ha'aretz, is an aleph there. Did I get all the words? Bereshit, Bara, Elohim, Et, Hashamim, Ve'et, Ha'aretz. There we go. Alephs in everything but Hashamim. So I was like six out of seven ain't bad." Oh, wait, six out of seven? Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, six days that you work and a seventh day where you don't. Shabbos. Okay, there must be something in that. There must be some little hint there that there's seven words in the first verse of the Torah, and they've all got God or godliness or oneness or expansive unity, except one, it's Hashamim. So I turned to our friend Rashi to see if he had any intelligent things to say about it. And what do you know? Here's Mr. 11th century Provençal Jew who's a merlot dealer, got plenty of time to analyze every single word in every Jewish text up until his lifetime, and what he says is, "Look, if you're looking for the Torah to tell you how the world was created in a chronological kind of way, you gotta be kidding yourself." That's not how it, that's not what's happening here. at the words. Look at how, look at the flow of things that happens. So for example, the heavens and the earth are created and then the very next thing we get is something about water, and yet we haven't heard anything about water yet. Where did the water come from? And why didn't we say God created It's just water is all of a sudden there. And he looks at the word hashamayim and he says, "Ah, see? Here's a hint." It says hashamayim, which means heavens. But what it really is, Rashi says, is haesh, the fire, mayim, waters. mayim, the fire waters. And he just insinuates that hashamayim actually means haesh mayim, and that the alef just dropped, Of course. like a Do you buy it? Rashi and I, Rashi is not my friend, I would say. He and I have a conf- a conflictual relationship. Do you buy it when he says this? like, I have also a conflictual relationship with Rashi, but it's the greatest thing in the world when somebody that you think you hate does something that you really love. Even in that you bring Torah. All right. All right.  buy it. I'm like, "Oh my  this is genius. I love this." So there is the alef. It's hidden. He found the same problem you did. What a blessing. It's not just that he solved your problem, but he found your problem and h- was as disturbed as you were Yes, I think he was. I mean, He doesn't talk about it the same way that I would talk about it, but he certainly comes to the same conclusion. There's a problem with this word, Hashem. And he his riff on it solves my problem, so we were on some plane, in, in communion. I loved this idea that the very place that the alef, that the oneness, the stand-in for God would be missing was in the very place that you think that it lives or that we're taught that it lives. There was something that felt really and beautiful and a little swirly and psychedelic about that idea for me too And I have just come back again and again to this verse as a real keystone for me. When I look around and I see especially my species, especially certain members of my species, behaving in s- ways that are so... feel so wrong and so broken and so hurtful. And to try my very, very best to understand the wholeness of this thing that we refer to as God. The s- the wholeness of creator, who is also a destroyer, who is also a, a wild, out of control, dangerous, destructive force, and also a nurturing, tender, healing, birthing force. I feel strongly that part of my spiritual work while I'm here on this planet is to do the best I can to reconcile that fact. I think it is a fact me. And to choose where I, as a human being with a certain kind of agency, put my emphasis. I don't think God has any choice. I think God is, as my rebbe Gershon Winkler teaches, God is just is-ing. Is just is-ing all of this. The, the, the, the drash on that is that the letters that make the ineffable name, the name that cannot be pronounced, that Heh Vav Heh Are the same letters that you need to say was, is, will always be. They are temporal words. Rabbi David Cooper riffing on, I will now give Buckminster Fuller smicha, Rabbi Buckminster Fuller the, the beautiful quote that God is a verb. Bucky said it first, Rabbi David Cooper riffed on it. Beautiful book, God is a Verb. God is a verb. That's why Bereshit Bara God is a noun, God is a verb. In the beginning of In the beginning of creativity, you gotta have division in this world. There's never been a great story written that didn't have tension. There's never been a great relationship didn't have moments of reconciliation after a tear. That's the drama of being a human being. It is dramatic to be a human being. It just is. Look at how we come into the world very dramatic. Look at how we leave the world, often very dramatic. Even the most peaceful birth, the most peaceful death surrounded by energy intense energy. And I think first verse starts to introduce us to ourselves, how we're gonna experience this ride that we just got on, of brokenness, of terrible things, of beauty, deliciousness, of hunger, of all the things that we're gonna experience in our life. And if we are very, very lucky, we will figure out to tend to ourselves and each other all of that. We will figure out how to choose compassion and healing and kindness, tenderness, forgiveness even in the face of a God that cannot Even in the face of a God who's just like, "Sorry, I had to do it. It just came through me. Yeah, I know, death, cancer, deceit, hostility. I j- I can't help it. It's, I- I'm just the pipeline." But you are an agent, and you can choose. I think we've got a kind of free will that God does not have But the Torah, as the story of all of it, is all about trying to teach us and try to bring us to own oneness that Like, how do we get okay with our impermanence? How do we get okay with each other's brokenness It's a high bar. It's a very high bar that this tradition sets for us, it's on us There's no savior. At least not yet. There's nobody who can do it for you. It's you and only you Bresheet Happy exalganon. a one-off, and what you set into motion, you and only you can do And it's all part of the oneness. At the end of the day, you're just another grain of sand on the beach  It's such a blessing that you've given us, the honoring the heartbreak and the opportunity of being one of a kind. Because the, the way that the great tragedy of Bereshit is discussed is is that separation of human beings and God that happens after they eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But it is in the first breath of the Torah is that separation, right? It is, it is just the, the heartbreak of differentiation of any kind, of two cells splitting where there used to be one cell, or of a baby realizing it's not actually a part of the person that carried it in its womb. The, the, the realization that no one will experience the world exactly like you will, and that we are born alone and die alone, even if we are surrounded on both ends by people who love us and are waiting to catch us on either side of the journey. The excruciating gift and challenge of, of what you just channeled for us is that the fall happened immediately. Like, the in- it's inherent to existing is to separate, and ain't that just a kick in the pants? Yeah. Like that, that right out of the starting block, like we're still in Gan Eden. We're still in the Garden of Eden. We're still, in the, in the good land. We still don't know that we are broken, but we're gonna find out. In fact we must find out. It's and, God as a character in this particularly poorly written novel sets it up so that it's impossible avoid. The brokenness is impossible to avoid, or the knowledge of the brokenness. Perhaps it's most important to remember that, yeah, there's brokenness all over the place. of the world outside of humanity seems to handle it pretty well. We're the ones that just make a it Because we know it. We know it. We don't- we in our, in our own minds us the flow. And I think there's a part of this opening set of stories that reminds us that it's in your head. It is in your head. There's the, the, the terrible moment of the first murder. There's this ... You know, it's such an important teaching. brothers, one's a farmer, one's a rancher. Somehow they get it, this idea that they need to offer, make offerings God. That this hasn't ... This, this concept hasn't really been, excuse the pun, fleshed out yet, and yet they, they, these two brothers have this impulse to make a, to make an offering. And God comes and is like, "Hey, I really like meat. I'm gonna eat the meat first and then I'll have the vegetables. You know, I'm European, I eat my salad at the end." Whatever, right? And who is the farmer, freaks out-  His, he, his head just takes, his guts, head, his emotional worry, anxiety, sense of insecurity, whatever it is, up, and he is He's jealous. And God says, down. I'm gonna get to you And if, if sin is crouching at the door, back up Calm down and everything will be okay. But if you let this thought, this hatred, this jealousy, worry that you're not enough This need to be first, if you let that consume you, it's, no, not good. Don't do that. he can't. He can't not. And he lets it  bore down into his heart, and he kills his brother. And it's, the irony. It's the vegetable farmer who kills the rancher, right? Again, and again, Torah just keeps throwing these things at us. Yeah, you think you're like, think you're like some groovy organic farmer guy who's like, "Yeah"? There's a murderer in you, too. You're gonna like, judge your brother for raising animals to eat them? Look what you just did, right? Like the layering, the thick layers of that myriad layers like a mille-feuille, dessert, layer after layer. Like baklava, layers and layers of these incredibly crispy little tidbits that are just begging us to look at ourselves, just begging us to get with what is really happening here, and to choose better. And, as the Torah unfolds from here, honestly, what you said at the very beginning, for me, really resonates which is you could spend your whole life on this one parsha. so rich. There's so much in it. It's just, it's Velcro, it's sticky Velcro that just, boop, grabs you. but as you get deeper into the Torah, and there's some scenes that are just truly awful, that, really should not be read to children. They are horrific. They are violent. They are madness  I'm not, again, read the Torah on literally. That's like falling in love with someone's clothes I say this to all my students, the minute something repulses you in the Torah, go in. It's calling you.  That's our challenge for this year. The thing that is too grotesque to look at is the thing that's asking you to understand it It's begging you. It needs you. needs you. It either needs you to recognize it in yourself and then do the tikkun, do the tuning that you must do to get that right, or it's begging you to understand how it gets like this there's a, a piece of the, the clothing that is also really satisfying in your narration, that if you fall in love with the clothing of Torah, you have missed the point.  The clothing that Adam and Chava put on is one of the signs to Hashem that there has been a separation, that after they eat of the tree, they say, "Oh my God, I'm naked. I didn't even realize," and they put on clothing. This is a nudist podcast now. This, for the rest of the year, because, right, because it's the, like, what are the klipot? What are the barriers? What are the separations between us and Hashem, between us and other? What are the the things that we put on out of shame and the, and resisting our loneliness that actually separate us from each other more fully actually we're missing the point if we focus on the separation A lot of that armor comes from hubris. A lot of that armor comes from both trying to hide yourself and try to protect yourself you know, and take advantage of others. And I think the klipa, the armor, the clothing, the, the protective garmentry you know, certainly we see a lot of this going on right now, a lot of self-righteousness every which way. A lot of, let me judge you by your outward appearance. Let me judge you by your, by your outward expression, by your outward beliefs. Let me not ask you a single question about it. Let me not be curious about how f- how completely freaky you are to me, Again, it's like when those pieces of Torah just like you go like, "Wow!" That's a good time to start asking questions. If you've got the koach, if you've got the strength to go in there. And, mamash, for sure, we don't always have that koach. We don't always have that inner reserve, so I wanna honor that. Sometimes it's not the right Yeah to, to dig into your stuff or to look at the ugliest, you know, business that's coming into your, life feed. Sometimes we cannot, and that's to be honored. But we can't avoid it forever either, we have to train ourselves. We have to strengthen ourselves. And as, I'm 67. I know what it was like in the '70s as a queer person what machinations we to live through in order to be as close to being ourselves most of the time, as much of the time as possible. And very often, I will tell you, I would say from the time I was, 14 to the time that I was 24, I maybe got to be myself, I don't know, maybe 15% of the time. Say 85% of the time had to not talk about my truth. 85% of the time I had to stay in the shadows. You had to be constantly vigilant. Constantly vigilant. Who could be trusted? might be a fellow traveler? Who was maybe signaling queerness? Maybe. And you took your time sorting that out, because if you made a false move, it could be absolute disaster. I wasn't fully legal in this country until 2002 2002 I'd been on this planet over a half a century by that time, and I'd ne- and, and I and I wasn't legal in every state in Cal- in, in, in the world, in, in the country Not being legal in my own country That, that's a thing that I lived through, and so know what it takes to survive under those conditions. And some days you gotta find strength you didn't even know you had. And I think studying Torah, especially if you're or studying, studying Torah for sure, let's keep it to just Torah for now, it's a fantastic exercise in how to get strong and how to look at things you really don't wanna, you wish weren't there. Challenging things that are supposed to be sacred With reverence and irreverence, and then a little bit more reverence, eh, and then a touch of irreverence, right? That this is an incredibly great place, especially for, marginalized people to learn how to just build that inner reserve so that when it comes at you in real time, Hmm. you don't panic. You look at it right in the eyes, say, "I've seen you I read all about you I read, I read all about you right there in Bereishit." You betcha. Sin is crouching at the door. And I don't think that, I think that we get launched here with this parsha, and we get the first examples of things that are not supposed to be things we do. Hmm. that we get the example of murdering somebody out of jealousy, not as "See? That's what the Torah, that's what the Torah says to do." Obviously. No, it's the exact opposite. It's trying to tell us what absolutely to not do. We know that in our kishkes. I don't understand how we get so lost later, right? And say, "Oh, but it is okay to like, take out all the Midianites." those stories about going in and conquering the land and just wiping out everybody there is just an extrapolation on the story about Cain and Abel. Maybe that, that is supposed to be as repulsive to us as the story of a brother killing his brother because his offering was taken first. out I mean, I feel like the arc is set in this, like any great script, the arc is set in the first episode, and I think the arc gets set in Bereshit, and it just continues all the way through. I feel like what we're able, what we're able to drop into is an incredible opportunity to start that muscle building, that spiritual muscle building from you are a one-off. Nobody else can walk this walk but you. Two there's holiness, godliness, oneness in every single thing. Your task is to find it. Three, you are going to fall for the clothes. even gonna put clothes on to try to attract people to you. Yes, you will. I see you in those Doc Martens. I know what you're doing over there, right? Don't fall for it. Use it. For sure, draw people in. Draw life in. Walk, walk with your head tall. Put on new clothes. Try it all. But no, that's not what it's about. try all those things on to get to the heart of the heart, the soul of the soul. That's what this walk is about, to live in the bifurcation knowing that oneness is in you and all around you, and you're gonna get little yummy bites every once in a while. fill you up. You get that awe and wonder, you get that feeling of peace, wholeness. So delicious. Nothing like it. And then you're gonna have to deal with the edges and the bumps and the impossibility of this beautiful, terrible life that we're living  Thank you so much for the, the opportunity to learn Torah with this as our challenge and our, our strength to, to move through this year with this as the, the opening. One of the the ways in which Torah is read, of course, we can't learn Torah without commentary. We don't just read the words on the page because it would be like just reading the clothes, and we have to hear what our commentaries, what our teachers before us and sitting next to us have to teach us. We also have a tradition of a Haftarah, an additional scoop of, of Torah to, to honor the multiple portions of sustenance in the wilderness. And so to complement or comment on our Torah reading, the, our ancestors picked Haftarah, additional readings from Nevi'im primarily and Ketuvim to, to supplement the week's reading. Our... One of the greats of our generation, a gedola hador, Judith Plaskow, has been for years working on building out a Haftarah Beyond Conquest, and she's been, been working on this from many angles and presented the, the challenge to us through this show to build a, a collection of Haftarah Beyond Conquest. And in thinking about how you evoke the, the ways in which the Israelites are instructed to interact with the Midianite, if we remember before the Midianite was a faceless mob of people, the Midianite was our father-in-law, Yitro. And so if we follow the, the pathways backwards through even our sacred texts, we can find wisdom and teaching outside of destruction and conquest. And so Rabbi Jos, as our, our first teacher of Torah, I will ask you, as I will ask every other guest that follows, what Haftarah you would add to our, our Torah for this year, for this parasha Wow. I will readily admit that nach is not my strong suit, but oh, and this can be anything contemporary, like a poem that you love or a piece of media or... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah That's easy then. If I were to call in contemporary haftarah, I would call in the spectacularly spiritually astute favorite book of mine, Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., which honestly, you probably aren't gonna use this, but I've gotta read this to you. I've just gotta read it to you. Please Okay. Here's my haftarah. It's the opening  Paragraph, of The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them. They could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul. Jim crack religions were big business. Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward, ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation and what all creation was all about. Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward. Eventually, it flung them out into space, the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones. These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth, a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness were three: heroics, low comedy, and pointless death. outwardless lost at last its imagined attractions. Only inwardness remained to be explored. Only the human soul remained terra incognita. This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom. What were people like in the olden times with their souls as yet unexplored? The following is a true story from the nightmare ages, falling roughly give or take a few years between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression. Outwardness. We are in this place of shifting. Some of us are still going outward. I think really the inwardness began maybe 4,000 years ago. I think Torah was one of those first documents that was like it's not about exploring. It's outward. It's not about you. It's about in. It's about us. It's about what do we have that creates this mycelial network of all humanity, of all beingness, of this, this incredibly beautifully wonderful interconnected mess that we are a part of?" Because we do that, there is no death. There is no loss. There is no brokenness. When we are able to feel the strands of oneness There's no fear. There's no jealousy. There's no and suffering. There's just what is. I'll be here for a while, and then I won't. We'll be here in this kind of way for a while, and then it'll be something else, and it's just gonna flow and flow. That's the trick. That's the evolutionary thing. the evolutionary journey gonna keep us on this planet. It's gotta happen. I think Torah knows that. It's why it, it, it is so bold. It is so bold in drawing up for us and showing us, shining a spotlight on the potholes of ego, of hatred, Just wants us to snuggle 

RAK: Rabbi Jhos, thank you for this incredible blessing of opening our Torah, helping us roll back to the beginning. Thank you so very much, It's really my pleasure and I hope that everyone, everyone who is tuning in and is surely as moved as I am by your teaching will continue to follow you and your work. Is there a good place that we can follow you for more Torah?  No, I'm the world's worst entrepreneur. I don't have a website. I Y- come track me Find Rabbi Jos in the Godhead. When you get in there, you'll recognize him.

 Thank you for listening to Left at Sinai: Parshat Bereishit with Rabbi Joe Singer. Join us next week as Rabbi Julia Watts Belser brings Parshat Noah to us. Your support for Left at Sinai will allow us to put our episodes out weekly for the coming year. Head to our GoFundMe, link in the show notes, to contribute to the show. Sponsor an episode of Learning and dedicate it in honor of a loved one, upcoming celebration, campaign victory, or yahrzeit. Transcripts, source sheets, and show notes can be found at arianakatz.com/leftatsinai. Leave a comment, subscribe to the show, and send us your thoughts. Email leftatsinai@gmail.com. Bonus points if it's an audio file that we can play on the show. Left at Sinai was edited by Ev Bowen, music by Molly Begott, art by Leora Ostroff. The name of this show, Left at Sinai, comes from Rosh Yeshiva Binyamin Katz. I'm your host, Ariana Katz. Follow the show and me on Instagram at leftatsinaipod or rabbiariana. Have a good week