Why Does the Torah Open with Stories Rather than a Commandment? Learning Values from the Bible Today

Rabbi Yitzchak’s question

Rashi opens his commentary on the Torah with the words of Rabbi Yitzchak: “The Torah should have begun only from ‘This month shall be for you’ (Exodus 12:2), which is the first commandment Israel was given. Why, then, did it open with Bereshit?”

What matters here is not the answer but the assumption behind the question. Rabbi Yitzchak assumes that the Torah is essentially a book of command and instruction. On this view, every part that contains no commandment needs justification. And that is no small part: the whole of Genesis and a quarter of Exodus.

“The Book of the Upright”

Tradition calls the book of Genesis “the Book of the Upright” (Sefer HaYashar), not “the Book of Law” or “the Book of Commandments”. The reason: the patriarchs and matriarchs were upright people. The way they lived and made decisions is a model to imitate.

The claim

It seems that the Bible once changed the world. It taught a cruel humanity what basic morality is.

Today that mission has been accomplished. Moral values have penetrated deep into the human conscience. So when we read the Bible, we do not learn new morality from it. We find in it confirmation of what we already believed.

Two things that happen when we read the Bible today

1. A familiar message. If a person finds a message such as “one should be humble”, this is not learning something new. It merely reinforces what his conscience already tells him.

2. A message that seems immoral. A person will not say “I was morally mistaken”. He will reinterpret the verse: as a temporary ruling (hora’at sha’ah – a law stated only for that time), as a parable, or with a forced reading, until it fits his moral sense. As the Talmudic rule has it, “better to strain the language than to strain the reasoning”: it is better to read the words in a somewhat forced way than to accept an idea that the mind rejects.

The conclusion: in the non-halakhic parts, we interpret the Bible in light of our conscience, and not the other way round. Today the source of morality is the conscience, not the text. The same goes for facts: in the account of creation the Torah did not come to teach us physics or geology, and the Rishonim already taught that the creation narrative is not entirely literal. The text is, at most, a source of inspiration.