All Beginnings are Hard כל התחלות קשות

A few days before New Year’s, I had dinner at a Japanese restaurant, sitting at the sushi counter. The owner, a skilled sushi chef (American),who learned his craft in Japan, was cutting and shaping and rolling and forming fish and vegetables into stunning arrangements that were soon to be delicately devoured by waiting diners. In his life outside the restaurant he is also a potter with his own kiln and an opera lover. As I watched him finish one dish and move quickly and seamlessly on to the next, I thought, doesn’t he get bored or tired of the life of a restauranteur? The pressure of consistently creating the beautiful and tasty morsels, not to mention the stress of managing staff, ordering supplies and dealing with clamoring customers must be wearing him down!

And then, in a moment of, “well, duh!” clarity, I realized that the answer is, probably, no. He must feel the way I do when I work. As he methodically and patiently creates sushi and sashimi and hand rolls, I, too, in my work, strive to create beauty. Beautiful letters, words, and columns that are pleasant to look at and easy to read, and that fulfill the laws of Halachah (Jewish law) - that’s the goal. But at the same time, I am doing the same thing, hour after hour, day after day. I am writing, now for the fourth time, all 804,805 letters, all 79,847 words, all 245 columns and all 62 pages of the Torah. It’s hard to begin again! To know that I will again be “living through” the stories of our ancestors, writing again the troubling narratives and the uplifting experiences of the Jewish people is daunting. But boredom isn’t part of it - perhaps frustration when dealing with a “bad quill day” or unwanted interruptions - but never boredom.

So I took a deep breath, washed my hands, said a “kavanah”, took up my quill and continued to write the words that I started with you last month - – “when God began to create” - בראשית ברא אלקים and today, I finished writing the first parsha (portion) of the Torah, Parashat Bereishit.  And as we see in Bereishit (Genesis), even God has a hard time with new beginnings! The joy and goodness of the first days of creation give way to manifestations of familiar problems - disobedience, jealousy, power, murder, corruption, deception (sound familiar?), that ultimately lead to the undoing of Creation in the second parashah of the Torah, Noah.

So now, I will deal with God’s disappointment and regret over having created Man in the first place. I’ll be a little sad that the truths of the story are still so blatantly true, but I certainly won’t be bored by them!

PS - I think I have it a little better than the sushi chef - at least my creations will last a little longer than his!