Saturday, October 10, 2026
Today is Shabbat Bereshit itself — the day the whole portion finally gets read aloud, after a week of circling it. The arc, start to finish: Genesis 1 is the cosmic account — six days of creation by speech alone, culminating in humanity made in God's image and a seventh day God sanctifies by stopping. Genesis 2–3 restarts at ground level: a single human formed from dirt, a garden, a prohibition, a snake, and the expulsion — cherubim and a revolving sword posted at the east of Eden so nobody gets back in. Genesis 4 is Cain and Abel: the first murder, Cain's sentence of wandering, and then — pointedly — Cain's line inventing cities, herding, music, and metallurgy, capped by Lamech's boast-song about killing a man. Genesis 5 runs the ledger of Adam's line through Seth: ten generations of begats, Enoch who "walked with God and was not," Methuselah's 969 years, down to Noah.
Then the ending, which is the part this week's emails never reached: Genesis 6:1–8. The "sons of God" take human wives; the Nephilim are on the earth; God caps the human lifespan at 120 years. And then the verses that close the portion — which are also, not coincidentally, today's maftir, the final lines chanted before the haftarah: "The LORD saw that man's wickedness on earth was great, and every scheme of his heart's devising was only evil, all day. And the LORD regretted (vayinachem) that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved (vayit'atzev) to His heart. And the LORD said: I will blot out from the earth the men I created… for I regret that I made them. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD." The portion that opened with "very good" closes with the Creator wishing He hadn't.
One calendar footnote worth noticing: the regular Bereshit haftarah (Isaiah 42) gets displaced today because tomorrow is Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan. The replacement is I Samuel 20:18–42 — "Machar Chodesh," David and Jonathan's farewell, chosen for the single phrase "tomorrow is the new moon." The calendar system overrides the week's content on a keyword match. Small instance of a big pattern: in rabbinic Judaism the apparatus of practice routinely outranks the text it's ostensibly serving.
The debate: what do you do with "and the LORD regretted"? Genesis 6:6 is the sharpest anthropopathism in the Torah — not God with a hand or a face, but God with a mistake. The tradition split hard, and the split never healed.
One side takes the verse at full strength. Bereshit Rabbah 27:4 stages it as a confrontation: a min — a heretic, plausibly a Christian — asks Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korchah: don't you people say God foresees everything? Then how did He come to grieve over an outcome He saw coming? R. Yehoshua answers with a parable: did you ever have a son born to you? What did you do? I rejoiced and made everyone rejoice. But you knew he would eventually die! He said: at the time of joy, joy; at the time of mourning, mourning. So God: He created knowing it would break, and grieved anyway — foreknowledge and grief are not contradictory, because grief is not a forecasting error. Rashi on 6:6 imports this exchange nearly verbatim and adds his own mechanism: God's "thought turned from the attribute of mercy to the attribute of judgment" — regret as a mode-switch, not a surprise. And this God-who-feels runs straight through the Talmud: Berakhot 3a has God roaring like a lion three times a night, "Woe to Me, that I destroyed My house and burned My sanctuary and exiled My children"; Chagigah 5b has God weeping in His hidden chambers; Megillah 29a sends the Shekhinah into exile alongside Israel. Abraham Joshua Heschel built his whole account of prophecy on this line of the tradition: divine pathos. The God of Israel is moved, wounded, invested; the unmoved mover is an import from Athens, and the prophets would not have recognized Him.
The other side finds this reading intolerable. Ibn Ezra disposes of 6:6 in one clause: dibra Torah kilshon bnei adam — "the Torah speaks in human language," regret-talk is translation for creatures who only understand regret. Rambam systematizes the objection (Guide for the Perplexed I:29 handles vayit'atzev directly; I:54 and the discussion of divine attributes carry the load): emotions are changes of state, and change entails deficiency — a God who regrets at time T2 was either wrong at T1 or worse off at T2, and either way is not God. Apparent divine regret is real change in the world being described from the world's side; nothing moves in God. For Maimonides this isn't a nicety — reading 6:6 literally is the emotional cousin of corporealism, which he classes with idolatry. The two sides are genuinely irreconcilable: either grief is beneath God (Rambam) or impassivity is (Heschel, and arguably the Gemara). And the stakes are not aesthetic. The verse everyone is really fighting over isn't about the flood generation. If God can regret making mankind, the question on every Jewish mind after 70 CE is obvious: can He regret choosing Israel?
Honest flag on your standing theme, consistent with the whole week: Bereshit's own content stays cosmic to the last verse — no covenant, no land, nothing territorial to lose. But today the theme arrives anyway, through theology rather than geography, and I'd argue the maftir is the hinge: Genesis 6:6 is the proof-text problem under supersessionism. Within a century of the Temple's destruction, Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho (~160 CE) made the case to an actual Jewish interlocutor that the events of 70 CE meant God had transferred the covenant — that exile was empirical evidence God had changed His mind about Israel, the way Genesis says He changed His mind about mankind. The ruined Temple was Exhibit A. A people that had just lost the land needed an answer to exactly this, and it is striking that the two answers the tradition produced map one-to-one onto the two sides of the 6:6 debate.
Answer one is Rambam's: a God who cannot regret cannot have dumped you. Divine immutability, which looks like abstract Greek metaphysics, is doing covenantal load-bearing work — the ninth of his Thirteen Principles (the Torah will never be exchanged for another) is a direct anti-supersessionist plank, aimed at Christian and Muslim claims alike. And note who's writing: a refugee from Almohad persecution, composing in Fustat, in exile, who responds to catastrophe by doubling down on a God incapable of changing His mind. Answer two is the Talmud's opposite move: don't deny God's grief — relocate it. The God of Berakhot 3a mourns the destruction as His own loss; Megillah 29a says wherever Israel was exiled, the Shekhinah was exiled with them. Exile re-read not as abandonment but as accompaniment: God didn't change His mind, He moved out with you. Two incompatible pictures of God, both engineered within the same tradition to make landlessness survivable — which is Heine's portable-homeland point extended one level up: it wasn't only the Torah that was made portable after 70 CE, it was God Himself, either as unchangeable law or as fellow traveler. And it's Yerushalmi's point about Jewish memory in miniature: the tradition metabolized catastrophe not by writing history but by re-arguing verses like this one.
Continuity note: this closes the Bereshit week — six entries, from the two creation accounts through Cain, Enoch, Shabbat, and tzelem Elohim to today's regret. Tomorrow we start Noach, where the regret gets executed — and then, remarkably, God binds His own hands: the first covenant in the Torah is God promising never to do this again. The tradition's whole answer to 6:6 is already embedded in next week's rainbow.