Bereshit 2024

For those of you who are Yankee and Dodgers fans, our Torah reading for this Shabbat begins right up your alley. The classic joke is that the origin of the world began on a baseball diamond. The Torah opens “In the big-inning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Wishing our Yankee fan members good luck… and may you be Judged fairly in front of the Aron where the Aseret Hadibrot, the Ten Commandments are kept. Yes, even as a Red Sox fan, and a former Blue Jay’s fan, I am wishing your team hatzlacha, success. Ok, maybe I am rooting a bit for the Dodgers. But I am not placing any Betts on who will win the series, which begins this weekend. (I guess you have to be a baseball fan to get the puns.)

Often, I am asked what is the derivation of my family’s name. Many think that it is derived from deckel, as in a kind of meat that is quite lean. Well, clearly very few in my father or grandfather’s generation could ever be classified or characterized as lean as a deckel. Rather, our family name came straight from this week’s Torah portion. In Genesis chapter two we read that four rivers flowed out from the Garden of Eden. The third of those was Nahar Chideckel, better known as the Tigris River.

As my father used to tell the story, two generations before him, the Czarist army looked to conscript young men into its army. On the list were some young Jewish men in the Jaffee family. Knowing that the army was coming to the village to take these young men into the army by force, the family quickly changed its name. They went to the local rabbi who advised them to open the Chumash and wherever it landed to pick a suitable name from that page.

When they opened the Chumash, they came to chapter two verse fourteen of Genesis. The rabbi looked where the Jaffee father pointed, shook his head and declared that their name was no longer Jaffee, but Chideckel, which today has been anglicized to Kideckel.

So now you know the derivation of my family name and how the Torah saved some of my relatives from conscription back in Eastern Europe.

While it is not the reason I became a rabbi, if one believes in God’s hand in our lives, way back at the beginning of creation Hashem had this all planned. It probably can be found in one of the commentaries in the heavenly Torah commentaries. And if one believes that the Torah is the book where everything that was meant to happen in this world somehow is found in the code, that included my arriving in Mystic almost five years ago to serve as your rabbi here in Southeastern CT.

This may not be one of those lengthy Torah explanations that you may read every week, but it does provide you with how I connect with the opening chapters of the Book of Bereishit, Genesis, which we begin reading this Shabbat.

Strange as it may seem, when we end reading a book of the Torah, we say chazak chazak v’neetchazek, may we find the strength to read the next book in the Torah. But when we begin the reading for the first time, there are no extra words. We simply recite the blessings of the Torah, with the hope that we will be inspired to not only continue its study, but to recognize the powerful moment of joining together with our past when the Torah was given to us. As we begin the reading, we should be inspired by how beautiful this world that God placed us in is. I hope that as you pass the many beautiful trees changing color this week, you are inspired by the beauty of God’s creation that was first planned in the writing of the first chapters of Genesis, prior to the actual creation

Shabbat shalom.

Bring them home now.

Am Yisrael Chai!

Rabbi K