GENISIS -& HERSTORY

This week, as the Jewish community turns again to Genesis, we enter a potent moment of sacred reflection. A new era is evolving…. And we are a witness and a participant to this change.

Let us review:

In Genesis 1:27, God creates man and woman together, fashioned from the Earth, both bearing the divine image. Equality is implicit in that first telling. Male and female arise from the same soil, breathe the same breath, and share the same spark. A few lines later, the scene shifts. In Genesis 2, woman is formed not from Earth but from Adam’s rib, described as an extension of him, a secondary creation.

This unreconciled tension is more than a textual oddity. It reveals a crack in the code of balance. The first account affirms duality in unity. The second introduces sequence and subordination. Between these beginnings the equilibrium of creation tilts, and that tilt echoes through culture, law, and memory.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a later mystical text, presses into this seam. It names Lilith as the first woman, created like Adam from dust. She refuses to lie beneath him, claiming equal origin and equal dignity. For that refusal she departs, and in her absence Eve is formed from Adam’s rib. Submission is written into the second story as if to correct the first, and the fracture becomes doctrine.

What began as a partnership of equals becomes a lineage of imbalance. Heaven placed over Earth, man placed over woman, spirit placed over flesh. The exile of Lilith marks a shift from sacred polarity to hierarchy. It is the moment the universe’s balanced circuit is broken, and the current of creation is rerouted through power rather than reciprocity.

To study Genesis this week is to place a hand on that fracture and listen. The Earth born woman and the rib born woman are not rival myths. They are poles within a single field, independence and relation, freedom and bond. Healing does not erase one pole in favor of the other. Healing restores the circuit so both can breathe within creation’s code.

If there is a task for us now, it is to re read the beginning with mature eyes. Let equality be more than a sentence. Let relationship be more than a chain of command. Let the story turn back toward balance, where difference generates life rather than dominance, and where the image of the divine is recognized in both. This week’s return to Genesis is an invitation to repair the crack, for the sake of redemption. By recognising that which has been exiled and calling her back, The Sacred Balance begins its realignment.

SHABBAT SHALOM

Lovy Lily, Or Lee X