There are times when an ancient text seems to speak more directly to where we are now than to the time when it was first written.

Rarely has that been truer than in the case of the famous first comment of Raji to the Torah, to the words in the beginning God created.

Let's listen to that comment in its entirety.

Rabbi Isaac said that Torah should have begun with a verse,

this month shall be to you the first of months, which was the first command given to Israel.

Why then did it begin with in the beginning? It began thus because it wished to convey the idea

contained in the verse the power of his acts he told to his people in order to give them

the estate of the nations, so that if the nations of the world would say to Israel,

your robbers, because you took by force the land of the seven nations, Israel might reply

to them, the whole earth belongs to the Holy One Blessed be he. He created it and gave it it to them and by his will he took it from them and gave it to us.

Rashi might have been speaking directly to us in 5771, 2010, in an age of anti-Zionism, boycott sanctions, divestments against Israel, and a growing question of the right

of the state of Israel to exist.

Now, Rashi lived in Trois in northern France in the 11th century, at a time when the position

of Jews under Christian rule was beginning seriously to worsen.

He lived through some of the more traumatic events of that

period, the massacre of Jewish communities in the Lorraine at the beginning of the First Crusade

in 1096, for example. Jews in his day were persecuted and powerless. There had no realistic hope

of imminent return to the land. And as to the logic of Rabbi Isaac's interpretation, it seems strained.

Why did the Torah begin with creation?

Because that's a fundamental of Jewish faith.

Rabbi Isaac seems to be arguing that since the Torah is primarily a book of commandments,

it should begin with the first command, at least the first given to the

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