By Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg
In the beginning, Torah does not give us a finished world.
It gives us a world becoming.
Bereshit bara Elohim.
Darkness. Deep water. Tohu va-vohu — chaos, unformed possibility.
And then, again and again:
Let there be light.
Let there be sky.
Let the earth bring forth life.
Something exists that did not exist before.
And God looks at it and says, tov — good.
Not perfect.
Good enough to keep creating.
Every morning in our liturgy we say:
Ha-mechadesh b’tuvo b’chol yom tamid ma’aseh v’reishit —
the One who, in goodness, renews each day, continually, the work of creation.
Creation is not only something that happened once.
Creation is still happening.
And our rabbis push this even further. Bereishit Rabbah imagines God creating worlds and destroying them, creating again, until this world emerges.
Even in rabbinic imagination, creation involves trying, revising, beginning again.
That feels urgent to me right now.
Because when we speak about Israelis and Palestinians, we hear so much language of inevitability.
There is no partner.
There is no way to share the land.
There is no way for both peoples to be safe.
There is no way to hold Jewish grief and Palestinian grief in the same heart.
There is no way forward.
But Judaism begins with a different spiritual assumption:
The world as it is is not the only world that is possible.
We have tried war.
We have tried occupation.
We have tried terror, retaliation, walls, military force, separation, and the hope that one side can somehow defeat the other sufficiently to make the conflict disappear.
We have tried many ways of living inside fear.
So perhaps the sacred question is not only:
“What has failed before?”
Perhaps it is:
What have we not tried yet?
George Bernard Shaw put it this way: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”
What relationship have we not built?
What voice have we not listened to?
What structures of mutual security have we not imagined?
What would happen if we treated Jewish safety and Palestinian dignity not as competing goals, but as conditions that ultimately depend on one another?
This is not naïveté.
It is not pretending danger is unreal.
It is refusing to confuse hopelessness with realism.
On Simchat Torah, we reach the end of Torah and immediately roll the scroll back.
Moses dies.
The story ends.
And we say:
Bereshit.
In the beginning.
The Jewish response to an ending is another beginning.
Maybe hope is not optimism.
Maybe hope is a discipline of creation.
The refusal to declare the present arrangement of the world permanent.
The willingness to imagine something that does not yet exist.
So the question I want to leave with all of us, especially as rabbis, is:
What possibility for Israel and Palestine have we not yet allowed ourselves—or our communities—to imagine, and what would it take for us to begin creating toward it?
Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg is a J Street Rabbinic and Cantorial Cabinet Co-Chair. Rabbi Kinberg serves as the Senior Rabbi and Director of Education at Kol Ami: A Center for Jewish Life in Kirkland, Washington.