Last night, I was learning the weekly portion with my son. This coming week on Shabbat we will read the portion ofVayera (Genesis 18–22). My son has a presentation on this portion on Friday, and so we sat together, taking turns reading the Hebrew and English, sounding out words slowly. Discussing the story. Angels who look like travelers. A promise that sounds impossible. Sarah laughing to herself. Abraham walking silently up a mountain with his son, in preparation for the sacrifice of Isaac.
As we debated why angels look like people, and which parsha-themed snack to bring to his class on Friday, something new came into focus for me. And I want to share it with you.
Genesis is one long story of identity formation. Not theory, not theology written on tablets. Human identity. Family identity. Spiritual identity. Identity that is formed in real time, inside real lives.
Adam and Eve hiding, after the eating the forbidden fruit. Cain refusing to accept responsibility over murdering his brother. Abraham and Sarah navigating foreign lands and adjusting how they present themselves to survive (the story of Abraham hiding Sarah’s identity in Egypt is what comes to my mind). Isaac doing the same. Rebecca guiding Jacob into disguise, both to receive the birthright blessing, and then to hide from his angry brother Esav. Laban switching Leah for Rachel under a veil. Joseph speaking Egyptian to his own brothers, concealing his face even though underneath the disguise he was weeping.
Page after page, a pattern appears: concealment, tension, shifting names, hidden intentions, people learning who they are by first discovering who they are not.
Genesis is not a book of saints. It is a book of beginnings, holiness struggling to enter the world while other forces push back. That friction I think is what ultimately will shape who we become.
And the question rises naturally: Wouldn’t God want us to begin with clarity, confidence, and open revelation? If so, why not start with Moses at Sinai? Why does the Bible begin in a world of blurred identities, competing truths, and fragile faith?
Here’s what I think: identity does not fall from heaven fully formed. It grows. It is tested. We must continually choose our identity. Before there is a people of Israel, there is a family trying to find God in a world that does not yet speak His language.
When Sarah laughs and says:
We are listening to a real human experience in Sarah’s laugh: caught between biology and promise, between what life has taught her and what God is asking her to believe. Faith and doubt exist in the same sound. Not the absence of belief, but belief working its way through reality. That is far more honest than perfection.
The Torah tells us why Abraham was chosen:
God does not praise Abraham for perfection. God praises him for teaching children. Teaching righteousness. Teaching justice. Teaching how to walk with God in a world that does not always reward it. Teaching how to hold faith through uncertainty, not to avoid uncertainty altogether.
This message matters for us as parents and educators. If our children think righteousness means flawlessness, they will shatter the first time life is complicated. If they think God only lives in certainty, they will miss Him in the real world, where faith and doubt are regular travel companions. Genesis reminds us that God is present in the formation, not only in the finished picture. We do not raise children to avoid wrestling. We raise them to meet God inside it. We are not raising children for a sheltered world. We are raising them to carry faith through complexity. To be able to hold two truths.
The numerous examples across Genesis, and I counted roughly thirty-plus of them earlier, demonstrate this process of self-discovery again and again. People learning who they are through tension, through mistakes, through moments of disguise and revelation, through choosing God even when the path is not obvious. The struggle is not a failure of faith; it is the training ground for it.
The later books of the Bible teach laws, covenant, and nationhood. But Genesis teaches who we must become before we can carry any of that responsibility. Faith that survives contact with the “outside” world is not born from certainty alone. It is born from learning to hold tension without breaking, to walk with God even when the next step is unclear.
Where is God inviting you to stand in the tension, instead of running from it, so that your faith grows strong? I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to send me a message at bibleplus@israel365.com
