This past week, Jews all over the world began reading the Torah again from the very beginning, restarting the annual cycle of public Torah reading following the holiday of Simchat Torah. The Torah starts with the seven days of creation, describing what God created on each one. The medieval commentator Rashi, whose insights have guided Jewish learning for nearly a millennium, quotes the sage Rabbi Isaac, who asks the following question: If the Five Books of Moses are fundamentally a book of law—establishing commandments, rituals, and the covenantal framework for the Jewish people—why doesn’t it begin with those laws? Why open with stories of creation, ancient patriarchs, and family dramas? Why not skip directly to Sinai and the giving of the Law?
Rabbi Isaac offers a prescient answer: The Torah begins with Genesis to establish an essential truth that would one day become desperately relevant. The nations of the world, Rabbi Isaac predicted, would eventually challenge the Jewish people’s right to the Land of Israel. And the Jewish response would point to those opening words:
If God is the Creator of all the earth, then He alone has the authority to apportion its lands. And according to the Torah’s narrative, God promised the Land of Israel to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The stories of Genesis aren’t merely prologue—they are the title deed.
According to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Rabbi Isaac’s answer points to something that even secular scholarship confirms: land sits at the very heart of the biblical story. The promise of a particular place to a particular people isn’t background material or historical color—it’s the through-line that connects Genesis to Deuteronomy.
Count the repetitions: God makes the land promise to Abraham seven times throughout Genesis, renews it with Isaac, and declares it again to Jacob three times. When Moses encounters God at the burning bush, he hears about a destination—a land of abundance waiting at the end of slavery. The entire wilderness narrative is a journey toward that place. Even Moses’s final moment—standing on Mount Nebo, gazing across the Jordan at a land he cannot enter—underscores how central this geography is to the biblical vision.
Think of it like Chekhov’s famous principle of dramatic writing: if you show a gun in the first act, it must go off by the third. If land dominates the entire arc of the Torah, then its opening chapters must somehow relate to that theme. Rabbi Isaac understood this. By beginning with “In the beginning, God created,” the Torah roots the land promise in the highest possible authority—the One who made heaven and earth has the right to assign its territories.
But why should any religion care so much about real estate? The question feels especially pointed in a monotheistic faith. If God is everywhere, why can’t He be worshiped anywhere? What makes one stretch of Mediterranean coastline theologically essential?
The answer lies in understanding what kind of project Judaism actually is. It’s not primarily concerned with individual enlightenment or personal mystical experiences. Judaism envisions something more ambitious: building an entire civilization according to divine principles.
Consider what the Torah actually contains. Yes, there are prayers and rituals. But there are also regulations for courts and commerce, guidelines for warfare and property rights, provisions for workers and the impoverished, systems for agricultural sustainability and debt relief. This is nation-building material. It’s a blueprint for structuring human society according to a radical proposition—that justice and compassion should govern how people live together.
You can’t build a society in the abstract. Communities need physical space. A nation needs borders, resources and infrastructure. If Judaism’s purpose is to demonstrate what human civilization looks like when ordered by divine law, then it requires an actual place where that demonstration can occur. A sacred mission demands sacred geography.
This is why the land isn’t incidental to Judaism—it’s where theory becomes practice, where ideals take on flesh and stone. The Torah doesn’t just imagine a better world; it provides coordinates for where a model of that world should be built.
The biblical narrative doesn’t merely mention the Land of Israel—it orbits around it. From the promises to the patriarchs through the entire exodus and wilderness experience, the story moves inexorably toward one destination. Understanding the land as central rather than peripheral changes how we read Scripture itself.
This is what makes Genesis indispensable. Before laws, before commandments, before any of the detailed instructions that fill Exodus through Deuteronomy, we learn that the Creator of all things made specific promises about a specific place. Genesis isn’t just backstory—it’s the foundation that makes everything else coherent.
Rabbi Isaac grasped that the Torah’s opening was purposeful, establishing from the outset that the land promise carries divine weight. Rashi valued this insight so highly that he made it the first teaching in his commentary—a work that has shaped Jewish learning for nearly a thousand years.
In our contemporary world, where Israel’s existence remains contentious and Jewish ties to the land face constant questioning, this ancient structure speaks with remarkable clarity. The Torah opens with creation, with divine promises, with a vision linking a people to a place. That this connection originates with the Creator Himself—this is the claim the Torah makes from its very first verse.
