In Parshas Bereishis, man begins by mixing good and evil in Gan Eden. By Parshas Noah, he has already sunk so low that the entire earth is no longer mixed, but almost entirely evil aside from Noah himself. What is evil? What does it mean to do evil? Morality consists of boundaries, areas where we may go and where we may not good. Good is defined by staying within Godly boundaries. Evil is defined by crossing those boundaries and destroying them. Chaos and order. Good and evil. The Godly and the ungodly. These are the parameters of creation. When God created the universe ex-nihilo, order was formed out of chaos through a series of divisions. When mankind sank into hopeless and irredeemable evil, those boundaries began to fray, and were finally collapsed completely. Each boundary had been erected for the purpose of man and life on earth. First the light was divided into day and night. Then the sky was divided into atmosphere and ocean. And then the ocean itself was divided to mak...

The Torah begins with G-d creating the world. Day by day we are told what is created, and then on the seventh day after having created everything from all the stars in the universe to the tiniest bugs and finally man, G-d rests. But why does G-d rest? Is he a man that he becomes tired and needs to take a day off? The Lord does not weary and falter. And the Sabbath is more than a day defined by negative, by the absence of work. The Sabbath is not merely the absence of work. It is the completion of work. All too often we tend to think of the Sabbath in terms of what we can't do, but that is not what the Sabbath is. The Sabbath is the culmination of a properly spent week. For six days G-d had brought material life into existence. On the seventh and final day he declared a rest from the material in favor of the spiritual. The first week though marks the expulsion of man from the Garden of Eden, and the end of the first welfare state. And two curses are attached to that expulsion in...