R. Tali Adler on Parashat Bereishit: Home, Exile, and How to Wander Together

Ta Shma

Human beings don’t have to be told that we are living outside of paradise.

It’s not just the fact that the world is not perfect: it’s that deep inside many of us, we feel a longing for a place that might be. Within each of us there is a longing for a home we have never fully found.

Midrashically, this human experience of exile begins almost immediately, on the eighth day of creation, immediately after the first Shabbat.