This is a "must teach". That is what continues to be reinforced in my mind on many a Shabbos Breishis when I revisit one of the first entries in "Touching History", a gripping personal story of the most charismatic rebbeim from whom I was privileged to learn. There Rav Sholom Gold writes, in a fashion far more dramatic than I would ever attempt, how the "first Rashi on chumash" speaks to our generation in a way that no one who came before us could have imagined.
To be sure, we all remember and are about to review that Rashi "justifies" the recording of creation as Torah's opener as the way to establish Hashem's sovereignty and His resultant right to assign the Holy land of Israel to His people. Thus, Rashi asserts that in some future time we are now fully equipped to respond to unfriendly nations who will accuse of being thieves who have stolen the Holy land away from its rightful owners. Truth be told, there are many questions on this Rashi and they generate discussions that run far and deep.
However, Rav Gold points out how puzzled Jews must have been when a careful reading of the text informs them of a time when we would be held up as land thieves in Israel. Imagine a medieval Jew running from the recent pogrom, or a relatively secure Jew of the 1800's trying to put this together. Before Mashiach comes, how could it come to be that we would ever be accused of stealing any country, especially a land so distant from any significant group of our people? And, of course, this makes no sense after Mashiach. Exactly which generation is going to need this argument? What time necessitated these passages?
Yet the twentieth and twenty first century Jew does not bat an eye on this Rashi. We don't have to travel far at all to find no end of people who look at us as land grabbers. We don't even stop for a moment to think that this Rashi must have been uninterpretable for centuries and perhaps even "metaphorized" to satisfy a skeptical student.
It is remarkable that the opening passuk of the Torah betrays every attempt to make it grammatically consistent with what we think the passuk should say, thus requiring extra textual commentary. Additionally, we are thankfully not at a loss to find prophecies that predict what we witness, be it Yechezkel who speaks of the flourishing land of Israel, the ingathering of the Jews of which the Torah speaks about, or Ramban's assertion that only Jewish hands will successfully bring forth from the land of Israel.
Yet the fact that very opening rabbinic comment on the Torah should speak to us so clearly as it never did before is breathtaking and should deeply impress any heart open to strengthening his or her emunah.