The Sky's the Limit - October/November 2019 - Creation Day 2

God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it may separate water from water.” God made the expanse, and it separated the water which was below the expanse from the water which was above the expanse. And it was so. God called the expanse shamayim (sky/heaven). And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. [Gen. 1:6-8, New JPS Tanakh]

When I was in rabbinic school, my teacher, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, taught us that havdalah was not the only moment of distinction marked by Judaism.  Havdalah, which means “separation”, is our acknowledgement that Shabbat is different from the other days of the week. In the last prayer of the ceremony, we mark several distinctions - between Shabbat and the other days, between that which is kadosh - holy - and that which is ordinary.  This trimester, as we explain about lifecycle events in Judaism, we talk about how life might continue uninterrupted, if we did not stop to notice differences.  I asked our Religious School faculty (teachers and madrichim - high school aides) when they became, or thought they would become, adults.  As every time when I ask this question, answers ranged from going to college, moving into a first apartment/home, having a child, when a parent dies.  We create a moment of adulthood, or at least the beginning of Jewish adulthood, with bar and bat mitzvah.  The moment is special because we have decided it is so.  We make a distinction which allows us to celebrate a process that is much longer than one moment.

A lens to understanding Judaism is that it teaches us to discern things in the world - one day from the next; one week from another, one just act from another which may be unjust.  We must learn to distinguish difference before we can make choices.  The Torah teaches us that this knowledge began when our first ancestors ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but our first story of creation is all about separation and difference. The very concept of day is created after the first separation of light from darkness.  The second day consists of a separation which is difficult for our modern cosmology - the construction of a barrier between the waters; making waters above, and waters below, separated by the heavens.  For our Biblical ancestors, there was water underneath the earth (That’s why wells work.) and water above the earth (That’s where rain comes from.)  Without a firm barrier between them, all is water - as the flood story was not just about rain, but about the waters rising up from below as well; the firmament being removed.

The kabbalistic mystics influenced by Rabbi Isaac Luria imagine that before creation, God was everywhere.  God, being perfect and therefore unchanging, had to withdraw (tzimtzum) from a portion of the universe in order to allow space for the world. Let us think about that image.  All around the world we live in is our ideal, our aspiration to the Divine.  We are separated from that aspiration by the skies above, the heaven that we imagine.  On the one hand, how frustrating to be able see perfection, but be unable to attain it.  On the other, as the poet Browning said, “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?” [Robert Browning, in the poem “Andrea del Sarto”]  There is no moment that we as human beings are satisfied that we cannot be better, do better.  Part of human nature is to be unsatisfied.  What better focus for that dissatisfaction than in striving to bring heaven to earth?

This year, as we mark another cycle around the sun, five thousand, seven hundred and eighty such spins, as our text counts since that first day of creation, we can look again to the firmament - the barrier that does not keep us from the ideal, but draws us forward and upward.  The waters have been separated, not to remove us, but to inspire.  Let us look up and be inspired.

Let There Be Light - September 2019 - Creation Day 1

[As there will be six issues printed of the Temple Topics this year, I thought it would be good to go back to the beginning, and focus each column on one day of the first creation story of the Torah.]

When God began to create heaven and earth - the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water - God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day. [Gen. 1:1-5, New JPS Tanakh]

In distinction from our ahistorical ancestors, we believe that things change, that there is an arc of history, perhaps moving forward in knowledge and civilization.  If we take that backwards, there must have been a starting point.  Cosmologists believe that the universe began with a “big bang” - that there was nothing and then there was something.  Our Jewish understanding has several versions of how it all came to be - two of them prominently placed at the beginning of our sacred text, the Torah.  The first version posits an orderly creation - six days with a development from nothingness to the world that we have received.

At the beginning, all was potential.  That which was to change things from nothing to something, the Creator we refer to as God, waited and considered in that potentiality: What would be and how should that existence be created?  The first thing was to get things moving to create time, and thus: a first day.  Day and night are marked by darkness and light, so God created light - and by creating light, defined darkness as its opposite. 

We often define ourselves by our creations - our work, our family, the home(s) that we have owned or made our own.  Some of us create more tangibly with visible objects.  We also create with words - spoken or written.  The way that we treat those around us is a creates the world that we live in; the environment that we inhabit.  Judaism challenges us to imagine each new year as a unique creation.  It is colored by the year that has come before, by who we have been up until that point.  Yet, the High HolyDays tell us that we are not solely defined by what we have done - that we can resolve to be different, once we have made healing for what we have done. To say goodbye to our old selves, or at least the parts that we want to leave behind, we are instructed to take a self-inventory, and to make right for others the wrongs that we have done.  Then, without baggage, we can imagine who we would be in the new year.

If we do it right, the idea of the new year can strike us like the light of creation - illuminating the path forward.  Once we have our light, we can define darkness - that which we would rather not do. Only once we have taken the decision to move forward, can we understand where we should and should not tread.

In the end, if the path is well imagined, we are inspired to travel upon it.  Then, just as God said at the end of the first day, it will be good - good for us, good for others, good for the world.  Let us resolve in this new year to pause, to consider what we are creating, to prepare ourselves for that new world, and, illuminated by the light of purpose, do our best to do good.

Shanah tovah,

Rabbi Abraham