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.