Living Through Creation
Rabbi Noa Kushner
Rosh Hashanah Morning, 5782
September 7th, 2021
Living Through Creation
1. Wave to Wave
Rabban Gamliel is on a boat when he sees another boat shattered, destroyed [1]
He knows that a Torah scholar, the great Rabbi Akiva was on board that same
shattered boat
And so he grieves
But when Gamliel gets to shore, who do you think comes up to him “and immediately
starts discussing a matter of halacha / jewish law?
None other than Akiva!
Shocked, Gamliel says, “How did you survive!?”
And Akiva replied:
“I was in the water and a plank arrived —
— and remember, the word for plank, daf, is also the word for a page of text —
“A plank came to me
And I bent my head before each and every wave that came toward me.
Eventually I reached the shore.”
In this world, we, too, are in the waves.
Waves which once seemed so far away, abstract really,
but now seem to be coming from every direction
Now we are in the waves, holding on, bending our heads in fear and humility and
hoping to make it to shore.
2. Fractured / Threadbare
Maybe the fires did it
I know we have Kitchen-ites in Tahoe and up north
Paradise burned last year and I hear Heavenly is close behind
Or maybe it was the acres and acres burnt to the ground in Jerusalem that did it
Maybe it was seeing the waters pour into the basements or subway stations, the flash floods back east
Maybe it was hurricane Ida
Louisiana in seemingly permanent traction
Or the empty wells, physically buckling from the rapidly dropping water table in our own state
Or maybe it was just COVID
COVID and delta
The idea that COVID is related to climate change
The idea that we aren’t retuning to normal, and maybe we have forgotten what normal used to be
Now it is all unavoidably, unmistakably personal
As personal as keeping kids home for a year
As personal as missing funerals
Once unthinkable changes now a matter of course
And as you and I know well
Lives are shattering because of all this
Lives are fragmenting or reconstituting, in great part from the upheaval and chaos
We are moving and divorcing and reeling and risking and quitting, radically changing course
Some of us are unsure how we can go on, what will happen
It’s not just you. The world is breaking up.
3. Creation was not a pretty affair
The way I learned it when I was young,
The creation of the natural world in the Torah seemed to be kind of a peaceful, happy affair
God said a bunch of great things out loud:
Beautiful ideas, really:
“Water,” “Grass,” “Light,” “Birds,”
“Put the ocean here,”
“Put heaven there — :
And each time God said one of these ideas, trees or the moon or fishes came to be and then God said, pretty much every time, “It is good,” before moving onto creating more on the next day.
But our rabbis, never ones to let a story stay simple and straightforward
Reimagine even those first days of creation, even before Eve and Adam, the original rogues, or any people get on the scene whatsoever —
They image those days as ones of great pain and pathos
See, in those early, early days,
According to our Torah
God created everything, not out of nothing, but out of chaos,
תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ / tohu vavohu, the kind of state where everything is all mixed up,
And no part is distinguishable from another [2]
So, you understand,
In the minds of the rabbis, since the sea, for example, had always been connected to the other parts of creation, she was completely attached to everything else in the primordial chaos
She did not like being separated out and pulled apart, grounded all of a sudden
While the skies rose above
They say she wept as the elements of the world were now forcibly separated [3]
Who could blame her?
And the seas, along with many of the pieces of creation: land, the moon — in creation,
According to the rabbis
they were all confused, shocked, angry at their new situation,
‘bewildered and confounded’ as to why they were suddenly apart, here in this new location [4]
You see, the rabbis know, frankly, just like everyone here knows
Everyone here who has
I don’t know, had a baby, started a project, built or rebuilt something, created a work of art, been in a relationship, or got a job
just like everyone here knows
Creation is not simple, it is the opposite of simple
Creation is not just, “and it was good”
There are emotions in creation and not all of them are joy and gratitude
The rabbis, once again, are right — creation is also destabilizing, shocking, confusing
For there is no way to create from nothing, we only change things from the way they were
And so we share the fear and sadness with the sea of Genesis,
We share the confusion of being separated from something we knew so well
Even if we didn’t like the old way all that much (!)
Even if we believe what’s on the way is better (!)
There’s still pain at having to change,
A shame at having to relearn how to live in the world,
How to manage our confusion and
Imagine a new story
One that coheres now
See, we’re all living through a kind of creation
Of re-creation
If it feels terrible, I’m teaching you there’s a precedent
The rabbis offer that all real re-creations are marked with pathos
And our moment of creation
Nothing less than a cellular remaking of the world
Sure is delivering on the pathos
For we’re living through the kind of moment in history where our natural world and our political world and our social world and our personal world are all colliding and dissolving at once
The kind of change that will begin but probably won’t end in our lifetimes
And I know it is Rosh Hashanah and the theme is creation
Birthday of the world and all of that
But I learned this year
one of the rabbis suggests that the first whole day of the creation of the world did not happen on Rosh Hashanah at all
Rather the first time night changed to morning was on Yom Kippur [5]
See, because the kind of creation I am talking about is not so much a fresh Rosh Hashanah beginning
But massive, destabilizing, and potentially magnificent change
I’m talking about a Yom Kippur kind of creation
The kind that assumes that chaos is already here
The kind that assumes things need to change
I am not talking about shiny new creation, I am talking about re-creation
Yom Kippur re-creation [6]
It’s already started
This re-creation has already started
Our question is: What kind of a creation story is it going to be?
4. “How long will the world accustom itself to darkness?”
The rabbis, in their creativity, also extend the image of chaos to describe what it was like in the the early generations of Torah
When the chaos and darkness was not just material,
Not just seas and heavens mixed up
But also spiritual
As in, the people in those early days exhibited a spiritual chaos, a moral darkness
So for example, people like Cain, famously asked questions like, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
(You know, right before killing his own brother in front of God)
That kind of chaos, that kind of darkness
And in the midrash
After seeing this,God cries out and asks:
“?עַד מָתַי יְהֵא הָעוֹלָם מִתְנַהֵג בַּאֲפֵלָה”
"How long will the world accustom itself to darkness?” [7]
Now pay attention
There’s an important distinction here:
God does not ask, “Why is there darkness?”
But, “How long will the world accustom itself to darkness?”
In other words, God’s question assumes that darkness and chaos is not a permanent state
God does not deny darkness nor its place in creation
God just cries out when a generation becomes accustomed to that darkness all the time
As if there is no other way
Now I have to explain something:
Darkness in this story is not something like turning off the lights. We are not talking about darkness as in night, nor a quality of color.
No, the kind of darkness I am talking about,
the kind of darkness the rabbis elicit in this story of creation and re-creation is the darkness of believing that we are not seen, that our actions are not seen and so, have no consequence.
You see
Another reason God asked how long the world would accustom itself to darkness
was because there was a whole generation,
the generation of אֱנוֹשׁ / Enosh [8]
That took people whenever and however they wanted, they stole people and did whatever they wanted to do to them, saying,
"After all, —
"מִי רֹאֵנוּ וּמִי יֹדְעֵנוּ”
“Who is watching and who will see us?” [9]
And this rhetorical question, the flagrancy of
"מִי רֹאֵנוּ וּמִי יֹדְעֵנוּ”
“Who is watching and who will see us?”
That is darkness, say the rabbis, that is the most dangerous question of all
Because with it,
One is free to abuse, neglect and destroy life at will
It is a darkness that even disregards hiding and shame as unnecessary, overkill.
At least Adam and Eve, after disobeying God’s only command — not to eat from the tree —
On a basic level, after breaking the rules, at least Adam and Eve had the instinct to hide!
But, “Who is watching and who will see us?”
Allows for anything out in the open
Furthermore
The assumption of absence of morality
Divinity
Righteousness from any source
Was also an indication of an illness within, a spiritual illness
Thinking not only their actions but their souls were unseen,
That their souls didn’t even really exist or if they did, it didn’t matter
This generation fell into a spiritual darkness
That is, while they assumed there was no one anywhere in the darkness to restrain them,
there also believed there was no one there to help them,
There was no-one, nothing at all. [10]
It was because of this fabricated darkness,
because everyone in that time, ‘isolated and disconnected,’ [11] spoke and lived this language of absence [12]
Because they all continued acting as if the “eye on high was unseeing” [13]
Because they ignored what this view was doing to the world, which was disintegrating around them
That finally, at last, God cried out:
‘Woe to those who are lost and will not let themselves be found!’ [14]|
“?עַד מָתַי יְהֵא הָעוֹלָם מִתְנַהֵג בַּאֲפֵלָה”
“How long will the world accustom itself to darkness?”
5. Hidden light
If we are scared now by the news,
on edge from what we are experiencing and seeing around us, take heart.
It means we have not yet been accustomed to the darkness.
It means that we still know what we do and who we are — that we are seen
We may be ‘shocked, confused’ as the world enters a state of re-creation
But this bewilderment and shock is our confirmation that we are not lost
That we are willing to let ourselves be found
Even if it hard to remember now, even if it feels impossibly distant, still we know:
There is a hidden light that connects all things. [15]
There is a hidden light that connects all things.
There is a hidden light that connects all things.
And I pray and I believe we can build our world around that light once again
6. “כסא רחמים” / Throne of Compassion
Speaking of prayer
Did you know that God prays?
It seems farfetched, I know, but it’s true. We learn it right in Berakhot, in Talmud
it says God prays to have compassion, רחמים, and it even lists God’s prayer:
“May my compassion and mercy overcome my anger, May my compassion overcome my other attributes.” [16]
I keep thinking about this story because I know that we’re supposed to walk in God’s ways
So if God is summoning compassion in prayer
If God can have the vulnerability to ask for such a thing
Maybe we should be praying for this, too.
Not just pray to receive it but, like God, but to grant it
A bunch of years ago when my kids were small
In preschool or younger
We were lucky enough to be invited on a family vacation to a tropical destination
The resort was landscaped in what I can only describe as ‘resort style’
Everything done up as if to transport us to a fictional place where everything is green and can be found within a few steps
We spent a week playing in the small pool, making sand castles and eating french fries
But the day we left
Everything all packed up, dressed in our airport clothes
We had to walk via a small harbor that could not be seen from the hotel
And this harbor was entirely filled with raw garbage
It was hard to take
But one of my kids,
At the sight of the piles of refuse floating in the innocent water
To her I am sure they looked like mountains
Just started sobbing
She looked at us and asked, “Why?”
I was so ashamed, for me, for everyone at the resort
For the dumb kid’s drinks we got in new plastic cups every day
For everyone who was walking by as if nothing was horribly wrong
For the lack of government enforcement
For the lack of planning and foresight
For the amount of consumption and space we take up without thought
For the ocean, who was now wearing this filth ‘as if it were a garment’ [17]
I swear I wanted to destroy the world
7. “כסא רחמים” / Throne of Compassion, Part 2
You know God not only prays
God has a daily schedule
It’s true. It’s detailed out in our Talmud [18]
And it says there that in the schedule
In one set of three hours,
God sits and judges the entire world
That is, God looks intently at everything, our whole situation
Perhaps as many of us have been doing recently
Maybe as we have been doing every day all our lives
Either way, in the schedule, God also sits and looks, discerns
Sees the pain and the problems
And, I am not making this up, once God sees
Based on all this looking and judgement [19]
That, given everything, there is simply no reasonable alternative, and the world must be destroyed —That is, the cruelty, the carelessness, the callousness, the entrenched racism and oppression The violence and sexism, the tragedy, poverty and anguish
The burning forests, the tents where there should be houses
All of creation seems to be crying out
That all of the evidence
Leaves God no other reasonable alternative other than to destroy all of creation (!) —
But just then, after God comes to this seemingly inevitable conclusionThen, it says in Talmud, then God stands up, leaves כסא הדין / the throne of judgment
and instead, sits on the throne of mercy
כסא רחמים / the throne of compassion
and God has compassion, mercy
For the poor world
For all of us who are doing the best we can, going from wave to wave, desperately trying to keep our heads above water|
For all of us who are lost but still believe from time to time that we can be found
For all of us who try to remember, even when there is so much evidence to the contrary
There is a hidden light that connects all things.
And our Talmud says God sits there on that holy כסא רחמים, that place of infinite compassion and does not destroy the world
Instead God sustains the world,
And I believe that compassion is what leads God instead to sustain the world
providing for every single creation on the earth, from the horns of oxen, to the eggs of lice. [20]
[Now you know I did not make this passage up, as a mother who has spent many, many hours combating lice I am physically incapable of making this up but I digress — ]
God, god, sustains everything
ensuring all life, without condition, without question, without expectation, all life, is sustained for another day
Maybe, if God, who presumably sees far more cruelty and corrosion than we do,
Maybe, if God, even after assessing and judging the world as lacking
If God can still, after all that, summon restraint and forgiveness and mercy
Maybe, we, too, can move from the throne of judgement to
כסא רחמים, royal throne of compassion,
And rather than destroy ourselves and each other out of well-founded indignation, and exacting judgement
Rather than lash out against each other out of fear of where we’re surely headed
Rather than collapse in despair
Like God, we can also try to summon enough רחמים / compassion
To rest in the place of compassion
So that we can do what is needed to sustain creation and the world [21]
But please take note — this text is not describing a larger, longer arc of God’s growth — an epic trajectory from divine judgement to divine compassion
That would be very on brand for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur
But it is not what happens here
Rather, God’s move from כסא דין to כסא רחמים
the seat of judgement to the seat of compassion
This move happens every day.
Every day God stands up and must move from one place to another, from one seat to the other
It it a daily act that, it seems actually physical, I couldn’t say it except it is right there in the Talmud
This standing, and sitting in a different place every day
We learn from this that compassion is not a country to which we move,
It is not a brand
Not a holy status or state we seek to achieve
We don’t earn it over the course of our lives as we accrue perspective and wisdom
This is a compassion that must be earned and re-earned every single day
Physically, materially, tangibly, over and over and over
Until sitting in the seat of רחמים / compassion becomes more and more ingrained in us,
Until responding out of compassion is no longer a conscious choice
Not a decision we have to deliberate
Until we no longer need to be cajoled to participate or scared into responding all the time
Because being compassionate and its natural outcome of trying to sustain the world is just what we do,
whether we want to or not
But our tradition doesn’t ask us to find this seat of compassion all by ourselves,
out of our own volition or discipline or ingenuity
We are not God, after all
And our tradition knows, God knows (!) how hard it is to stand up again and again, and to try and sustain creation —
So our tradition offers us all kinds of blessings and commandments to ensure we find that place of רחמים,
the posture of sustaining
Blessings that raise our awareness that, we are not actually the judge of the world
Prayers that remind us we are desperate for compassion ourselves Commandments that demand we offer to sustain before someone even has to ask
Commandments that remind us the natural world is not ours, not one blade of grass belongs to us
Rather we were created to escort the land and the sea and the sky safely through their seasons and times, even now,
especially now.
8. Rainmakers
For one year
The Kitchen has mobilized a group, the Rainmakers, that exists just to try and help sustain creation
And these talented people, some truly seasoned leaders in environmental work, some brand new to the conversation and many in-between, have been teaching and learning and discussing and ritualizing all year
Whether it’s bringing a MacArthur grantee to help identify the “billion machines” we’ll need to electrify in our homes
Baking matzah, thus relieving us of unnecessary packaging (let my plastic go!)
Or researching investment and divestment so any money we have is part of the effort
Not only that, along with Dayenu, a movement of the American Jewish community working to confront the climate crisis, Rainmakers has been on the front lines supporting federal and state legislation that creates structural, systemic changes — to cut emissions, create jobs and prioritize vulnerable communities. [22]
The work is not done
But if you want to know what escorting the planet to safety looks like
This is what it looks like
This is how we walk in God’s ways and help to sustain the world, every part of creation
9. Let the light come
I have one last secret:
I didn’t tell you this before but, according to our teachings,
When God asked
“?עַד מָתַי”
“How long will the world be accustomed to darkness?!”
God also answered, saying
“!תָּבוֹא הָאוֹרָה”
“Let the light come!” / “Bring on the light!”
“יְהִי אוֹר”
“Let there be light!” [23]
Now some say that light was Abraham our father and Sarah our mother
Some say that light was righteousness itself
Some say that light exists still
And it was was none other than the hidden light that connects all things
This has been the most chaotic year in most of our lives
There is more darkness than we could have imagined
But I promise you this hidden light still exists,
It still connects all things, without exception
Not only is it in us,
We are made of that light.
And just as God once built creation around that hidden light
generations and generations and generations ago
As long as we know it connects us still,
Then we can summon it too.
יְהִי רָצוֹן מִלְּפָנֶיךָ
May it be your will oh, god
Let the darkness end
Let us find the compassion to sustain what you’ve given us
And let us re-create the world
beginning with your light
“!תָּבוֹא הָאוֹרָה”
“Let the light come!”
“יְהִי אוֹר”
“Let there be light!”
Once again
BT Yavamot 121a:18, with thanks to my teacher Melila Helner who taught me this story
See Ha’amek Davar on Gen. 1:12, “Bohu, bo hu / ‘In it’ because all of creation was in it.”
Bereisheet Rabbah 5:4; Also Midrash Tanhuma Chayei Sarah 3:9, ‘Where shall we go?’
Bereisheet Rabbah 2:2. “In this way the earth was shocked and confused (pun on ‘tohu vavohu’) and it said "the upper ones and the lower ones were created in one moment, the upper ones are alive, and the lower ones are dead!"; therefore the earth was ‘formless and void.’”
Bereisheet Rabba 2:3
(aka t’shuvah)
Beresheet Rabbah 2:3
See Rashi to Gen. 6:4
Bereisheet Rabbah 2:4, See also Isaiah 29:15
In fact, in that time, “light itself was like darkness”
Rav Kook, “The Hidden Light enabled the different elements of creation to interact with one another. It dispelled the initial state of darkness, when all objects were isolated and disconnected from each other.” From Midbar Shur, pp. 95-96, trans., R. Chanan Morrison, Sapphire from the Land of Israel, p. 20-21.
Lit. of open thievery, see BT Bava Kamma 79b:8; This kind of darkness is akin to a prison, see Sefer Aggadah 67:55.
BT Bava Kamma 79b:8
See Me’Or Einayim, Vaera 1, citing Rashi [could not find this Rashi NK]
Kook, See note 10.
BT Berakhot 7a:3
Riff on Ps. 104:2
BT Avodah Zarah 3b:7-15.
See Steinsaltz Hebrew translation of Avodah Zarah 3b:14-15
Avodah Zara 3b:9
See also BT Shabbat 133b:6
https://www.thekitchensf.org/rainmakers; https://dayenu.org/who-we-are#our-mission
Bereisheet Rabbah 2:3
