Happy Birthday, Dear Cosmos!

Musings on Rosh Hashanah and Creation

Ha-yom harat olam. Ha-yom ya’amid bamishpat kol y’tzurei olamim im k’vanim im k’avadim. Im k’vanim, rachameinu k’racheim av al banim.

Today the world was created. Today all creation is called to be judged, whether as your children or as your servants. If as your children, show us compassion as a parent does with children.

– Rosh Hashanah Mahzor (high holiday prayerbook)

Judgment

Whether you’re in synagogue this year, or contemplating the Jewish new year in your own way, when the high holidays come around, they inevitably bring a series of ideas and associations with them.

For one thing, a rabbinic debate in the Babylonian Talmud about when Rosh Hashanah should take place led to the choice that it should occur in the fall, not the spring. Fall is a time of transition for many of us — both summer’s end and the beginning of the school year for parents and children alike. Rosh Hashanah is also a time that’s traditionally spent with family, with all of the emotions that come packaged with such gatherings. Finally, the new year doesn’t arrive on its own, but serves as a herald for the holy day slated to arrive ten days later — Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the most solemn day of the Jewish year. Whether one fasts and contemplates right behavior and the notion of sin, attends synagogue out of a sense of filial duty, or simply notes the date and goes to work, its presence is felt by most Jews.

Of course, if you’re a traditional Jew, you’re well-prepared. The ritual, liturgy, and religious expectations are laid out, and the contemplative aspects of Rosh Hashanah function alongside the mitzvot (the commandments) and liturgy associated with the holiday. It’s also possible that you may believe the universe was, in fact, created 5780+ years ago, and that we’re literally called to judgment, with our names set to be inscribed in the Book of Life if we’re worthy.

But what of the rest of us in the twenty-first century? We, the majority of Jewry, who hold more liberal beliefs, or who strive to reconcile religious concepts with a scientific worldview? What of those among us who are agnostics or atheists, and consider the Jewish holidays to be purely cultural? What of the large number of Jews who, though not affiliated with a synagogue, seek after some form of meaning in the holiday cycle, and in Judaism itself? What of those who find the idea of divine judgment infantile — the product of an historical period long since passed?

Creation

We moderns. We hold new paradigms about creation (also referred to as cosmogony) that have come to supplant ancient Greek and Jewish creation myths. Hubble’s Big Bang reigns supreme in contemporary thought, and theories in astrophysics have brought us multiverses, bubble universes, holographic universes. And in them, not a single Sky God to be found — only wonder.

So where does Jewish cosmogony fit into our picture, if at all? Must we believe literally in the book of Genesis to be “good Jews?” I certainly don’t think so. Yet, if not, and if we categorize most of the stories found in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as fiction, does it not make sense to jettison the entire Jewish enterprise as irrelevant because it’s predicated on myth? I don’t think this necessarily follows either, even in the era of Hitchens and Dawkins. Finally, to maintain an authentically Jewish belief system, must we divide or compartmentalize our consciousness to keep differing ideas from conflicting, or entice the rational and spiritual to dovetail in some way so as to derive meaning from stories such as that found in Genesis 1?

I ask this last question because I attempted variations on these exercises for years. And they ultimately failed for me. One of my techniques was to rely on what Keats called negative capability, the nuanced ability to keep two disparate ideas in mind at the same time without judging either or attempting to reconcile them. The idea failed when I realized it was my personal attempt at keeping the embers of my old hasidic beliefs alive and relevant in some form. A kind of personal fiction. Yet, eventually, there was a point at which I sought out certain elemental truths, and at that time, I was even willing to allow Judaism to fall by the wayside in order to embrace them.

And it so happens that I began my inquiry with Rosh Hashanah.

As a child in Jewish schools, I was taught that though it was also about creation, the holiday was ultimately about God’s judgment. This only served to instill a sense of fear — was I good enough? Ethical enough? Was God watching me when I was alone? Did s/he know my thoughts? Because if so, I was surely doomed.

It’s clear that even back then, something wasn’t working. And it took several decades of what Rabbi Arthur Waskow has referred to as “Godwrestling” for me to shift my perspective on what Rosh Hashanah and being part of the nation of Israel meant to me. (Hint: Yisrael literally refers to struggling with God.)

When I began my Master’s degree in Religious Studies, I studied several ancient Jewish languages, and this included things like learning semitic roots and the etymologies of Hebrew words. One Rosh Hashanah, my studies of Genesis (Bereishit) led me to the obvious:

“When God began to create heaven and earth. . .” (Genesis 1:1)

Delving into the word “bara,” referring to God’s primeval act of creation, I looked up the trilateral (three-part) Hebrew verb root, ה.ר.ה (hay-resh-hay), which also happens to be the root of the term for pregnancy (הריון — herayon). Extending this, the word for parenthood is הורה (horeh for a male and horah for a female). I rather liked the idea that the metaphors were thick on the ground in the Torah; metaphysics no longer mattered as much to me. Meaning did. So I began to think of Rosh Hashanah as a time to begin anew, to rethink, and to reparent if needed.

With this interpretation in mind, I began to explore other etymologies, and soon came to realize that it wasn’t the truth-claims of the Tanakh that mattered, but what its stories could do to enrich a life. Or many lives. And this eventually came to inform my teaching as well.

I soon realized that I was far from alone in this wrestling match with the Jewish sources. The rabbis of Late Antiquity and the medieval period, who forged the variety of Judaism we know today, also struggled with the biblical texts and their potential meanings. In essence, they were struggling with core Jewish concepts, and with God, as they worked to establish and define normative Jewish belief and practice over the centuries. One of these rabbis was the French medieval scholar (and vintner), Rashi (a.k.a. Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac), known for his commentaries on the Tanakh and rabbinic texts. On Genesis 1:1, he wrote the following:

The Torah which is the Law book of Israel should have commenced with the verse (Exodus 12:2) “This month shall be unto you the first of the months” which is the first commandment given to Israel. What is the reason, then, that it commences with the account of the Creation? Because of the thought expressed in the text (Psalms 111:6) “He declared to His people the strength of His works (i.e. He gave an account of the work of Creation), in order that He might give them the heritage of the nations.”

Synthesis

On reading Rashi, something shifted for me, and clarified my understanding of the text. It simply, all at once, became clear that I could not only interpret the biblical text myself, but that I could do the same with its interpreters’ texts. If I was looking for some kind of rabbinic sanction (heter) for my alternative beliefs, and I believe I was at the time, I found it in Rashi’s thousand-year-old interpretation. Namely, that the creation of the cosmos in the Tanakh was the metaphorical account of a people’s heritage. Not a literal act. Not a miracle. (Psalms, quoted by Rashi, is seen, even from within Jewish tradition, as having been written by a human.) Rather, it was the account of the birth of a people, written by humans. My people. My heritage. That much was indisputable. Creation was now personal.

And so it went. This kind of hermeneutic became my elemental truth for the day, and for every Rosh Hashanah thereafter. Although, like many, I believed that the creation of the universe in Genesis wasn’t to be taken literally, I also saw the richness of the interpretive tradition laid bare in the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Tanakh, and in traditional texts such as the Talmud and the Aggadic Midrash (arguably, biblical fan fiction).

Of course, that was my own personal process. I can’t pretend to know what might work for you if, like me, the literality of religious texts isn’t your cup of tea. Yet, I do know that metaphors are powerful, and that they can help forge personal meaning — both spiritually and in the rest of our lives. Perhaps you’ll choose to seek your own metaphors for the new year; and if you do, my wish for you is that they help guide you to the kind of life you most desire.

It took me a very long time to move past the lingering sense of judgment and life vs. death discourse that pervade the Days of Awe. By shifting my perspective to the theme of creation, I found that it also encompassed constructive ideas about what it means to begin afresh in the new year, to take stock of one’s life — and to be a mensch. And this, without instilling fear. It was an illuminating beginning. L’shanah tovah u’metukah! Wishing you a happy and sweet new year!

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 He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day.

- Genesis 1