The Story of Creation, which we heard this morning, is the most appropriate story Jewish tradition has for the first day of a new year.
After all, Rosh Hashanah celebrates the birthday of the world. And the Story of Creation – whether or not we accept the story as historically accurate, which on
the face of it, clearly it is not …
This morning’s Torah reading is a beautiful tale of the world’s origins.
Consider that under the watchful direction of God, order is fashioned from chaos and in the course of these opening verses of the Torah we are introduced to a hierarchy among all living creatures and, too, we learn of our relationship to one another as human beings and of our responsibility to serve as caretakers of the earth and its fullness thereof.
When we read that God created the world in such a way that it may improve and we may have a hand in making it so, we are reading a story, that is first and foremost a story of hope. And our search to know more about this God who creates Hope – this God who is the Source of Hope – this Search for God, my friends, is that which has sustained the Jewish people over time.
And it will be our search for greater knowledge of and connection with God that will sustain us in times of blessing and in times of trial and need going forward.
So, it is appropriate that we read the Creation story on Rosh Hashanah morning.
Now, many here will appreciate that as beautiful and appropriate as is the story of Creation, the first-verses-of-Genesis is not the most traditional reading for Rosh Hashanah morning. That honor goes to a reading known as the Akedah.
You and I know the Akedah as the account of God demanding of Abraham that he sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. The story was selected to be read on the first day of a new year some 1800 years ago by rabbis interested in repudiating the nascent Christian community’s Gospel stories, wherein god, as had earlier been the case with Abraham, required the sacrifice of a beloved son.
In the case of Christianity, as we understand, the sacrifice is complete; whereas in the Jewish telling, God stays Abraham’s hand, and a ram is sacrificed in Isaac’s stead. And so it is, incidentally, that we hear an echo of this story when we blow the shofar, or ram’s horn.
Members of the Jewish community of the first millennium, would have readily understood the rabbis’ intent; you and I, however, no longer have this need and, what’s more, the story of a god who demands child sacrifice, not withstanding any last minute reprieve, sends chills down our spine; for these reasons, we don’t read the Akedah on Rosh Hashanah here. To our modern ears, after all, a god who calls for violence or, even, a god who threatens violence, is a god we want nothing to do with.
So, unfortunately, is this the case for many of us when it comes to the beautiful Story of Creation, as well. For insofar as both the Creation Story & the Akedah, irrespective of their poetry or literary merits, place God front and center, these stories from the Torah may well leave many people cold. As I say, unfortunate.
Here’s the argument: the world in which we live today is sophisticated and modern; daily life is complicated and busy; and given that we have so many serious and weighty matters to attend to, we can little afford to devote ourselves to (what are often dismissed as) nostalgic tales of a happy or warring – take your pick – old-time religious deity we ought long ago to have moved beyond.
But I rise to tell you that the Story of Creation, with its fashioning order from chaos, and the Story of the Binding of Isaac, with its insistent demand that we confront suffering, violence and evil by staring it down… both stories are best understood as windows onto how Judaism invites us to look at the world.
In other words, precisely because both stories, each in its own way, provides us with a template for embarking upon our search for God, both of these stories can help point us in the direction of a better understanding of what it means to hope.
For the Torah is nothing less than the record of our people’s search for God – the Source of our Hope – through the ages.
Hope, after all, is more than mere optimism. No. True hope – which means to ever be seeking to be in connection with the Source of our Hope…
True Hope is to believe in an unyielding sense of the possible coupled with our own proactive stake in the outcome of circumstances we care about.
Or if, you will, true hope is the essence of Judaism’s eternal search for God.
From the earliest rabbinic interpretations of the Torah, it has been our People’s desire to try, at once, to understand why a God who created the world also permits children and parents to suffer; and to seek to understand why a God who creates life also allows disease and violence and evil to exist.
And how has Judaism approached these bedeviling questions as to why the world is the way it is? By assuming that we not only have the right to ask such questions but, indeed, we have the privilege to demand their answers.
So it is that ever since Adam hid from God in the Garden of Eden, and Abraham argued with God at Sodom and Gomorrah; and ever since Jacob wrestled with a divine messenger, and Moses defended our people before God in the scene at the golden calf; we have felt ourselves empowered to argue with, wrestled with and debate with God.
Not because we disrespect God – and certainly not because we dismiss God – but precisely because we believe there is nothing more important than remaining connected to the immediate events and people in our lives, and remaining ever hopeful especially in the face of the most trying of circumstances. And this sense of connectedness we have located in our search for and our struggle with God.
Are you familiar with contemporary Jewish poet Yehoshua November? i
You will be. For November, who, studied in Pitt’s Masters of Fine Arts program, has been of late critically lauded for the ways in which he weaves through his quintessentially modern poetry Judaism’s eternal, search and struggle with God.
Permit me, if you will, on this first morning of our New Year, to share with you a few stanzas of Yehoshua November’s poem “The Purpose of This World.”
“When some Jews cannot explain the sorrow of their lives,” he writes, “they take a vow of atheism. Then everywhere they go, they curse the God they don’t believe exists.”
You with me? Wait. He continues…
“ …they curse the God they don’t believe exists. But why, why don’t they grab Him by the lapels, pull His formless body down into this lowly world, and make Him explain?!”
With this provocative image of grabbing God by the lapels, Yehoshua November powerfully embodies Judaism’s tradition of arguing and wrestling with God. It is an audacious poem, yet one wholly in keeping with our People’s eternal search for Hope as embodied in Judaism’s essential understanding of God.
And given the Torah portion we have shared on this New Year’s morning, the Story of Creation, it is even more extraordinary, that this modern poet continues with the following couplet:
“After all, this – [grabbing God by the lapels, pulling God’s formless body down into this lowly world, and making God explain, this] – this is the purpose of creation …” November writes.
“This is the purpose of creation -- to make this coarse realm a dwelling place for [God’s] presence.”
I love this poem so much that I have decided that in 5772, Yehoshua November is my new favorite poet. And in that, he joins the ranks of King David and Judah haLevi and Yehuda Amichai!
But why do I love this poem so much? Because it is so poignant and so true.
Who among us has not wanted to shake a fist at God?
Who among us has not cursed the God we do not believe exists?
Who among us does not know what it is to want to demand answers to life’s inexplicable and most challenging questions? But to whom shall we turn?
Thanks be to God – as it were – that two millennia ago our wise rabbis created a means by which we can engage in these types of discussions.
So it is that even as we read in Genesis that God fashioned us b’tzelem elohim, in the image of the divine; so do we also read in the writings of the Rabbis, that human beings returned the favor, when we first conceived of God ki’vyakhol b’sar v’dam, when our Rabbis first suggested that God be understood as a protagonist in the world, a being, as it were, analogized to one of flesh and blood.
You know, there is currently an exhibition showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that makes this case beautifully. The exhibit celebrates 17th Century Dutch Master Rembrandt van Rijn. The show is receiving wide acclaim for bringing to light the story of Rembrandt’s boldly casting aside centuries-old conventions that up until the mid-1600’s depicted God as exclusively ethereal and other-worldly.
But scholarship now reveals, that for some reason, in mid-career, Rembrandt, a denizen of heavily Jewish Amsterdam, determined to base the divine likeness in his portraiture on the compassionate, humane, accessible images of the people – very likely the Jews – he knew among his neighbors and friends.
What motivated him? No one is sure. Perhaps it was the death of his beloved 30 year-old wife Saskia … or mayhaps it was the death in infancy of three of their four children … or perchance, Rembrandt sought God in this new way once the artist found himself in mounting financial trouble.
We may never know what motivated Rembrandt to seek in God the hopeful, caring visage of another human being. But of this much, we can be certain…
What Rembrandt did for the world of Renaissance Art in locating his Search for Hope in the face of God, the ancient rabbis of the Talmud did for all of us more than a millennium and a half earlier, when they located God at the center of our Search for Hope.
And so, in searching for God does our relationship with Hope continue.
This summer, as many of you know, I traveled to Poland as the rabbi on a trip of interfaith educators and students. For ten days we traveled through the once-great Polish centers of Jewish culture and thought and we bore witness to the 20th Century’s most horrific scenes of inhumanity and cruelty. Everywhere we went, in the midst of so much sorrow and so many memories, we searched for hope.
Our journey took us to Poland’s capitol city of Warsaw, which for 700 years was home to a once-proud, indigenous Jewish community, and is sadly today but a shadow of its former self.
From there we journeyed to Lublin, once a locus Jewish scholarship, and today all but empty of Jewish culture and thought.
And our final days were spent in the beautiful, cultured city of Krakow, where until 1939 fully a quarter of the city’s 240,000 residents were Jewish; today, poignantly, the Jewish community numbers but some 300 souls.
In the course of our travels, we stood in the streets of ghettos. We traversed the rail lines that led to the killing factories of Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz.
We took shelter from both scorching sun and drenching rain in dank and musty barracks, entered torture chambers, wept in ersatz bath houses, and breathed air once filled with toxic gas.
The trip was far from pleasant, but it was incredibly important, just the same.
For as difficult as it was to walk in the footsteps of those who had been slaughtered – to see what had become of once proud Jewish communities and to imagine what it was for innocents to be forced to step out of cattle cars and be marched straight into gas chambers…
The most challenging part of being in a place where so many lives and so many dreams had been shattered was to be hopeful; and, in the face of such evil, to continue believing in the validity of Judaism’s undying search for God.
While in Poland, I learned an incredibly meaningful Hebrew pun. Amazingly, in Hebrew, the intact name for Poland is Polanya. Yet, broken into pieces, the name Polanya can be understood to read Po-lan-ya, which translates as: Here lives God.
It is an incredible and daring assertion. After all, Poland was the land on which the greatest number of Jewish and Christian innocents, alike, were slaughtered by a godless nation-state run amok.
But I tell you, even in a place of such tremendous brokenness, to a person, each and every Christian and Jewish teacher and student on our journey, came to see in even the smallest acts of empathy, reconciliation & reclamation of memory…
To a person we found, even in Po-lan-ya, a place of so many broken spirits and broken lives, here & there a hint of divinity that reassured us: Alas, hope lives! ii
Significantly, Pulitzer-prize winning author and poet (and native of Point Breeze) Annie Dillard has written of that which we speak here this morning, namely the hope and sense of the divine that may be discovered in places that are broken.
She is speaking, of course, not only of what can be realized in the wake of shattered lives and in the shadow of evil but, Dillard is speaking, as well, of the good, and the potential blessings that can be redeemed from relationships that have been broken and from the whisper of dreams that have been lost.
For Annie Dillard is writing of the dynamism of hope and of the immensity of what can be achieved when we are open to what can be discovered, especially when it would appear that God is nowhere to be found.
Hear Annie Dillard in her own words: “The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home…, the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock – more than a maple – a universe.”iii
To those who claim that a search for God, or even the mere suggestion that there is a God, is nothing more than silliness and nothing less than vanity, I tell you, “the god you don’t believe in I don’t believe in either."
Rather do I stand with the poets November and Dillard, choosing to “grab God by the lapels” and opting to “stalk the gaps, between mountains and cells” where “the back parts of God” may be seen.
And I am proud to be in the company of Rembrandt and our ancient Rabbis who understood that God – and all the hope that is embodied in our search for God – will best be discerned in the face of our neighbor, our lover, our enemy & friend.
Certainly there is ample reason to doubt and to disavow the various gods that have been put forth over time. Indeed, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has written “we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in.”
But let us not decide – indeed, on this New Year’s Day let us do one better…
Let us resolve never to give up on Judaism’s search for God!
Though we may argue and debate with God; though we may well curse God and justifiably condemn God for all that is not right in our world…
Let us resolve here and now never to give up on our search for God… never to walk away from our people’s eternal search for God...
For the Jewish People’s timeless Search for God is nothing less than Judaism’s eternal hoping mechanism.
Where can God be found? Jewish sources ask. Here and there and everywhere will God be found, comes the timeless reply. Wherever one looks it is possible to discover the potential for holiness. Even in the presence of ghettos and gas chambers and especially in the gaps of our lives.
It will be so when life is a challenge, when as in the Akedah parents and children are tested; and, too, we may well discover God in those moments when we might least imagine there need be any doubt of our many blessings.
But most especially, we shall discover that our search for God is fruitful when we pause to look into the face of those with whom we share our lives. We need only keep ourselves open to this reality; and we need only open our hearts and hands to one another to discover that God, that hope, exists, right here, right now, among us today.
So it is that in the New Year, I pray each of you and all of us together will remain open to a fulfilling, fruitful search for God.
Indeed, it has been nothing less than our people’s search for God – nothing less than Judaism’s eternal hoping mechanism – that for some three millennia has allowed our people to hold fast to the redemptive possibility of hope and that has permitted us to reach this day.
This first day of a New Year… and the rest of our lives.
Shanah Tovah
i
Yehoshua November, “God’s Optimism,”The Purpose of the World” page 58, Main Street Rag Publishing Co., Charlotte, North Carolina, 2010.
ii
Based on my article, “Finding God in the Darkness: Rabbi Aaron B. Bisno Visits Death Camps and Reflects on the Haunting History of Jewish Poland,” published in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 3, 2011.
iii
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, page 274, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1998.
