2024 Rosh Hashanah Morning
The queen of an ancient land cultivated a garden. It was known throughout the world as a great spectacle of flowers, plants and trees. A duke visits her kingdom, and asks permission to walk around. He takes it all in with wide-open eyes, looks at the queen and says, Wow, God’s best work huh? The queen looks up to him and says Um, you should have seen it when he was in charge.
God created the world in 6 days, and then God created human beings. But that’s not the end of the creation story … It is happening right now. Here. In this world, this country, this state, this synagogue, and inside of you.
There’s a notable difference between those first 6 days and what followed. During the first six days of creation, God was the sole Creator. But after those six days it’s no longer up to God, it is up to us. As one of my favorite Torah verses states - Lo b’shamaiim hi1 - it is not in the heavens. The onus is no longer in the heavens, but upon us, here on Earth.
And on this specific day when we celebrate creation, we should also understand that creation was not, and never was, perfect: A midrash tells us that even before God said Let there be light, God created ten things in the primordial universe. One of those things was t’shuvah. This tells us that the possibility for improvement and change is foundational to creation itself. God created us to be a creation … for creation.
As the garden joke implies, our efforts have the power to uplift creation beyond its original condition. When we embrace our role as co-creators, we might find that - like the queen’s garden - the world becomes even more magnificent. Our challenge, then, is not just to enjoy creation, but to nurture it, improve it, and help it flourish in ways that even God might admire.
Think about Hamotzi, the prayer we recite just before eating bread. Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz, praised are you Adonai our God, ruler of the universe who brings forth bread from the earth.
The prayer is odd, because God does not bring forth bread from the earth. God may have created flour, water, yeast, and salt, but bread is not created until human hands take all those ingredients and mold them together.
There’s an old Shelley Berman joke that goes like this:
Before coming to America, my grandfather was promised that the streets would be paved with gold. He got here and he quickly discovered three things: No, the streets were not paved in gold. What’s worse, the streets weren’t even paved. And the third thing was that he was expected to pave the streets.
The world today is in extreme need of repair. Four years ago, our community was ravaged by COVID, a disease of the body. As we enter the first day of this new year, we are suffering through a disease of the spirit - an increase in hatred and antisemitism - political violence, environmental devastation, an awful war in Israel that will soon be commemorating one horrible year of violence and captivity … The world needs us to pave gold streets as much as it needs us to make bread.
Earlier, we heard the Torah portion known as the Akeidah. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The very next verse after God decides to test Abraham, the Torah tells us Abraham rose early in the morning, and saddled his donkey, and took Isaac his son … and went unto the place of which God had told him2
The Torah seems to emphasize the fact that Abraham was so willing to follow God’s order, that he got up early in order to perform God’s command.
The Torah makes sure to emphasize the important point that Abraham loved his son: God tells Abraham: Take now your son, your only son, whom you love…3
There is enormous tension that exists between Abraham’s love of Isaac and God’s command to sacrifice him. Our tradition teaches that this tension exists to teach us the main lesson of the Akeidah: Obedience to God is the ultimate expression of faith.
But my goodness. Doesn’t our prayer book remind us to practice faith without fanaticism? Abraham almost killed his beloved son, Isaac. He was so focused on his mission to obey God that God had to scream Abraham’s name from the heavens, not once but twice, to stop him at the very last second …
There are a lot of ways to understand this story, but the one I prefer is that God never wanted Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. The real test of the Akeidah was not to see if Abraham would be willing to sacrifice his son; it was to make sure that Abraham would place the safety and wellbeing of Isaac above and beyond the obedience of God.
But the truth is, the world sacrifices Isaac over and over again.
Judaism’s ultimate expression is not about fealty to God. Judaism is lived in partnership and responsibility to one another. When asked to share the essence of Judaism, Hillel succinctly said Do not do to your neighbor what is hateful to your neighbor. There is no mention of faith, or God, or obedience, or loyalty. In Hillel’s distillation of Judaism, God doesn’t care about our faith nearly as much as God cares about our behavior.
Our actions have the potential to be God’s actions.
I want to go back to Hamotzi. Our ancestors clearly knew that humans bake bread, and not God. Why, then, does the prayer thank God for bringing forth bread from the earth?
During the first 6 days of creation, God planted seeds. It is not only true that we pick the fruit … we are the fruit.
We water the garden, and we pave the streets. When we bake bread, God does bring forth bread, because we bring forth bread.
This potential of ours is a double-edged sword. Our capacity to tend goes hand in hand with the capacity to destroy. Our abilities of creativity and insight are matched by our ability to hate and fear. God gave us the capacity to do terrible things because God desperately needs us to do wonderful things. One cannot exist without the other.
Creation is not perfect. But as God reminds us during the first six days, it is good. It can continue to be good if we choose to improve upon it. Each of us has the holy opportunity and the sacred responsibility to bring a little piece … of peace. We must bring not only bread, but justice, compassion, and shalom. We must acknowledge our partnership with God as co-creators. My fervent prayer is that we embrace this sacred task. And when we do, we can share bread with one another that we - God’s partners - have brought forth from the earth.