From the moment we met, he spoke more than he listened. He was nervous, and considering how long he’d
lived alone, I couldn’t really blame him for his lack of social skills. Still, he
just went on and on about how neatly he had named and ordered everything,
before he’d even introduced himself or asked how I was feeling. Mind you, I wasn’t ungrateful for what he’d
done—I know all that arranging was hard work.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
On this Rosh Hashanah morning, when we celebrate creation, I’d like to
tell you my story, which is also his—and yours.
Consider it a gentle plea for chaos.
When we first met, he seemed truly happy to see me. I could tell how lonely he’d been, how
grateful he was for my company. And I,
newly born, had so many questions for him—about that marvelous garden that was
to be our home, its myriad strange and lovely inhabitants, and the Creator that
made us, who he called Yah. But Adam
didn’t have time for any of that—or so he told me as he labeled everything in
sight.
He was so dead set on the task at hand, so intent and
serious—while to me, the whole endeavor felt. . . arbitrary. In an effort to make conversation, I’d ask:
“Adam, what do you call this and this and that?” Irritated by the
interruption, he’d reply curtly: “Evven. Orev.
Shemesh.” Silently I
wondered: Why? Why not stone?
Raven? Sun? Or piedra. Cuervo.
Sol. Or, more to my liking, heavy-silence and dark laughter and gold-that-warms-my-face?
All those names of his!
So capricious, and worse—such abstractions, like pale shadows of the
tangible things they purported to name. While he was categorizing everything
into order, genus and species, I wanted to learn the stories of this gnarled oak, that fox running through the undergrowth, this crimson-mottled rose growing along the riverbanks. I realized that for me, knowing happened in
relationship—as I experienced and connected with particular places and things.
That’s how it went for us, too—at least at first. In the beginning, I think he liked the idea of me more than my company in the
flesh and blood. He enjoyed the concept
of my companionship, but hadn’t a clue what to make of who I really was. So when he named me Ishah—woman—I resisted, refusing to settle for the generic. “Look at me,” I insisted, “and call me Chava.
I am a person, not a gender, and I will be the author of my own embodied
life.”
I couldn’t tolerate the way Adam’s names and orders
separated us from the rest of creation I so dearly longed to be a part of. Maybe some of this was biology; without the
pull of moon or womb, milk or menopause, he was more inclined to separate
himself from everything else, to imagine himself like Yah, to forget that he
was made of clay. Whatever the reason,
while he was busy apportioning the garden, I was determined to push the boundaries. To connect.
To occupy the liminal spaces where borders blurred and I felt most
alive. As he cleaned up, I embraced
messes. While he sorted everything by
time and season, dividing between light and dark, holy and profane, I sought to
love and hate and laugh and cry, to arrange and confuse, forgive and remember
and forget—all at once. I sought out the
magical, mystical, mixed up places that had safely escaped the Great
Separations: dawn and dusk and fog, marshes and mudflats. On occasion, I, too, made use of walls; like
Adam, I sometimes cherished a room of my own.
But even then, always I wanted it with windows flung open to the wild
and entangled world.
“Adam,” I pleaded, “your binaries are for math, not life. Some
things—the best and most important things—don’t fit neatly into boxes. They lay claim to multitudes of names,
bestowed by nature and nurture, accident and fate—and refuse in earnest to be
defined by any of them. Those names are
not the end of knowing but its beginning.
Knowing another is endless; the thing to be known grows with the
knowing. Look closer at the rivers you have used to
mark this marvelous place. Where you
see borders, I find confluences, the mingling of life-sustaining waters. See how the stream loves chaos, how it loops
and meanders, never running straight. I
would like to walk those winding riverbanks with you, using our speech to make
connections. Let’s explore this garden side by side. We can celebrate its
wildness, listen to its stories, and create our own, together.
To his credit, he heard me out. But even as I spoke, I could feel his growing
agitation. He resisted my invitation
with argument, and then lashed out: “I am doing Yah’s will,” he barked, “and so
should you!”
I have never felt so lonely as I did in that moment. Part of
me wanted to just let it go, to appease him in his anger. But I was not born to submit. Yah created me to be ezer k’negdo, a partner to lovingly challenging him. I was stunned—too flustered to help him, too proud
to acquiesce—and so I turned away.
I walked alone, upstream, until I made it back to the
rivers’ source at the center of the garden.
There I took refuge beneath the enormous tree that he’d so adamantly
insisted I avoid. I sat, silent and
solitary, for what seemed a very long time, until I slept.
When I awoke, the sun was gone. Everything was black. My first night had fallen, and all that I’d
experienced during the day was unrecognizable, shrouded in shadows. As my eyes
slowly adjusted, I glimpsed the heavenly hosts sprayed across the sky, but their
light, though shimmering, made me feel small and cold and afraid. I
shivered. The night went on and on. The stars wheeled overhead. I wept.
Then, in that hour of deepest darkness, something shifted in
me. I began to feel for Adam—to feel with him. With tears flooding my broken
heart, it dawned on me that his impulse to control creation’s wildness was not born
of arrogance or contempt, as I had thought.
I realized we were more alike than I’d imagined—that he, too, was terrified.
I wept and waited that first night, exposed and lonely—as he
must have so often been before I was born.
In my fear, the desire to name and contain my surroundings gripped me,
too. Adam’s ardor for order offered the illusion of control, and when my vulnerability
felt too much to bear alone, it dearly tempted me.
So I sat, torn between fear and delusion, when Yah finally
spoke to me. Like my partner, I first
heard the call through the sound of my own breath: a rhythm, a release, a soft melody
swelling through the night.
I form light and create
darkness;
I make peace and
chaos, too.
Surrender and take
comfort, knowing you are dust and ashes.
Let there be wildness,
within and without.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.
Yah’s voice brought the solace of surrender. My fear did not disappear, but alongside it,
I felt a rush of courage and consolation that lifted my spirits. A warm
presence enveloped me—it was Yah and then, seamlessly—miraculously—it was Adam,
too, returned to me through the long night.
He wrapped his arms around me, embraced me, kissed me for the first
time. His cheek felt hot and wet against
mine. He’d been crying, too.
“Chava,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Adam,” I said, “I’m sorry, too.”
We sat together holding hands, weeping and laughing and
sharing our stories until the sun peaked out of the east.
And so, my children, in the end, my gentle plea for chaos
turns out to be a love song after all—the world’s first love song.
His.
And mine.
And yours.
Perhaps that is what we celebrate most on Rosh Hashanah,
this day when we are all born anew.
Today we fall in love, again, with creation and its
grandeur—even if it doesn’t always love us back.
We use our halting language and mortal words to fall in love,
again, with one another—our communities and friends and families, our parents
and children and partners. We fall in
love again, despite our fear, knowing full well that pain and heartbreak will inevitably
follow.
We fall in love again with Yah, who remains both deeply
intimate and utterly inscrutable.
Yes, as my husband reminded you last night, this is a season
to make accountings. We recall our
failings. We name and number our mitzvahs and misdeeds in the ledger of
the year gone by. But beyond all that, I
believe that the reason we really come to shul on this New Year’s Day is so
that we might learn, together, to love what we would otherwise, naturally fear:
our own human frailty.
Avinu malkeinu, we
plead, chanaynu v’anaynu, ki ayn banu
ma’asim.
Have mercy on us, show
us your grace—for we are nothing before You.
We come here, with compassion for ourselves and one another,
to acknowledge our vulnerability, to hold and nurture and love each other, and
in so doing, face down the fear together.
On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate creation by consoling and
comforting one another.
Just as Adam and I did, at the end of the world’s first
night in Eden. . . at least until the new day broke, when I turned to him, and
said, “Now, about that tree. . .”
Notes
a gentle plea for chaos: I’ve taken this phrase from the title
of Mirabel Osler’s book A Gentle Plea for
Chaos: The Enchantment of Gardening.
In its words and pictures she makes an argument for a garden aesthetic
that leaves room for significant wildness.
She also connects the issue of chaos/wildness with gender:
There is an antiseptic
tidiness that characterizes a well-controlled gardener. And I’d go further and say that usually the
gardener is male. Men seem more obsessed
with order in the garden than women. . .
So when I make a plea
for havoc, what would be lost? Merely the pristine appearance of a garden
kept highly manicured, which could be squandered for amiable disorder. Just in some places. Just to give a pull at our primeval
senses. A mild desire for amorphous
confusion which will gently infiltrate and, given time, will one day set the
garden singing.
I could only connect with particular things: As Franciscan
friar Richard Rohr notes: All things are
endowed with “this-ness.” A personal,
unique God makes a personal, unique creation.
moon or womb, milk or menopause: from Pitzele, Our Father’s Wells
I sought to love and hate and laugh and cry: from Yehudah
Amichai’s wonderful poem playing on Ecclesiastes, “A Man in His Time”:
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A
man doesn't have time in his life
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to
have time for everything.
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He
doesn't have seasons enough to have
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a
season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
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Was
wrong about that.
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A
man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
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to
laugh and cry with the same eyes,
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with
the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
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to
make love in war and war in love.
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And
to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
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to
arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
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what
history
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takes
years and years to do.
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A
man doesn't have time.
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When
he loses he seeks, when he finds
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he
forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
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he
begins to forget.
mystical, mixed up places that had safely
escaped the Great Separations: from Kathleen Dean Moore’s collection
of essays on ecology and place, The Pine
Island Paradox: Making Connections in a Disconnected World
for math, not life: as taught to
me at the Hartman Institute by a young Israeli teacher of kabbalah, Biti Roi
multitudes of names, bestowed by nature
and nurture, accident and fate: from the oft-quoted poem by the 20th
century Israeli poet Zelda:
Everyone Has a Name
Everyone has a name
given to him by God and given to him by his parents
Everyone has a name
given to him by his stature and the way he smiles and given to him by his clothing
Everyone has a name
given to him by the mountains and given to him by his walls
Everyone has a name
given to him by the stars and given to him by his neighbors
Everyone has a name
given to him by his sins and given to him by his longing
Everyone has a name
given to him by his enemies and given to him by his love
Everyone has a name
given to him by his feasts and given to him by his work
Everyone has a
name
given to him by the seasons and given to him by his blindness
Everyone has a name
given to him by the sea and given to him by his death.
See how the stream loves chaos:
Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden
ezer k’negdo, a true partner:
often mistranslated as helpmate, with the implication that she is subordinate
to Adam. To the contrary, quite
literally, the term translates as “helper who is opposite or against him.”
Let there be wildness: playing on
both Thoreau’s famous quote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world ”
and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Inversnaid”:
What would the world
be, once bereft
Of wet and
wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left,
wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds
and the wilderness yet.
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