Hayom harat olam—Today
is Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world. Which is to say, my birthday, for that is what this new
year celebrates—the formation of humankind on the sixth day of creation. Before I was born, God spent five and a half
days—give or take a few billion years—creating light and darkness, heaven and
earth, land and sea, trees and grasses, sun and moon and stars, fish and fowl,
beasts and cattle and creeping things. Finally,
on the sixth day—today—the first of Tishrei, God made me.
From the beginning, I knew that I was different. God created everything else with words, declaring:
Let
there be. . .
Y’hi or. . . . Let
there be light. . .
Y’hi rakia. . . Let
there be a firmament. . .
Totzei ha-aretz. . . Let
earth bring forth streams of life. . . .
And so it was.
But not with me.
I, the only creature to share God’s gift for speech, was not
born of that gift. God formed me from dust and ashes, red clay animated by divine
breath. Then God set me down in Eden,
that same clay firm beneath my freshly-molded feet.
“What am I? And what are you?” I asked, my tongue
miraculously shaping syllables even as my eyes adjusted to the luminous world.
“You are Adam,
born of earth—of adamah.”
Sometime down the road, after the exile, I found the courage
to question God: “Why did you make me out of earth rather than words, like
everything else?” God laughed and said,
“Because only you and your descendants will need to remember your roots. The rest of my creatures will never forget
their connection to this earth and one another.
They know, and are content to be, exactly what they are. But not you, Adam. You desire more, and your aspirations are
both noble and dangerous. So heed my warning: When you recall your humble beginnings, your
striving will bring greatness; when you forget, tragedy awaits.” At the time, I didn’t understand a word of
this. Only after countless years had
passed—after I had grown old and celebrated and suffered and endured—and seen
my children and grandchildren do the same—only then did I learn to take comfort
in the chill of clay that shivered through my shoulders, bowed my spine, and muddled
my knees, reminding me of my origins.
But I digress. . . all of that came later. At first, everything was new and
confusing—and I was alone. I cried out
longingly to my Creator: “What am I doing here? And what should I even call you?”
Silence.
“Where are you?”
Silence.
Then I saw the ravens, roosting in the treetops. They were black as the darkness that covered
the face of the deep before it all began, but their calling to one another
filled me with laughter and light. “Caw,
caw,” they cackled, and in the stillness that followed, I became aware of the sound
of my own breathing.
“Yaaaahhh. . .
Yaaaahhh. . . .”
In that moment, I felt my breath as raven’s song, as water
and wind and time. As God’s breath. It was, at once, utterly mysterious and intensely
intimate.
“Yaaaahhh. . .
Yaaaahhh. . . . My Creator, now I
know what to call you—Yah, the Breath
of Life. So, nu. . . tell me, Yah, what do I do now? What do you ask of me?”
Silence—except for my breathing. And then, finally, a reply, in the still,
small spaces between each breath: “Help
me.”
My calling was to help Yah, to be Yah’s partner in creation,
to work and watch over it all as Yah’s hands on the ground.
I began slowly, learning from the Master. I considered the way that Yah created,
speaking and sub-dividing heaven and earth into ever-smaller binaries: light
and dark, upper and lower waters, land and sea, sun and moon, plants and
animals, each according to its kind. Studying
those separations, I saw that they all required some sort of wall to buttress
order against entropy. I realized life depends
upon havdallah, the ongoing task of
setting and maintaining boundaries. A
world undivided cannot stand; for life to feed and reproduce and sustain
itself, there must be division, with membranes that distinguish one thing from
another. Even within the gates of Eden, I
could see how difficult it was to maintain the created order against the chaos
that constantly threatened to wash everything away.
Only after waiting and watching for what seemed a very long
time, did I take my first, tentative step to act as Yah’s partner. Like
Yah, I started with the waters. A river
issued forth from the center of the garden.
Immediately after bubbling out from under that strange tree that Yah had
told me to avoid, the stream split into four branches, dividing Eden into
quadrants. So I surveyed the garden
accordingly, exploring each of its four regions, observing their flora and fauna. Learning the lay of the terrain from whence I
came.
At first I stayed close to the riverbanks, clinging to their
well-defined ways for fear of getting lost.
Finally, I mustered the courage to venture
away, steadily treading out a network of trails with my footfalls.
But what to make of it all?
It was wondrous and incomprehensible, so vast and intricate, beautiful
and terrifying. “Work it and watch over
it,” Yah had said, but as I walked between the rivers, I was completely
overwhelmed—inundated with sights and smells and sounds, reeling under the
ever-changing wind and weather. Where to
begin? How to create?
That’s when Yah called to me again, in that same still,
small voice that somehow cut through the chaos, proclaiming: “If you wish to know, name.”
If you wish to know,
name.
And so I did. Like Yah, I used words to shape my world. First, I called the rivers: Pishon and
Gichon, Tigris and Euphrates. Next, the
elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.
Faster and faster, things—and their names—came to me. I found my mission—sorting through Yah’s immense
creation as it cascaded before my eyes:
Animal. Vegetable.
Mineral.
Kingdom.
Class. Order. Species.
Oak. Elm. Granite.
Quartz.
Ant. Bee.
Grasshopper.
Wolf. Trout.
Snake. . .
For the first time in my young life, I felt purposeful—and
powerful. As I defined new realities
with my words, I could sense Yah’s presence surging within me. How I delighted
in his extraordinary gift—this miraculous capacity to transform sound and fury
into butterflies and birdsong!
Yes, I thought, enraptured,
to name is to know, and to distinguish is divine.
Over the ages since that distant day in the garden, you, my
descendants, have followed in my footsteps.
For you, too, create with words that bind, distinguish, and define. Like me, you enlist language to stave off
chaos, listening between breaths to learn who you are, and what you are called
to do in this world. My children, you have taken up my mantle. And so tonight, on Rosh Hashanah—my
birthday—you celebrate our creation, and our uniquely human powers, passed down
to you from Yah, and me, in this sacred season.
Hayom harat olam—today
the world is born—as you gather to review, renew, and re-create your lives with words. You make your cheshbon nefesh, your spiritual accounting, divvying up your
choices in the past year’s ledger: what to keep and what to discard, mitzvahs
and misdeeds, successes and failures, what you’ve been and who you want to
be. You name your transgressions, recite
that extended list of al cheyts, with
the hope that in so doing, you can better know—and grow beyond—them. You establish healthier boundaries to guide
your conduct. And you fend off entropy
with conscious and conscientious action.
Which is to say: you take the inevitable messes you’ve made in another
year’s passing and try, once again, to give them shape, to make some fleeting
sense of it all.
It’s what I
did. It’s what you do.
To distinguish is
divine. To name is to know.
But, my children, I would be remiss if,
before taking leave of you, I failed to note that naming and knowing come with
one significant catch: to distinguish may be divine, but it is also a terribly
lonely task.
For all those separations take their toll. The boundaries that enable life come at
considerable sacrifice. Even while I was
still in the garden, identifying and defining things with wondrous ease, a part
of me already longed for the primal, undivided world. The moment I started naming and ordering the
first plants and animals, I felt myself detaching from everything else in Yah’s
creation. Seeking to know the earth, I
separated myself from it. I wondered
whether maybe Yah, too, was lonely, after setting so many boundaries to make
room for the world. Perhaps feeling
lonely at the end of the day moved Yah to make me.
Now Yah and I were lonely together—at least until she arrived. . .
Notes
Notes
the formation of humankind on the sixth day of creation: According to the Rabbis, creation
began on the 25th of Elul. . .
give or take a few billion years: Rashi famously warns against reading the creation narrative as
history or science, noting that we should not take the order of events
literally. By way of example, he points
to the verse in Psalm 90 which notes that one “day” in the eyes of God is like
a thousand years in human terms.
Finally, on this very day: The Rabbis take two opposing views
on why humanity was created last. One
perspective sees us as the “crown of creation”, with all that preceded us
analogous to a banquet awaiting the last minute appearance of the special guest
for whom it is made. Others, however,
suggest that we are created last—after the lowliest insects—to help keep us
humble when we are inclined toward hubris.
You are Adam, born of earth:
It is hard to translate the play on words.
Some have tried “Human from humus”
As long as you recall your humble beginnings: Commenting on the
Genesis1:28, and playing on the Hebrew word for “dominion”, u-r’du, commentators suggest that if we
are good stewards, we will exercise dominion, but if we are irresponsible, then
we will fall lower than any other created thing. For more on the issue of dominion, see Jeremy
Cohen’s excellent book, Be Fertile and
Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a
Biblical Text
Yah, the Breath of Life:
I first read of the connection between the Divine Name and breathing in a
passage by Arthur Wascow.
to work it and watch over it: Genesis 2:15. This critical verse speaks of humanity’s role
vis-Ã -vis the rest of creation. In
Hebrew, l’avdah u-l’shomrah. Also sometimes translated as “to till and
to tend.”
Sub-dividing heaven and earth: Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg speaks
of creation via separation in very insightful detail in her book, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire
A world undivided cannot stand: See Evan Eisenberg’s
tour-de-force, The Ecology of Eden,
which notes that at every level—from cells to eco-systems, life depends upon
boundaries.
A river issued forth from the center of the garden: See Genesis
2:10. In her book, A River Flows from Eden, Melila Hellner-Eshed notes that this is
the most oft-quoted Torah verse in the Zohar.
Tigris and Euphrates: the usual translation of Chidekkel and Prat. The other two rivers
named are not associated with any actual, historical rivers.
stave off chaos: On the enduring power of chaos to trump Divine
order in the world, see Jon Levenson, Creation
and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. My one critique of Levenson is that he
tends to identify chaos with evil; I don’t necessarily make that moral
connection (which will be obvious in following sections).
to distinguish may be divine, but. . . : Zornberg notes: “From
a midrashic perspective it seems that havdallah—separation, specialization, the
formation of difference and opposition—is generally achieved at some
sacrifice. When, for instance, the lower
waters are separated from the higher waters on the second day of creation, the
lower waters are described in midrashic sources as weeping. . . The idea of
separation and difference has a tragic resonance: gone is the primal unity of
“God alone in His world.” New
possibilities, new hazards open up.”
I wondered whether maybe Yah, too, was lonely: See the chapter
“Tales of a Lonely God” in Peter Pitzele’s Our
Fathers’ Wells: A Personal Encounter with the Myths of Genesis
