Some readers of this blog might be interested in this D'var Torah (literally "word of Torah" or homily) that I delivered this past Thursday, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, at the Merion Tribute House Service in Merion, Pennsylvania:
Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of . . . . the anniversary of what?
We often think of Rosh Hashanah as the anniversary of the creation of the world, or maybe of the first day of creation. “Hayom harat olam,” – “today is the birthday of the world” – in the words of the liturgy after we blow the shofar during Musaf.
But it’s not so simple. Of course it’s not so simple. In the Talmud, Tractate Rosh Hashanah, the Rabbis debate when the world was created. Some support the first of Tishri – today. Others arguing for the first of Nissan – the month of Passover. But the prevailing midrashic view, captured in Leviticus Rabbah, is that Rosh Hashanah – today – is actually the anniversary of the creation of the first human being on the sixth day of creation. (Put aside the irony that although the first Rosh Hashanah fell on a Friday, in the fixed calendar by which we now abide, the first day of Rosh Hashanah – today – can never fall on a Friday.)
So, if Rosh Hashanah marks the anniversary of the creation of humanity, then, in fact, the anniversary of the beginning of creation falls on the 25th of Elul, almost a week earlier. So maybe we should sing, not “Hayom harat olam,” but “Hayom harat Adam.” Or maybe that’s the point – the microcosm of Adam is the macrocosm.
But let’s move on. According to the midrash, humanity was created at the very end of the sixth day of creation. Or maybe after the very end. The Rabbis wonder why Genesis tells us that on the seventh day, “God finished the work that God had been doing and rested.” What part of the work – the work of creation – was left to finish on what should have been a day of rest? One view is that on Shabbat, God created rest itself. But another view, almost heretical, is that God created humanity at the very last possible instant on the sixth day, so late that, in human halakhic terms it was already Shabbat. Of course, God, being God, can measure time so precisely that from God’s view it was still Friday. But the fact remains that, in halakhic terms, God finished the work of creation by creating humanity on Shabbat.
God, the great procrastinator.
Or let’s try another image. God the long-childless but yearning woman, who gives birth after all hope seemed to have been lost, when it is by all accounts too late. Our Torah reading today, after all, is not about either the first day or the sixth day of creation, but about – among other things – the birth of Isaac to Sarah, the quintessential long-childless (“barren” in the traditional if problematic jargon) woman visited by a miracle so remarkable that she laughs. And the Haftarah is about Hannah, another long-childless woman, who’s prayer for a child has become the paradigm of silent prayer for us all. For these women, birth comes at the last minute – or after the last minute. It is possible only because God’s time is not our time.
And so God too was a once-“barren” but eventually fertile woman, giving birth on what human timekeeping would consider Shabbat, the day of rest, only because God’s time is not our time.
After all, the word “harat,” as in “Hayom harat olam,” is etymologically connected to pregnancy and birth, as in “herayon” and “horeh.” And, as I emphasized in a drash here in this room during Yom Kippur of 2002, God’s attribute of Malkhut – kingship – which features so centrally on these Yamim Noraim, is associated in the Kabbalistic mind with God’s most immanent connection to the universe and with the Shekhinhah, God’s feminine side.
God was a “barren” woman, which is not a pejorative term here, particularly after those six remarkably productive days of creation. An incredible achievement. But this childless woman was still without what she so desired – what Sarah no longer could hope for and what Hannah desperately prayed for – an offspring made in her own image.
And they all lived happily ever after.
Not quite.
When women who have long been childless give birth in the Bible, their joy often ends up being mixed with conflict and even heartache. Sarah gives birth to Isaac, and then turns viciously on Hagar and Ishmael and then, in tomorrow’s reading, faces the terrible recognition that her husband Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. Hannah has her son, Samuel, nurtures him, weans him, and then gives him up to the Temple as she had promised. She does not get to raise him. Her prayer at the end of the Haftarah is meant to be a ode of triumph, but is actually bombastic and shrill. Hannah prays “I have triumphed through Hashem; I gloat over my enemies.” Give me a break! This is so emotionally clamorous – so in contrast with her silent prayer earlier – that one gets the sense that it hides some deep pain and regret.
Significantly, none of this is the fault of the kids themselves. Isaac and Samuel were both fine boys. Good boys. Loving boys. But the situation is fraught. There is, we all know, a very thin line between deep family love, the fruit of desperate longing, and deep family dysfunction.
And what about God, who gives birth – so to speak – just as the glory of Shabbat is beginning or has begun? Things in that story don’t work out so well either. The Garden of Eden turns out to be no Paradise.
The point here is not just that humanity sins. For Sin is not merely an aberration from the order of creation. Sin is a by-product of free will, and free will is an aspect of humanity’s creation in the image of God, and humanity being created in the image of God is a product of God’s love, the overflowing love of a mother desperate for a child. Indeed, as the Rabbis insist, the Yetzer Ha-Ra – the so-called evil inclination – is not only the source of sin, it is also the source of creative energy. Without the Yetzer Ha-Ra, for example, we would produce no children of our own.
So it is, in some sense, God’s overflowing, even excessive, love created the mess we’re in, as well as the glory to which we aspire. God loves us too much to allow us to be mere flesh and blood androids. God creates us in God’s own image, with all the risk that entails.
The Quran brilliantly captures this thought with a midrash of its own. According to the Quoran, when God created human beings, He commanded all the angels to bow down to them – to this new creation that God loved so dearly. Satan, the greatest of the angels, refused. Why should a spirit bow down to a creature of mere flesh and blood? God insisted. Satan rebelled. Thus, evil came into the world – the direct product, so to speak, of God kvelling over the children that God loved so dearly.
The Kabbalah takes the story even further back, imagining God trying to pour the divine energy into vessels of light. Again, though, God overdid it. God loved the world too much. The vessels shattered, and their shells, broken into thousands or millions or trillions of pieces, are the source of evil, which we must redeem and transform one by one by one.
So consider this cycle of cause and effect: It is God’s love, God’s longing, that produces a human being imbued with both good and evil inclinations. And it is only through the fruitful combination of those good and evil inclinations that this human being – we – can become the source of love both for the children we create and for all the redemptive work we are commanded to accomplish.
I do not mean to be flip here, or to deny the terrible problem of evil. There is no simple explanation for Holocausts or mad terror. At the same time, though, we need to recognize the mysterious but powerful intertwining of good and evil, love and anguish, triumph and disaster.
It is also worth remembering, during these ten days of repentance, as we seek forgiveness for our failures, that God’s love is still the love of a parent, a yearning parent who waited till the last possible nanosecond before creating humanity in the divine image.
These ten days are about the drama of justice and mercy. But, again, we need to avoid simple dichotomies. Mercy is not merely the suspension of justice, though it can look that way. Justice recognizes that free will brings with it responsibility. And mercy acknowledges that free will is vulnerable. But we have free will because we are made in God’s image, and we are made in God’s image because God – the once-“barren” mother – loves us so deeply. So both justice and mercy are ultimately expressions of divine love.
I mentioned earlier that the word “harat” – as in “Hayom harat olam” – is related to pregnancy and birth. But note also, as Cardinal Walter Kasper does in his recent book on mercy, that “rachamim” – the Hebrew word for compassion and also for mercy – is derived from “rechem,” which means womb. It is a motherly word – the long-childless mother whose heart overflows.
So how do justice and mercy actually connect? Saint Anselm, as paraphrased in Cardinal Kasper’s book, gives this answer:
In his mercy, God conforms not to our deeds, but to ... his [own] goodness. God is just, not in reference to us and our deeds, but rather in conformity with himself and his goodness. . . . God is so very just that he cannot be conceived of as being more just. His mercy is his own distinctive justice.
To put it another way: God’s mercy does not detract from God’s justice. It is an expression of God’s justice, understood as only God can understand it.
Or maybe, to some degree, not only as God can understand it. For our task in the next few days is not only to seek God’s mercy, but also to seek each other’s forgiveness, and to forgive. Yom Kippur, it is said, only automatically atones for violations of mitzvot between us and God; for violations of mitzvot between us and our fellows, we must seek forgiveness first. And according to some Rabbis, even the sins against God are not erased until we clean the slate of our sins against our fellows. But, for precisely that reason, our job in the next few days is even deeper – not only to seek forgiveness, but to forgive.
Our task on these days is to show mercy. We must understand mercy and its relation to justice as God understands it. We must recognize God’s image in each other. We must appreciate each other as the children whose birth brought delight to God, the long-waiting mother, at the very last possible instant of the creation of the world.
Shana Tova.
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