HAYOM HARAT OLAM. Today is the birthday of the world. And so today we remember how the world came to be born. VAYOMER ELOHIM YEHI OR, VAYEHI OR -- God spoke: "Let there be light." And there was light. VAYAR ELOHIM ET HA-OR KI TOV -- And God saw the light, that it was good. God, all alone in the cosmos, spoke. One might wonder: where did the words come from? Where in the universe did God find words to speak? Had God spoken before? Did God create language in order to then create a world? Were words part of the primal tohu va-vohu, the formless elements that pre-existed creation? Rabbi Akiva taught that from the very beginning the twenty-two letters of the alef-bet were engraved on God's crown with a pen of flaming fire. When God set about to create the world, they descended together and demanded, "Create the world through me!"
God used words to create the world. This gives us some idea what powerful beings words are. Sometimes I imagine that each of us has a pocket of words that belong just to us. There are plenty of words in the world -- whole languages, in fact, that we don't know at all. Yet we each have our favorite words that we speak all the time. Words come to us from our families. We learn words in school. We learn them from our friends. As small children we learn great rafts of words at once. And even as adults now and then we come upon a new word and put it in our pocket. When we speak, we take a word out of our collection, put it into our mouth and breathe through it, and it comes to life.
Every word creates. Every time we speak, something new is born. Every comment, every question, every articulated thought brings something to life that didn't exist in the world until spoken. When we say, "Thank you," something is created. When we say, "Sweetie," something is created. When we say, "Need a hand with that?" something is created. Every word creates the world.
This is a power which no one can take away from us, our power to create through words. Even if we are hungry, even if we are hurt, even if we are wronged or injured or deprived, our power to create through words is our own.
We each have a pocket of words which is our own to choose from. We each have a voice with which to sing, to chant, to vocalize sounds of love and affection and adoration, or, God forbid, the opposite. It is completely our own choice which sounds we make -- not the choice of our parents or our teachers or our politicians, not the choice of our most dreaded opponent or our greatest foe.
There is only one enemy which can rob us of our ability to give voice to peace and hope. And that is the sinking of our own hearts into despondency. Sometimes, against our will, our spirits slip downward, and we become afraid and beset. We feel unmoored. From this sinking place, our words sound unattractive to us even as we speak. We watch as our speech creates realities that are not what we wish. It is as though a virus has slipped into our God-given ability to create through words and begins replicating thoughts that we would never wish to inflict on our world.
In such times I have come to believe that the struggle against despondency is a fundamental spiritual struggle. The world is always changing and moving. There are always elections, and worse. We are surrounded by the cries of people slipping. Their shouts can be so loud that we might forget that there are other sounds to be heard. It is easy to be overwhelmed, especially if we ourselves are losing our grip. When we sink, we must do all we can to regain our footing, our calm, our sanity.
We might think of these holy days as a great sea of words given to us by our ancestors to recalibrate our spirits through the medium of our voices. We are handed a machzor full of words of great purity and beauty, and we are asked to breathe into them, to sing them, whether we fully understand them or not, whether we entirely believe them or not. We speak them into being. Only through our breath do these words come alive and rise up. And when they do, they carry our spirits with them. That is the hope, that what is sore and heavy in our spirits will be lifted up through the singing of holy words. And that the world will be lifted up with us and through us.
The height or heaviness of our hearts is a political issue: it has consequence for the world as well as for our own equilibrium. Despondency depresses not only our own moods but the worlds created through our speech and our actions. We might think of all Jewish practice as a kind of mystical technology for the raising up of the spirit, an infusion of holiness, an exercise to calibrate the soul to a higher vibration, and thereby the world. We might think of the whole year of holy days: Shabbat, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simchat Torah, Hanukkah, Tu B'shevat, Purim, Pesach, Yom Ha-shoah, Shavuot, Tisha B'av, each as its own bouquet of words and tones given to us by our ancestors to raise and refine our spirits. We might think of our holy teachings and mitzvot not only as traditions to sustain us as a people but also as tools to sustain our souls. We might think of the special rituals of the life cycle as customized infusions to hold us together and raise us up even as we are morphing from one phase of living to the next.
But we all know that religious practice of any kind, including our own, can harden hearts as much as it can soften them and lift them up. We have all heard words of prayer and teaching spoken in hard and divisive tones as well as in beautifully embracing voice. Probably some of us too have come across a word in the High Holy Day prayers or sometime during the year that alienated us instead of lifting our spirits. Spiritual practice is a tricky matter. It works differently for different people. We each have to find our own pathway through the sea of Torah. It's not always an easy swim.
The point is that we have to do something, for ourselves and for our world, to lift the spirit from which we give voice to the next moment. For some, the lifting up of the spirit is a cognitive process, examining the ways in which we understand ourselves in the world. For some, the lifting is in the body, in opening up blocked channels, in moving freely. For some, it is through tears, shaking, laughing, being held. For some it is through song or silence. For some it happens in the forest, by the ocean, with animals. For some it is through lovingly serving other people. Whatever it takes for our spirits to be lifted up, to be high and whole, we need to find that pathway and not neglect it. The intactness of our spirits is not a selfish matter; it is the conduit through which peace and beauty are breathed into the world through us.
Sometimes when I think of the troubles that beset our world, country or community, it occurs to me that we have failed to find good, strong, life-affirming words. Or we know the words but are unable to speak them in powerful tones of kindness and beauty. When I think of the hurts and divisions that have beset this beautiful community, it might be that we simply haven't each managed to speak beautifully and powerfully enough to each other to create what we truly yearn for.
It isn't easy at all to speak of what is wrong without creating more wrongness. And it is harder still to give voice to what should be in a way which breathes it into being. It is not simply a matter of will, which words we speak, which worlds we create. It is essentially a mystical process, a tikkun, a repair, a lifting up. When our hearts are lifted, our voices rise with our hearts, and the world is lifted through our voices. And so, in these challenging days, there is some urgency to this. Our world needs lifted spirits.
We are blessed that our ancestors have given us tools for the lifting and refining of our spirits, for the creation not only of more personal happiness -- which is itself not a bad thing at all -- but also for adding beauty and peace to a world which needs it badly. May our hearts be lifted in this new year. May we find right words, good words, beautiful words in our pockets to speak both of what is not and of what could be. May we breathe those words into speech in a lovely, generative way that brings life to us all. VAYEHI TOV MEOD -- and that will be good indeed!
© 2004 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 09/17/2004 (rge)