Rosh Hashana is said by the rabbis to be the birthday of the world. Hayom harat olam -- today the world is born. And because we are here together, celebrating a birthday, it is only proper that there be a toast, some praise of the world whose birth is the occasion for our festivity, especially since the world is our host tonight. And so on this occasion I would like to offer some ceremonial words about the world's goodness.
By olam, as in hayom harat olam -- today the world is born -- I don't mean the earth, the planet on which we happen to dwell, but world, olam, in the full cosmic sense perhaps best translated as "universe," except that the olam whose birth we celebrate today includes not only the universe of all existent space but also the universe of all existent time. Today is said to be the birthday of the universe, the anniversary of the date on which all possibility started to actually be, the day the theater opened. We are told in the first chapter of Genesis that the Architect of the olam looked at all of it and said "Vayehi tov" "And it was good."
But this is actually a debatable point, is it not? Is the universe, this expanse of possibility in which we all operate, in fact good? This is the universe in which there is not only birth but also death, not only peaceful death in the fullness of age but also violent death, not only violent death but also violent injury which doesn't even culminate in the mercy of death. This is the universe in which there is plenty but also the universe in which there is robbery. This is the universe in which the one with plenty watches the hungry one crave and starve, in which the hungry one lives in the shadow of the overflowing refuse heap of the one with plenty, all one great teeming cacophony.
As soon as we're born we begin gathering data on the relative safety and comfort of the universe. Vayehi tov? Or vayehi lo tov? Is it good? Or is it not good? How does it look from our infant crib? By a young age we come to a working hypothesis, and we tend to stay with that provisional answer throughout our life, whatever further experience comes our way. It is so basic that we seldom even have to think about it. Before our day even begins, we wake up with a fundamental sense of optimism or pessimism. We walk into the day expecting to be helped, or expecting to be hurt. We anticipate support, or we anticipate attack.
It is an important question, whether or not this olam is fundamentally good. It makes a difference as we face what seem to be inevitable losses and challenges and wounds, and as we in our own moments of prosperity witness others losing, being challenged, bleeding. It makes a difference whether we face these injuries in the context of a universe which is warm or cold, which is loving or indifferent (or possibly malevolent.) In a kind world we know that difficulties will pass, that we can gain wisdom from them, that healing is available. In a world which is lo tov, we have no such confidence. Today being the birthday of the world, it might be an auspicious day to revisit this question: tov or lo tov? Are we in good hands here or are we not?
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One fall day some years ago I was driving down highway 101 in lovely gold afternoon light. While I was driving I was mulling over this and that, this friction, that trouble -- nothing serious, but the little grumpy, grinding matters of the moment. And, exactly when I passed the Geyserville exit a sentence suddenly formed in my brain. I didn't exactly hear a voice, but something articulated, so that I found this one sentence completely formed in my mind as though from the outside, interrupting my mundane thoughts. The sentence was: "You will never freefall forever; there will always be a hand to catch you."
Being something of a skeptic about unprovable assertions, as you all know -- not to mention voices almost speaking to me in my car -- I took the sentence under advisement. I didn't know then if it is true or not, and I still don't. It is possible that I could free-fall forever and not be caught. But I haven't. I've lost my footing any number of times in the ensuing years. I've taken some tumbles. I've gone head-first a few times. But I have always experienced the Hand.
And so I have grown in more recent years to have some sort of germinal confidence, even as I may at some moment be terribly unhappy about my immediate circumstance. It is as though, while I am experiencing my own difficulty, whatever it may be, at the very same time, like a faint harmony to the tune of my dominant unhappiness, I can hear that voice that I first heard in my car. And so at the very same moment that I may be terribly aggrieved about my situation, some part of the back of my mind is thinking about the Hand.
I remain agnostic about the Hand. I can absolutely imagine the possibility that it will fail me, that something may happen in my heretofore fairly fortunate life that will completely swamp anything that has caught and sustained me up to now. I certainly would never tell anyone else anything definitive about the Hand. How do I know how far another person can fall? Who am I to tell another person, when they are hurtling downward, that "You will never freefall forever; there will always be a hand to catch you"?
But these caveats are getting more theoretical every year, more distant. I am becoming more confident in the Hand. I am getting to know it better. And so this past year, which was certainly full of alarm and misery on the world front, and which had its own little complement of challenges for me at the personal level as well, sometimes I was aware inside myself, even at times when I was fairly unhappy, of that little counter-melody of confidence, some shred of subterranean gratitude, a tiny bit of underlying calm, a slight openness to what might and did come my way, even if I didn't like it. This is hard to put into words, especially words I might have to remember saying sometime when the coals under my feet get really hot, but at those moments I had some sensibility that might even approach what religious people call faith.
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When I hear the word "faith," I think about deer whistles. For our visitors from points urban: deer whistles are little plastic gadgets that you mount on the front bumper of your car. They cost about eight dollars a pair. It says on the packaging that, when you are traveling at speeds exceeding 30 MPH, the wind through the deer whistles makes a sub-audible screech that repels deer. Consequently they run away from your car instead of jumping into its path, saving themselves from a gruesome death and your car from an expensive crunch or worse. Do they work? Who knows? Some say they do, some say they don't. Over the past thirteen years that I've lived here in deer country, Mickey and I have hit deer three times. We've never hit one when we've had deer whistles on our bumper. I'd say I know a little more every year. I'd say my faith grows along the vector of time and experience.
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Here is an argument from the midrash which I've enjoyed this past Ellul. It has to do with the gorgeous rabbinic invention of calling God "Ha-makom," "the Place."
R. Huna said in R. Ammi's name: Why do we give a changed name to the Holy One, blessed be God, and call God 'hamakom,' 'the Place'? Because God is the Place of the world. R. Jose b. Halafta said: We do not know whether God is the place of the world or whether the world is God's place, but from the verse, Behold, there is a place with Me (Ex. XXXIII, 21), it follows that God is the place of God's world, but God's world is not God's place.
Got all that? The debate actually goes on awhile longer, the sages flinging proof texts at each other until they conclude as follows:
R. Abba b. Judan said: God is like a warrior riding a horse, robes flowing over on both sides; the horse is subsidiary to the rider, but the rider is not subsidiary to the horse.
So by this logic, if logic is what you would call it, the world is the horse and God is the rider enveloping the steed, the world, in robes. God is the place, the makom, of the world.
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Our most astounding prayer has to be the one we say the most frequently: BARUCH ATA ADONAI -- Blessed are You, God. To say this even once, much less dozens of times a day, we are claiming -- proclaiming -- that not only the horse but the rider, not only the world but the Place of the world, is blessed. Not only this flower, that tree, this cat, that person, this planet, that star, but the One that hosts and holds it all, is baruch, is blessed, is GOOD. A bold claim. And yet it seems possibly so to me, increasingly so.
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We can know if this is so in one or both of two ways: we can accept that this is true because the scriptures of our ancestors tell us that this is true. Or we can walk curious and questioning through life until we have accrued enough data that we begin to have a sense of how things really are in this olam of ours. I suppose it is well and good to accept the vision of our ancestors -- this is the way that Judah Halevi taught the King of the Khazars to believe. But we live in a marketplace of competing scriptures and competing ancestors. And, much more crucially, we live in a time when the consequences of unquestioning devotion to any scripture have been shown to be intolerable. And so we might be wiser, if less absolutely certain, if we test and trust our own experience, as partial in both senses of the world partial, as our own experience inevitably is. If anything, we might consider the wisdom of our ancestors to be itself a piece of data -- that for several hundred generations, through every sort of travail and every possible ecstasy as well, Jewish parents have spoken in the ears of their children powerful little sentences like BARUCH ATA ADONAI.
One day years ago I was driving along Highway 101 in the autumn sun and I heard a sentence. And I thought about that sentence, tried it on, leaned a bit into it to see if it held. The verdict isn't in, but the data is accruing. And as it does so I lean on it a bit more heavily, more confidently.
It was helpful to have a sentence come my way that I could lean into and investigate. Words and phrases have a way of doing that -- they jump off a page or out of a speaker's mouth, or appear full-blown while you are driving down the highway, and they become yours to live with. There are some delicious sentences floating in the air tonight: "God is One," "You are loved with an unending love," "BARUCH ATA ADONAI." Maybe there will be a word or a phrase that will lodge itself in your ear tonight and become your companion in this next year.
But the words themselves don't tell you anything -- at least not standing on their own. You have to test them, lean into them, see if they support you, see if they show up when you need them. Only then do they become a faith worth depending on. As it is, I could buy those eight dollar whistles for decades and still hit a deer someday. But I'm starting to think that less and less likely. This affects my driving for the better, and it certainly makes the road more pleasurable.
This past year being what it was, I have been glad and grateful for my tiny, diaphanous faith, for that little countermelody to all the anxieties, outrages and sorrows of 5762. It has sweetened the road considerably. As we enter 5763 -- another birthday for the horse if not the rider or the robes -- I hope with all my heart that the goodness of the olam becomes so completely evident that there is no need of faith, no need to wonder if the whistles are working, no need for the Hand to catch anyone because no one is falling. But in case my wish does not come completely true, I will go into the new year glad that this past year was the proving ground it was, glad that I had further opportunity to test the propositions that have become my faith, so that it becomes a bit more solid, weightier, less likely to blow away in a good gust of wind. And so tonight, on the birthday of all time and all space, on the birth of a new interval in which to live and learn, a toast: to the sweet goodness, the holiness that seems to be, that increasingly seems to be, that might not be but probably is, that I am almost certain really is, that I lean into, that holds me, that has probably brought all of us to this moment.
© 2002 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 10/28/2002 (rge)