Rosh Hashanah Message
September 23, 2006
Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton

All religious traditions are built on paradigms usually expressed in narratives. Simply put, we tell stories to know who we are and where we came from.

Judaism's central paradigms are known by the terms Creation, Redemption and Revelation.

Most traditions share the first - it would seem to be, by definition, the most universal of stories to tell, for it is the one true absolute and life-affirming paradigm, deconstructionist thought notwithstanding. We all share being born - and some would add, as some traditions do in their shaping of their narrative arc, death and human mortality as an anchor to understanding of self in the world.

But to return to life and the constructs of Judaism, I wonder about our three paradigms, Creation (the birth of the world story), Redemption (the Exodus story) and Revelation (the Sinai story). I would like to ask you:

In your child's eye view of the world, which did you consider the most important? I ask you either to actually recollect or to imagine this perspective …

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I had a strong early attachment to the Exodus narrative - fueled, no doubt, by the wonderful wall-length panorama we created on butcher-block paper in Kindergarten, featuring every episode, from baby Moses in the basket to the building of the pyramids by the slaves, to the dramatic crossing of the sea. But later on, my critical child's eye view of the world shifted, homing in more on abstractions such as time and space. It was the sixth grade, in Geography. I recall realizing, with a powerful and almost visceral sensation, that national borders - while recordable on a map and visible in various forms of two-dimensional documents and three-dimensional border barriers - bore little or no true relation to the land itself.

With the whimsy of an 11 year-old's imagination, I pictured the tree roots below and the air above the US-Canadian border, realizing with a yet-incomplete awareness that to those trees, borders were fully and utterly irrelevant. Pollution and weather; human and animal traffic; the impact of conservation vs. development; I could almost visualize these taking place in a realm apart, as I understood how completely rivers, air and land are ignorant of borders and jurisdiction. In other words:

The borders do not matter to the roots of the trees.

Next, there was a history lesson around the same time. It may have been about queens and kings, or the War of 1812, but whatever the content, somehow it released in me a sense of time, a force unto itself, moving inexorably, un-tethered to my own or any person's awareness of it. What happened before could be learned, interpreted, re-interpreted and imagined. We could never go "back there" nor could we get to the next era - or moment - before going through, second by second, the one we were in.

This flash of insight was even more powerful than the first. Getting "space" was important, but getting "time" felt bigger. Existential questions, heightened by the early loss of a parent, were a major part of my private concerns. They would emerge again much later, in my shift from professional singer to professional Jew.

And yet … was it such a shift, in this realm of concern for, and connection to, the Creation paradigm? As a performing artist, I dwelled in the dimension of Creativity, whose root word is surely not accidentally related to that primeval moment of existence. All impulses to survive, to create and sustain life, and yes, to create art - the bread and roses of poem and song - are rooted in the moment the Jewish mystics call yesh me-ayin - something from nothing.

All of us who pay attention to contemporary issues know at least this much about science and physics: today, scientists are exploring theories of the origins of the universe that bear a distinct relationship to this notion of something from nothing, most often referred to as the Big Bang theory.

My eight year-old spontaneously asked just the other day: "Ima, what made the earth - God or science?"

As Reconstructionists, we acknowledge the importance of living in two civilizations, the Jewish and the civic/secular. But just imagine coming to a Bat Mitzvah, and hearing our teen chant this version of the creation story:

When the Dark Ages began, the cosmos was a formless sea of particle; by the time it ended, just a couple Hundred million years later, the universe was alight With young stars gathered into nascent galaxies. It was during the Dark Ages that the chemical elements we know so well - carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and most of the rest - were first forged out of primordial hydrogen and helium. And it was during this time that the great structures of the modern universe - superclusters of thousands of galaxies stretching across millions of light years - began to assemble.
    Michael J. Lemonick, Time, September 4, 2006

This prosaic Creation narrative, from an article entitled, appropriately, Let There Be Light still, however, makes me yearn for the poetry and cadences of our narrative, of light and dark, chaos above and below, beginning with the most wonderfully evocative word breishit - commonly translated "in the beginning."

The root comes from the word for head, rosh. Reishit thus means the head in the sense of the start, or beginning. The particle b' represents the preposition in. Followed by the verb bara, the past form of create, we might render the phrase - The world, created in beginning-ness ….

We begin our Creation narrative, then, with the primal message that the world started in the process of formation. The Hasidic master Simhah Bunam of Poland, says it this way: "God created the world in a permanent state of reishit, beginning. The world is always incomplete. Continuous creative effort is needed to renew the world, to keep it from sinking again into primeval chaos." [quoted in Kol Haneshamah: Prayerbook for the Days of Awe, p. 492]

So we can now more deeply understand why our mahzor, our High Holy Day prayerbook, includes the Creation narrative as an alternative reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Some of you who grew up in Reform settings may remember it as your annual Rosh Hashanah Torah reading. It also makes sense that we resume reading Torah at the beginning, breshit, on the very final day of the fall holiday cycle, on Simhat Torah, when the sha'arey teshuvah, the gates through which we return, are symbolically held open until those last hours of Tishrey celebration.

Will we return to a basic understanding of what we must to do preserve creation- To be able to dance on the planet with joy yet allow our footprint to be light?

In both the scientific and religious narratives, creation continues to unfold, an imperfect work in progress. Remember that we humans did not come along until the sixth day. Our human impact on and interference with creation has not sat well with the elements and creatures of the first five days, nor with many of us.

The borders do not matter to the roots of the trees.

What does it matter to the soil, the shorelines, the ecosystems, the cycles of pollination and regeneration, which countries' aircraft, missiles, or tanks destroyed them, or which region's storm warning systems failed or did not yet exist, or which countries' policies were lax or favored short-term commercial gain over long-term economic and social benefit?

The trees of Lebanon and Israel, the coastal wetlands of Mississippi and Louisiana, Texas and Florida don't know the source of the rockets, or the party affiliation of the agency heads whose actions led to their destruction.

The borders do not matter to the roots of the trees.

We are indeed a village now. Tsunamis, hurricanes, the burning of oil fields; every aspect of our lives is thoroughly affected by ocean disasters occurring thousands of miles way. Not affected, lehavdil, in the same devastating way as those who lives were ended, those who survived with the traumas of loss and displacement, official neglect, or pervasive indifference. And though we can clearly draw a link between rising fuel prices, and cost of all goods and services linked to our methods of transportation so firmly anchored in our dependence on a limited natural resource, I am not concerned primarily with the impact of world events on our budgets.

I am concerned primarily with our cooperation in the global deception that we are safe if we take care of ourselves, if we live only in relation to what seems to be ours - our narrative, our families, our region, our people. Yet, without a doubt, we see the roots of our global responsibilities in our sacred narrative, in our Creation story.

The borders do not matter to the roots of the trees.

On the sixth day of Creation, God created male and female, blessed them and said, be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and be responsible for it [Gen 1:28].

We are called. We are called to witness. We are called to see the suffering brought about by environmental injustice. We are called to action. We are called to reverse the destruction of ecosystems. We are called to respond to the social degradation in weaker communities and nations.

We are called to move heaven and earth to live up to this, our sacred task. It is our human responsibility, our common cause with all of Creation.