Clergy Sermons

Bereshit - Beginning Anew

I confess to having been at a bit of a loss as I thought about Simchat Torah, which we celebrated on Thursday night and Friday.  I knew that the emotions of the October 7 attack being launched on Simchat Torah and Shabbat last year would be part of the day.  Often on anniversaries, you relive some of the pain, loss, sadness, anger and trauma. How would we be able to dance with the Torah on this anniversary?  Intellectually I know and preach, and have lived, holding on to contrasting emotions.  I have taught that we need to dance on Simchat Torah and that our pain must not push joy out of our lives.  I didn’t know if I could do it. Even after a year, the pain is still fresh, hostages are still in captivity, antisemitism continues to rise, gaps between us continue to grow, bombs continue to fall, tension and uncertainty is pervasive.  Dancing? I didn’t know.  After the Nova Festival, Israelis said, “We will dance again.”  But when?

And what happened?  We danced.  We needed to dance.  The Jewish lesson coded deep in my heart from Jewish tradition is that life is constantly beginning again after pain and sorrow, holding onto both sadness and joy at the same time.  This is a key Jewish message and is embedded this morning’s portion, Bereshit.  Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel teaches that Adam and Eve teach us how to begin again.  Listen to his words (paraphrase): “When God created human, God gave us a secret.  The secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again.”

This morning, two days after Simchat Torah, amidst a world that can still feel dark, I want to teach about beginning again.  Wiesel wrote a book called Messengers of God about biblical stories.  Building on a Midrash, which asks us to imagine that it began that first night in the garden. The sun went down and they had no idea that the darkness would ever end.  They thought that the world was coming to an end.  Their fear kept them awake, they wept and prayed, and in the morning when the sun rose, Adam and Eve realized that we can begin again. 

They needed that message when they were expelled from the Garden of Eden after eating the forbidden fruit. Adam and Eve did not give in to resignation.  Wiesel writes: “After the fall, they began to work, to strive for a future.”

The secret that you can begin again occurs time after time throughout our history.  Humanity is destroyed and only Noah and his family survive, with all the animals.  What does he do?  Noah plants a vineyard to sustain life.  We can see it in the lives of all of our patriarchs and matriarchs.  I know that reading the prophet Jeremiah, as the haftarah on the second day of Rosh Hashana, I was struck by his instructions to rebuild following exile. He buys a plot of land as we are streaming away, believing we will return.  This is who we are, a people with the secret that you can begin again.

Beginning again, does not mean forgetting about what may have happened.  We make space for that.  On Simchat Torah this year, we created a moment of silence to feel loss.  We sang Hatikvah.  We had a quiet hakafah where we acknowledged pain and held on to our essence, passing the Torah quietly from person to person.  Part of beginning again requires us to create space to feel sadness and have others present amidst that sadness, and at the same time, hold onto joy and imagine what might be.

Many of us have been touched by Rachel Polin Goldberg’s words, in many ways she is a modern prophet.  Listen to her words in a CNN interview after her beloved son Hersh’s funeral:  “We’ve really made the choice that we really would like to not just exist, but we want to live.  We want to live for our girls. And the truth is, I want to live for Hersh. I want to live the life that Hersh should have lived. And that’s a life filled with love and happiness and light, and we will always have this deep void.  But I think that it’s still possible to have that void and to be happy and choose life.”  That’s how we began again on Simchat Torah, we held onto contrasting emotions of joy and sadness, light and darkness.  We imagined what life could be.  We danced. Seeing all the little kids running around with abandon and dancing with the Torahs, my heart filled on what is and might be, a thriving Judaism defined by song and dance.

There is more in the Adam and Eve story about how to begin again.  Embedded in the story is the power and necessity of connection.  Adam and Eve had each other.  In another Midrash, Eve offers to leave following the banishment from the garden.  Adam says, “No, please stay.”  Love is part of the secret of beginning again.  I have shared over this past year that we have needed each other to get through the unthinkable.  Being seen, heard and cared for has been another of the lessons to how to begin again.

This year we are doing a community read of Rabbi Sharon Brous’, The Amen Effect.  She writes about the transformative nature of “showing up when we want to retreat, of listening deeply to each other’s pain even when we fear there are no words. Of grieving and rejoicing together and recognizing that even though we can’t heal each other, we can, and we must see each other.”  That is the key to beginning again.

Another piece of the secret of how to begin again is to realize that there is opportunity amidst darkness and pain. Think about the consequences Adam and Eve receive after being expelled from the garden.  Often they are understood as punishment, but are they really punishments? Eve is told she will have pain in childbirth.  Adam is told that he will have to work hard to produce food.  Yes, pain in childbirth is excruciating (or so I have been told), but the result is a child! Children are the greatest blessing in the world. And hard work to produce food?  Yes, it is difficult, but ultimately, hard work too is one of the most satisfying things in the world. Adam gained the skill to provide for himself.  For all of us, no matter what our profession, we know the satisfaction that can accompany hard work.   Adam and Eve learned from the beginning that embedded in suffering and pain, can be blessings.  On the High Holidays, I asked us to think humbly about what might emerge in days to come in the aftermath of October 7.  It is one of the most important discussions that we can have as a community.

        Here’s another secret to beginning anew, chesed/love.  God did something extraordinary before Adam and Eve left that garden.  And the Lord God made garments of skins for Adam and his wife and clothed them. Love and caring transcend anger and punishment. They needed protection as they face the unknown world, and they received it from God, even though God may have been angry or disappointed.  (Or maybe God knew that the only way for humans to truly have free will is to disobey).  It is our love and caring for Israel, fellow Jews and those suffering that help us begin again at this moment in time. 

        When we study the story of Adam and Eve, we encounter a couple whose life, like many in our world today is marked by fear, loss and sadness.  From the fear of whether the sun would come back, to the loss of Eden, to the most tragic of losses, one son, Cain, kills another, Abel.  How do you emerge from that? I honestly don’t know.  But like Rachel Pollin Goldberg say, you don’t just exist, but you truly live. Somehow, Adam and Eve continue.  They take a risk, daring to bring another child into the world.  This child is not like Cain, whose name means acquisition, which is how too many parents see their child. Nor is he like Abel, whose name means a breath, reflecting his fleeting life.  They name this child Sheyt or Seth, which means a gift, because as Eve says, “God has given him to us as a gift in place of Abel whom Cain killed.” We can love and lose, always remembering what and who we have lost, and begin again.

          The Midrash has another secret about beginning again in this story.  After the sun rises, Adam feels intense gratitude and gives an offering to God. Fear transforms in the face of gratitude.  In the Midrash, before he died, Adam instructs Seth to give thanks to God every day for the gift of sunlight. When Seth died, he gave the same instructions to his children, and they did to theirs. That is why we recite a blessing thanking God for the gift of sunlight in our morning prayers.  Gratitude helps us face another day.

          This year we danced, maybe with more gratitude than we have felt before. We danced not with innocence or naivete, but with the profound understanding of who we are and that we are links in a long and beautiful chain of tradition.  We danced knowing that many sacrificed so that we could dance.  We danced allowing sadness to mingle together with strength and spirits unbroken.  This year reminded us that we will dance and continue to dance, for we have been entrusted with a secret, that we can begin again.