Beginnings tend to be messy: ask anyone who’s ever given birth, tilled the soil, sculpted, composed, or built something to last. By their nature, beginnings tend to begin unformed and void, at first dark and uncertain, then haltingly lurch toward something-ness.

Each year, Jews recycle Torah and begin its reading anew. This week we again start at the very beginning (a very good place to start), with the story of Genesis – creation, unformed and void, dark on the face of the deep, light, goodness, evening and morning, time and space, sun and moon, life and death, humanity, a garden with two special trees, an apple, a showdown, an expulsion…. The story is mother’s milk to theology itself. Except for cosmologists embracing the Big Bounce rather than the Big Bang Theory of Everything, we can understand Genesis as a pre-scientific (or extra-scientific) theology of beginning-ness.

If we look closer, however, we see that the Biblical creation starts with a false start – and maybe more than one. Torah’s first chapter recites a first creation, but then Torah’s second chapter tantalizingly suggests a second creation story. The first story posits six days of creation; the second story just one day. The first story evolves humanity at the end of the creation narrative; the second story creates humanity upfront before plants. The first story chronicles humanity’s creation equally in both male and female form, both in the divine image; the second story creates first a male and then a female from the male’s side.

Torah’s creation story is a mess. Biblical exegetes ascribing to the Documentary Hypothesis reason that the Genesis narrative must combine two separate tellings, by two separate narrators, redacted and mushed together into our codified Torah. Creation sure is a messy business.

There’s more. Jewish mystics imagine not two creations but seven (Zohar 1:24b). And why not? If there could be two creation stories, and if creation can be wiped out later (tune in next week forNoah and the Flood), then why not more? Better yet: why not imagine that creation happens each instant? So teaches quantum mechanics, which aligns with traditional Jewish morning liturgy that praises the force “that in goodness constantly renews the work of creation.”

We may never fully unlock the secrets of the universe: there’s plenty of Jewish wisdom that counsels us mere mortals not to try (Talmud, Chagigah 14b). But as to what we ourselves create, we have an important choice to make. We can deem our creations made once, over and done; or we can choose to scrap some of them and start over. Or, we can see each moment literally as pregnant with possibility, a whole universe waiting to unfold by our attitude, word and deed. Which one we choose will shape the kind of creators we are and can become, and with it our own human power to renew our world for good.

Rabbi David Evan Markus

For nearly 30 years I have practiced as a lawyer in the field of trusts and estates.  I’ve referred to it as a practice in death, dying and disability.  Not the comedy portion of the law. As a Rabbi, I’m called upon to officiate at funerals and unveilings.  This past Shabbat I sat with a couple grieving over the loss of a prematurely born child.

I sit with people as we figure out together what purpose we can glean from our experience of loss.  We do that while holding two competing challenging ideas about life and death. The first idea is that Jews cherish life.  In Torah we are instructed to choose life.  When we toast we say L’chaim.  Sanhedrin teaches if you save one life it is as if you have saved the world.  Life is a treasured gift. The second idea is that death is tragic.  There’s no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that from the day we are born we are destined to die.

When we come to the yizkor part of the service we bring with us both cherishing life and abhorring death. Yet our mourning does not have to be a sense that death is failure.  There is a kind of fix for this and it is based in remembering and the way we apply memory. We can employ our experience and knowledge of death in a pursuit of creating a better life because sometimes it takes death to remind us to cherish life. 

Remembering is the counter balance to understanding death as failure. Remembering is our opportunity to glean value and to bring forward lessons learned.

I have the opportunity to remember someone like my maternal great grandmother, Anna, and her children. She was a widow in the Ukraine, whose husband had died and left her with six children. They left Novgorod Volinsk over a century ago to come to America. She sent the oldest to America first. And then Anna took her four younger children and set out for America too. Remember they didn’t book tickets on United Airlines; complain about security lines and luggage fees. They traveled by wagon to the train and from the train to the port to board ships, perhaps a cargo ship.  Along the way, they got ill, and one even died.  In bringing her children to America, my great grandmother Anna lost her youngest child when he fell out of the carriage in which they were riding. He was about 3 years old. His name was Bernard. I didn’t hear the story from Anna so I can’t explain how she had the fortitude to bury a child and continue on the journey to America.  I can only assume that death was not unfamiliar to her, and that within her grief and suffering there was also some acceptance that death comes to each person, and to some far too soon.

I was reminded of that story recently. I’ll bet some of you are already predicting why.  We woke up one morning during Labor Day weekend to see a deeply disturbing photo on the front page of the paper or in your news feed. The picture shows a small boy. He is wearing a red T-shirt and long shorts that stop below the knee. His shirt is hiked above his waist, exposing his midriff. He is wearing black sneakers with no socks. And he is dead; face down in the rocky surf.

There was a second photo; a policeman is carrying the boy away. The policeman is wearing latex gloves. The boy’s tiny feet dangle below the policeman’s waist; we see that one of the Velcro straps on his sneakers has come undone. The boy looks almost as if he is asleep in what might be his father’s arms, just the way 3 year olds can be limp and sleep almost anywhere when exhausted. And though we can’t know what the policeman is thinking as he carries a dead child from the ocean, one thing is clear: He is looking away. Turkish officials identified the Kurdish boy who washed up on the beach as 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi.

The memory of Aylan Kurdi was enough to shock the world into action.  As Rabbi Sharon Brous recently reminded us we slept through years of the Syrian civil war with some 250000 dead and did not really react.  Only upon seeing that picture that morning on the front of our newspapers and in our newsfeeds did we, as Jews, wake up. We woke up to remember that the world abandoned Jews to die 70 years ago and we have an obligation to do more. And how many other humanitarian crises have occurred since then – Cambodia, Uganda, Rwanda, Bosnia, the list is too long.  With our memory engaged and awakened, Jewish aid organizations began raising money to help the refugees. The enormity of a civil war, especially one in a country that was pledged to the destruction of Israel, could not wake us from our slumber. But the sight of Aylan Kurdi woke us from our dreaming, because it triggered a memory.

Yizkor is here to reconnect us with the memories of people we loved but it should not be and it cannot be a perfunctory exercise in being sad about loss, or a sense of failure.  It has to be a time for us to reconnect with those people whose existence helped to give life to us, to shape who we are, who taught us something by their very being.  And then we have to do something with it.

Remembering is a catalyst.  We remember Shabbat to sanctify it.  זכור את השבת לקדשו We are told to remember Shabbat so that we take the time to rest and honor creation and freedom.  We are commanded to remember the exodus from Egypt. How can we be the guardians and champions of freedom if we have forgotten our own slavery? 

We are commanded to remember the golden calf built by the recently freed Israelites in the desert as they despaired Moses’ disappearance and chose to worship a tangible manifestation of the divine rather than have faith. We remember so that we focus not on possessions and material things but rather on the true faith that we can dedicate ourselves to higher purposes.

In the yizkor prayer we pledge to give tzedakah in the memory of the departed.  I often bristled at this pledge in the middle of yizkor, as if the appeal for funds was tucked neatly into our time of grief. Remember your loved ones and support charity! But the word for charity in Hebrew is tzedakah, Justice. Justice is what we have to give to the world in the name of those we remember.

Death is the inevitable last stage of life. Can we dare to accept death and glean the lessons of lives lived. Memory creates presence.  Memory keeps living the essence of what inhabited the body.  Memory is context.  Memory is what keeps us learning and creative.  Memory keeps us searching for serenity and love.

Life is a lot more than a pre-mortality condition. But life is uncertain. And the art of living is learning to live with this uncertainty. It is about living, not just surviving.  The value of living is to extend ourselves to others with tzedakah, in justice. With caring, compassion and charity. With thoughts, prayers, words and deeds. With our whole selves, with our life force, with our love. Death is not a failure. But a life lived selfishly is. A life lived without caring is a failure. A life successfully lived is taking the opportunity to activate memory into action.

Rabbi Evan J. Krame

Have you been to a poetry slam?  It’s a form of poetry competition.  The poets present their works in a struggle for dominance.  One doesn’t naturally associate poetry with a sport.  Drop any notion of poetry as a lovely art form.  The poems presented are often confrontational and clever.  There is no chance Elizabeth Barrett Browning would win one of these.  Yet it begs the question, what is the role of poetry that is confrontational?

In the Torah reading for this week Moses says:  “Write down this poem and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths, in order that this poem may be My witness against the people of Israel.”  A poem stands as witness, like an accuser in a courtroom.   Like Picasso’s masterwork Guernica, a grey toned depiction of the Spanish Civil War’s destructive aftermath, Moses’ poetry calls to the conscience of each person who might have been tempted toward immorality.

The Greek historian Polybius wrote: “There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.”  Polybius could have been talking about the High Holidays, when the liturgy beckons us to use our own thoughts to stand as witness to our shortcomings in this process we call teshuvah.  It is not easy to set aside the ego and the protective instinct that insulates us from doing the soul work necessary to improve ourselves.  At Proverbs 18:17 we learn that the one who pleads his cause first seems righteous but his neighbor will come and expose him.  For me, this means that we need accusers, like Moses’ poem, to expose us to our own failings and set us on a path of improvement.

In the special way that a painting or poem can unlock the heart, we should also have prayers and services that help open us up to our errors and shortcomings during these High Holidays.  That is one role of the liturgy and of clergy.  Our job is to employ words to their purpose of urging us on toward self-improvement.  The words can be prayer or poetry.  My prayer for these yamim noraim, these Days of Awe, is that the machzor prayer book, like Moses at a poetry slam, stands as witness and confronts you so that your heart is open to do meaningful teshuvah.

Rabbi Evan J. Krame

It’s just like Passover in September (not Christmas in July), but with a High Holy Day spiritual message about gratitude and the means of spiritual growth.

This week’s Torah portion (Ki Tavo) features the Passover Haggadah’s re-telling of the journey from bondage to liberation: “My father was a wandering Aramean.  He went down to Egypt few in number to sojourn, and there became a great and mighty nation.  The Egyptians … oppressed us … [and] we cried out … and God heard our plea … and freed us from Egypt with a mighty hand, an outstretched arm, awesome power, signs and wonders” (Deut. 26:5-8).

Cue matzah, four cups and Seder songs!  But why these words now, and how do they cue up the upcoming Days of Awe?

These words are the first liturgy of monotheism, prescribed to be spoken when we “come into the [Promised] Land … and take the first fruits of the ground” in gratitude to God for “bringing us into this place, and giving us this Land – a land flowing with milk and money” (Deut 26:1-2, 9).  Our spiritual ancestors were called to give thanks and to use specific words linking them collectively to their timeless ancestral story.

In our day, people all kinds of houses of worship – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. – do much the same, using prescribed texts shared in communal prayer for collective expression.  Even Jews who typically don’t attend synagogue, who fill synagogues on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, will encounter prescribed liturgy – the shared texts and stories of collective ancestry and prayer experience.

As we prepare for the Days of Awe, this week’s Torah portion comes to signal that once again we’ll journey from bondage to liberation (though our shackles might be of inner bondage rather than physical slavery), and to remind that our path to liberation must include gratitude.

But can text really command gratitude?  Can fixed words really evoke a spiritual journey?  Words can be important, but liturgy is just jargon unless we give it life.  As we ready for the High Holy Days, the season asks us to enliven our words with intention, focus and heart.  The Days of Awe call us to offer words as if they were fruits of our inner harvest after reaching a land of promise.

And when this lofty goal eludes us (it always might), when our words don’t fully reach the heart, may our words rest gently on the outside of the heart, waiting their moment to go deep and bring forth a bountiful harvest of inner liberation and gratitude beyond words.

Rabbi David Evan Markus

This is the beginning of the month of Elul, the month that precedes the holiday-packed month of Tishrei. It is now that we begin sounding the shofar daily, signaling that it is the time to prepare for the transformation we hope to make in the coming year. First we must look into our spiritual mirror and honestly at ourselves. We need to engage in a “soul searching” that reveals ways in which we hold ourselves back, act out of fear and close ourselves off to different ways of seeing our role within this world. This isn’t an occupation review. It is about how you do, not what you do. There are a few questions to consider in this process: 

How are we living up to being made in the image of God and seeing others as made in the divine image as well? How can we be our most generous selves? Do we give others the benefit of the doubt? How do we feel and express gratitude? Do we see the wonder in our world? How do we alleviate the pain others may feel? How do we support our community? How do we pursue justice?

If we find, while gazing in that spiritual mirror, that the image of ourselves reflected back doesn’t yet match our aspirations, each day gives us an opportunity to come closer to it.

by JoHanna Potts