ראש השנה תש“ע
היום הרת עולם– On this day the World is born
Today I would like to engage in an interpretive meditation on one of the classic prayers of Rosh Ha-Shanah, recited three times in the Mussaf Amidah, as a kind of refrain punctuating the various other themes of the day.You may clsoe your eyes, if you like. And if you doze off, that’s okay, too. Imagine, the first nap of the New Year! Enjoy!
היום הרת עולם – On this day the World is born – Rosh Ha-Shanah marks the birthday of the world. Let us imagine the rounded belly of the Cosmos, heavy with child, expectant, suffering the jolts and stresses of her Global Fetus. Finally it turns, descends and emerges into full view, drenched with blood and mucous, crying out screams that sound like the cries of the shofar.
The world is born.
What world is it that is born today? What is a World?
We could say that the world is the totality of things – everything that is. Let us close our eyes and try to imagine that.
Human thought has striven since earliest times to encompass this concept – the thought of the All, of all there is. In our times our images are configured through the instruments of science and technology – the telescope, microscope or computer. We can imagine expanses spreading ever so swiftly outward to infinity, just as we can imagine the paradox of the infinitude of the microcosmos, the smallest and most condensed reality. So we might imagine ourselves as Space/Time travelers, zooming toward that moment of birth, that cosmic upheaval, when, with a bang or a scream, all that was inside turned outside, revealing itself – disclosing itslef – as all that can live – as it is, as well, all that ever dies – everything that was, is or will be; revealing itself to be all that is “not-yet”, now in a different way than before – when the “not-yet” did not yet exist.
Today we are called upon to conceive the world, to birth the world, in all its grandeur and expansiveness. How exhilarated we feel, to breathe in the limitless vastness of everything there is; and, how small we feel as we dizzily ride the centrifugal forces of our thought, away from our puny selves, outward to eternal infinitude.
כי אראה שמיך, מעשה אצבעותיך, ירח וכוכבים אשר כוננתה:
When I look up at Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
At the moon and the stars You have set in placeמהאנושכיתזכרנוובןאנושכיתפקדנו.
ותחשביהו מעט מא–להים, וכבוד והדר תעטרהו.What is a frail mortal, that You should be mindful of him?
Or a human being, that You should notice her.
Yet You have made him but little lower than the angels,
Crowning her head with glory and honor. [Ps. 8;3-5]
So this infinite cosmos, which we strain to encompass in our thought, is one world whose beginning we mark on this day.
But there are more; there are many worlds.
Every day we say of God – מלך א–ל חי העולמים – God is Ruler, Power and Life-Force of All Worlds. What are these other worlds, infused with Divine Life?
In Hebrew, the word עולם – World, in meaning “all that there is” also refers to the dimension of Time. In our daily prayers, right after the first verse of the Sh’ma – Hear O Israel … the Eternal is One, we say:
ברוךכבודה‘ לעולם ועד
God’s Manifestation of Glory and Majesty overflows forever.
So Olam means “all of Time” – Eternity. Can we feel the flow of this vast world of Time? Our tradition teaches us that we can locate ourselves – find our places – in that world, because Time is not an undifferentiated ocean. Traditionally we mark Time in natural and sacred cycles. Increasingly, as moderns, we mark Time in abstract, digital units. Rosh Ha-Shanah comes to recall us to a more organic, worldly view of Time.
This vast, empty abstraction is given life by our prayer: היום הרת עולם – On this day the World is born. We conceive of Time as a baby that is born every year. We celebrate the emergence of Rosh Ha-Shanah – the Head of the Year – emerging from the ¯ÁÌ – the compassionate womb of the Divine – the birthing of our world. Time, too, is a world to be nurtured so that it may develop and grow.
Who is it who marks these births, who presides over the births of these worlds? It is the human-being.
Our rabbis teach – בראש השנה נברא אדם הראשון [Pes.dRK 23]
On Rosh Ha-Shanah “Adam” – the first human beings – were created. So we should read the phrase –היום הרת עולם– On this day the World is born – as – On this day humanity is born – Rosh Ha-Shanah commemorates not only the birth of the Cosmos in Space and Time, but the birth of the first people. Inevitably, as the Psalmist realized, when we contemplate the vastness of the universal matrix of Time and Space, we are drawn to contemplation of the panorama of human history – Moses on his death bed sang out –
זכורימותעולם, בינו שנות דור ודור
When you remember the days of the world, contemplate the years of every passing generation. [Deut. 32;7]
On Rosh Ha-Shanah we imagine the generations, the masses of men and women and children who have lived and died, some at their expected time, and some not at their expected time, some in ease and luxury and many in poverty and hardship, some with a sense of accomplishment and others with a sense of defeat. Humanity is, at one and the same time, both a vast biological organism and a vast psycho-technic organism. We are linked together in chains of chromosomes of DNA, and we are just as surely linked together by chains of loves and hates, memories and hopes, artifacts and endeavors.
As we strain to grasp the protean multiplicity of the human organism , its teeming cells of flesh and history, we mark this day, Rosh Ha-Shanah, in awe and celebration. We try to reach way back, to imagine a beginning to this world. How far back can we go? Again, we close our eyes and try to see the various forms of human living flourishing and struggling over our globe. We think back to modes of living, habitations, migrations, utensils and monuments. Can we hear the symphonic chorus of songs and stories, teachings, whispers, laments, demagogueries, prayers and rumors? How far back can we go and still hold it all together as one? How far back can we go and still recognize our present in that past?
To take the measure of the world is thus to ask for the age of mankind. Interestingly, this tradition is echoed not only in Jewish sources, but even in our own English term – “world”. The dictionary tells us that “world” derives from Old English – “were”/“old”- ‘the age of Man’ – The word “were” as “man” should be familiar to us from the term for a ‘Man-Wolf’, a “werewolf”. So Rosh Ha-Shanah is the birth-day of the “were/old” – the age of humankind.
היום הרת עולם – On this day the World is born – This is the day it all started. This is the day the heart of man and woman began to beat. Every Rosh Ha-Shanah is another beat of that heart, another measure of the pulse of humanity. On Rosh Ha-Shanah we ask – How old is humanity? And, checking the world’s pulse, we ask further – How ‘well’ is this world? How far into the future do we dare imagine? Will we get there? In what condition and under what conditions?
Does this exhaust the list of worlds whose birth we announce today? Hardly. There are worlds within worlds. We say in the Kaddish –
יהא שמיה רבה מברך לעלם ולעלמי עלמיא
May God’s Great Name be blessed forever and throughout allולעלמי עלמיא
worlds of worlds
This world of ours is a world of worlds. Each of these worlds is a manifold complexity, a system of orbiting galaxies. Each system itself finds and maintains its orbital path. The interlocking of these infinite pathways obeys certain deep laws of compatibility and conciliance. Only thus could all the worlds within worlds coexist.
Yet, somehow, among these worlds are worlds whose orbits are fundamentally uncharted and unpredictable. These are free, questing, individual worlds, so exhilarated by their own abilities to cruise the worlds around them that they often forget that they themselves are worlds, just as much as the worlds they contemplate and conquer. On Rosh Ha-Shanah we are called upon to remember this: Such worlds are we.
Says the Mishnah –
כל המקיים נפש אחת כאילו קיים עולם מלא
Anyone who sustains one soul is credited by the Torah with sustaining an entire world. [San. 4;4]
Each of us is a world, every person. As people, each of us – on different days of different months of different years – has a birthday, the day we emerged upon this Earth. But on Rosh Ha-Shanah, when we say – היום הרת עולם – On this day the World is born – we refer to another birthday; we gather to affirm ourselves as ‘worlds’. Each of us is a unique world in the magnificence of our bodies’ functioning – whether broken or whole; in the richness of our emotions – expressed or restrained, in the sweep and depth of our intelligence – prosaic or profound, original or hackneyed. The most complex computer could not duplicate the unique way we use our freedom, the way we reach for our destiny, how we marshal our potential, our how we bear our history.
With the passing of another year we know we are all growing older. Some of us are very old, indeed. Yet this prayer declares that we are annually reborn. To proclaim this day as the birthday of our world is to declare our belief in self-renewal and regeneration. When we say – היום הרת עולם – On this day the World is born – on a deeper level we are not talking only about an anniversary, of an event long past but remembered. We are sending out a birth announcement – Today our world is born. A new born celebrates its birth with wailing and whimpering, suckling and secreting, squirming and sleeping. How much have we changed? How much have we grown?
The same root for עולם – World – serves as the base for the word עלם – young man and עלמה – young woman. What image of natural, unforced vibrancy can we apply to ourselves this year? Once we felt ourselves to be invincible. Now we are wiser. We recognize our weakness. But Rosh Ha-Shanah calls us to recapture the generosity of spirit that flows from youthful, healthy innocence. Can we do this? Yes, we can, because we are each a world, combining within ourselves all the strengths and weaknesses of who we were, are and will be, all combined in a miraculous system of retrieval and rediscovery. By the way, in Hebrew that capability is called Teshuvah – Repentance and Return. Because we are such a turning and re-turning world, on Rosh Ha-Shanah we are able to minister to ourselves as midwives to our own rebirth. Only this time we can be conscious and aware of the process. Is it a process of sweet pleasure or of daunting pain?
היום הרת עולם
On this day the World is born. We are born this very day.
Then the prayer continues
היום יעמיד במשפט כל יצורי עולמים
On this day God places in judgement the creatures of all worlds.
Judgement. This is a basic concern during this Days of Awe, Days of Judgement. But we must try to understand – if today we declare ourselves to be new-born, in what sense can we be judged. Who would presume to pass judgement on a new-born baby? What is there to judge? Judgement applies to actions, to expectations and responsibilities – fulfilled or betrayed.
But at birth, what kind of judgement can there be?
So the prayer continues:
אם כבנים, אם כעבדים
Whether as children or as servants
God, in all honesty we come before You in two guises. We have a history; we come with a resume, a record of our service to You. You be the judge as to our commitment and effort to serve You well. We await Your judgement anxiously:
אם כעבדים עינינו לך תלויות
עד שתחננו ותוציא כאור משפטנו, איום קדוש
As servants, we lift our eyes up to you, that You might be gracious to
us and bring our Judgement to Light, Awesome Holy One!אם כבנים רחמנו כרחם אב על בנים
But we are also your new-born children.
To translate the content without the Patriarchal construction –
As Your new-born children, regard us with compassionate love, as a Parent regards her child, just emerged from Her womb.
A parent does, indeed, judge their new-born child. Is the baby healthy, is she all there? Who does he look like? What hints of the world to come can be discerned in this little microcosm?
So it is in that sense that we present ourselves for God’s discerning, loving inspection. As we are born into this New year, may God wash us and warm us. As God holds each and every one of us, new-born, defenseless and full of life, †may God delight in us. May God rejoice in recognizing His Image and Her Image in each of us. And may God gaze upon us and say, “Look, she looks just like her father; he looks just like his mother. Yes, that’s My baby.”
And may we have a sweet, sweet year, amen.
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