Sermons

Hayom Harat Olam: Today is Pregnant with Eternit
Rosh HaShanah 5770
by Rabbi Sim Glaser

When the moon is full it means
So many things to human beings
Some think of love, or mad dogs screachin’
For Rabbis? You got two weeks till preachin’

When Rosh Hashana comes around
Like new moons we must wax profound
And choose the most important theme
That moves your soul and vents my spleen

No matter what I dwell upon
You’ll say: here’s what you should have done…
Can’t talk of economic fright
You’ll say “Rab Z did that last night”.

Which problematic news to chew?
What matters most to modern Jews?
What makes us reach for Kleenex tissues?
I thought, hmmm… I’ll preach on all the issues!

This year we faced a ton of woes
The tsurus came in heavy blows
The banks collapsed, the market crashed
No eating out, we’re low on cash

 

Just when we thought we were well paid-off
We got smacked by Bernie Madoff
I prayed “don’t let him be a Jew”
Disappointed by that too.

Israel in constant danger
Makes it hard to love the stranger
And no one’s stranger than Iran
That’s why their nukes have to be banned

The ice caps they continue fading
Greenhouse gasses ‘cumulating
It’s tough times in Afghanistan
Our soldiers and the Taliban

I’m sad that Michael Jackson died
Woodstock? Wasn’t there. I lied.
Or if I was, I don’t recall
Most don’t, if they were there at all

Barack? Let’s give him some ba-reaks
He’s fixing eight years of mistakes
His doctor plan might need repair
But everyone deserves health care

Unemployment nine point four
And factories forced to close their doors
Homelessness we see increasing
Hungry families unceasing

Foreclosures stunned our north side friends
Their suf-fer-ing seems without end
As Jews we try and help them heal
Advising better mortgage deals

So, when asked: what was the rabbi’s theme?
You say: he spoke on everything
It made your heads both ache and spin
And his sermon had yet to begin!

But that’s how Rabi G deals with chaos
He doesn’t kvetch or pull his payos
Get an ulcer, hives or worse
He puts it all in silly verse

Yes, I deal with the stress of chaotic times by making rhymes. I’m always looking for a good rhyme. The highlight of this year for me was when I was listening to the radio and heard a woman talking about her rather indulgent mother who had gone to the ultimate health retreat center designed exclusively for the toes, the heals, ankles, etc. And then she said a word that solved a rhyming problem I have had for over 50 years. She said her mother had gone to a foot spa.

It’s a common high holy day theme of mine to kvetch about being overwhelmed, and 5769 provided no relief. It was, in almost everybody’s reckoning, a year of chaos.

Chaos has always been around. The book of Genesis, the start of the Torah begins: bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim v’et ha aretz, v’ha aretz haya… tohu va vohu.

Tohu vavohu – usually translated as “the earth was void and chaotic” or “without substance and in disarray”. But do you know the actual meaning of the word tohu? You don’t, do you? Neither do I. Nobody really does. For years when I heard tohu I thought the world was formed from some type of Chinese bean curd. And on the second day God created “mock duck”.

Fact is, the word tohu cannot be translated, because chaos is so beyond our grasp that it cannot be rendered by human language. The word “chaos” is a Greek word meaning confusion. But we’re not doing the Greek thing here. This is a Hebrew story. Tohu is a void, empty dark zero place, and repeatedly throughout the bible you find that chaos assaults creation. The first story in the Torah says that water is chaos. And when the “great depths burst forth” and it rains for 40 days and 40 nights. In order for there to be new creation after this, God had to get the water back to where it belongs.  For some strange reason, there had to be chaos to put things in order. That seems to be the way of the world.
 
The mystics say that in creating the known universe from the unknown tohu God enacted tsimtsum, the great contraction, taking this mess of potential and creating boundaries so that ordinary beings like you and me would some day be able to make sense of things.

But Chaos continues to pursue us, and is very difficult to pinpoint. When a tornado touched down on Park Blvd this summer I got several emails from friends around the country who saw it from a distance on their computers said: are you alright? Are you alright? And I said: you know what? I didn’t even see it. Turns out that nobody here really saw the tornado. One man on the scene was asked by a reporter: “So how did you know you were in a tornado?” “How did I know? There was stuff flying all around me in a circle that’s how I knew!”

 

Chaos is not a bad thing. In truth it is necessary. Several weeks ago in the New York Times the author Robert Wright suggested we stop fighting about evolution vs. intelligent design and just admire the fact that humanity ultimately evolved over billions of years from chaos to a moral, loving, ethical, artistic, philosophical creature. Ok, so it took a long time, and some of us aren’t so evolved yet. But here we are! Still chaotic, still becoming.

I would maintain that all the most beautiful creations emerge from chaos.

As a musician and music lover, I can attest that the best songs ever written came out of awesome chaotic jam sessions. I am thrilled all you kids are going to be tuning into that hip new band, The Beatles, when you get the Beatles’ Guitar Hero Video game. You will learn all the intricate parts of the songs so you can get to level three (whatever that means). But you should know from an old Fab Four freak hand that this music came out of the chaotic jamming of two talented blokes from Liverpool who honed their skills over thousands of hours of mistake filled performances in German night clubs. One of my favorite things about the Beatles’ music is the errors in their recorded songs that they didn’t repair! They left them in! Which gave so many, like yours truly, the hope that we could be the next Beatles! And we were so wrong!

This summer Barb and I went up to the site of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area fire of a couple of years ago. We expected to see destruction, devastation, wilderness. Many summers we had spent time at our friends’ cabin and when it burned down along with the old growth forest through the chaos of fire and carelessness we sensed this was the end of things. That was not what we found.

Young growth had already begun, enhanced by sunshine where before it had not shone. New building plans were underway. We cleared dead trees away and beheld a new view of the lake we had never seen. Along with human partnership the earth had already begun to heal itself and make new order from chaos.

The housing foreclosure crisis in this country produced chaos not unlike a hungry fire climbing up the walls of all our institutions and affecting almost everyone. How did we respond? We checked our incessant appetite for things. We started thinking more about the human pain suffered by others. Members of our congregation linked arms with neighbors to our immediate north, making some unlikely new friends and we knocked on the doors of foreclosed or soon to be foreclosed houses offering information on how to get into better mortgage situations and how to deal with absentee landlords.

The stunning crumbling of our most powerful financial institutions spawned a new look at the very foundations our American wealth is built upon. The financial chaos of last year has made us smarter and certainly less likely to take things for granted. The Wall Street blaze allowed for new ways to effect control, and for creative entrepanurship to emerge.

Seemingly chaotic riots in Iran found news reporters scrambling to keep up with all the instant tweeters in the crowd, holding up their cell phones to document the injustice of a fixed election live on the scene. The chaos of tyrannical rule morphing into the creation of democracy before our eyes.

Jewish mysticism teaches that true Tikkun – repair – growth - cannot happen without brokenness. A friend of my parents long ago wrote a business success book called: If it Ain’t Broke, Break It! referring to the need for shattering before anything truly original is going to come.

As we listen to the Shofar blast traditionally we are to proclaim: Hayom harat olam! Today the world is born! This is not an accurate translation of hayom harat olam.

Hayom means today, yes. But Harat doesn’t mean “born”, it means “pregnant”. Olam can mean world, but it is better translated as “eternity” - from its root alam, which means “hidden – or beyond our perception. So what do we get? Hayom harat olam. Today is pregnant with eternity. Simpler translation? Today we are celebrating that anything is possible! That includes chaos, and all the great things that could come of it.

When times are pregnant with possibilities there is good news and there is bad news, because there is choice. We are powerful creatures. We can create further chaos or we can establish order from within it.
The warming of our planet stands as a huge example of human-made chaos, perhaps the most dangerous variety. We have changed the conditions of life on earth that was otherwise proceeding in a very ordered manner. We are putting back into the atmosphere the carbon that millions and millions of years and billions of billions of creatures removed and stored in the earth, and we are doing it faster than we can realize. Making chaos out of order.

We are changing the ordered air we breathe, the very purposeful winds that drive the rains, the elegantly knitted blanket that holds the warmth of the sun just long enough for us to survive from one day to the next, nurtured and nourished, and thus the earth’s climate becomes more and more chaotic, more unstable. This is a chaos we have created!

But even that gassy cloud has a silver lining. The chaos of global warming carries a message for us. Restrain yourself. Place boundaries on your appetite. Figure out new ways to consume. Honor the pace with which this globe has evolved into an inhabitable place. Some say that the warming trend is now beyond reversing, but I simply cannot believe that, nor would I get up in front of a bunch of teenagers, children and young parents and say that humankind cannot reverse the chaotic trend we’ve established. My teacher, Rabbi Joseph Edelheit put it this way: “The process of creation in the face of chaos is, in fact, the great human challenge.” We can do it, and we will do it because anything is possible. Hayom harat olam – today the world is pregnant with eternal possibilities.

You may have noticed that the shofar is always curved, a spiral, like a ram’s horn, and not straight like an antelope’s horn. That’s a requirement. It teaches us to pull back towards what is right, to return from the precipice. To shape eternity and not just go off into nowhere.

Listen, the shofar says, to the song of creation of which we are a part. Listen to the voices of mercy and hospitality at the conclusion of a chaotic hurricane flood. Listen to the sound of door knocking friends in a devastated north side neighborhood. Listen to soft rush of wind from an energy producing windmill. Listen to sound of a shovel breaking ground to plant a young sapling in a devastated forest. Listen to the Shofar calling: Look how powerful I am in addressing confusion and shaping the future into a glorious form, just as God did in creating the universe!

Yes, it has been a chaotic year, but hayom harat olam. Today is pregnant with eternity! Today births new intentions, conceives new possibilities. Today is our day. Today our choices will gestate the future, for our children, and for the children of every species on earth. Yes, today is pregnant with eternity. As we learned last year with great fanfare, almost anything can happen. And it did. And what we will learn from this coming year is that we can make good things happen. And we will.

Keyn yhi ratson