TEMPLE HIGHLIGHTS | RABBI'S MONTHLY COLUMN

The canvas of a new year awaits sacred artistry

From the study of Rabbi Stern

This month brings us Parashat Bereshit, our Jewish story of cosmic creation. It comes right on the heels of the new year, at this season when we begin to make real our resolutions of the Days of Awe – our commitments to heal relationships, to improve ourselves, to strive to bring more holiness to our lives and greater healing to God’s world. We begin to work on all those creative and generative tasks just as we read the Torah’s account of the creation of the world itself, and a closer look at Bereshit helps us to understand our own transformative opportunities more deeply.

Bereshit seems to counsel a healthy realism as we approach the sacred creative work we have set out for ourselves. Our creation story begins: “When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was wild and waste, and darkness on the face of the deep, with a wind from God sweeping over the face of the waters.” The first feature we notice is that, for all the debates of our medieval philosophers, the world is not created ex nihilo, out of nothing – there is already wind, water, and something chaotic going on before God even utters, “Let there be light.”

What does that suggest for our own creations this year? That we shouldn’t pine for an utterly blank slate, for an utterly fresh start in the relationship we are trying to improve, or the path of commitment we are trying to walk. Instead, the Torah’s creation story seems to suggest that our greatest acts of creation begin with the recognition of what is already on the move before us – the hurting heart, the demands of work or home, the complicated relationship, the daunting reality of the social ills we vow to confront – poverty or racism or violence. We are not painters before a blank canvas, with dollops of paint lying inert on a palette awaiting our genius stroke. The better world or more meaningful life we strive to create begins with baggage – there is already wind and water and darkness. Our task will be to recognize those realities, and nonetheless have the courage to bring light and order and understanding where only chaos has reigned. God did it one clarifying act at a time – separating light from darkness, land from sea, the waters above the earth from the waters below. And so will we – sorting through the competing claims on our time and attention, and creating healing or justice or joy one step at a time – one phone call, one conversation, one volunteer hour, one dose of healing laughter. God didn’t get a blank canvas, and neither do we. God didn’t create blessing all at once, and neither will we.

Bereshit also teaches us that God’s created world of blessing is filled with those separations and contrasts: light from darkness, rain from sea, sea from land, sun from stars from the moon. The Torah’s primary vision of oneness is not that we become part of some great undifferentiated whole – peace comes from the ordering of differences, not from their elimination. And so too in the relationships we strive to improve this year – we should not define reconciliation as an absence of difference, but as finding a way to live with our differences, to grow from them, and at our best – to recognize them as blessings of creation. The refrain of the creation story is “and there was evening and there was morning” -- a bold chorus of opposites joined by conjunction, never submerged one in the other.

And near the end of it all – after oceans and mountains, after plants and stars and birds and beasts, comes the statement in Genesis 1:27 that guides and exalts our humanity, even as it might guide and elevate the creative tasks ahead of us in this new year: Vayivra elohim et-ha-adam b’tzalmo – “And God created humanity in God’s image.” The essential reminder that the canvas and landscape of our creation in the year ahead is fundamentally human, and that human beings possess fundamental dignity. Whether it is the undereducated child in a struggling school system, the homeless person challenged by mental illness, the dear friend who is sick, or the loved one facing personal or professional obstacles - what imbues every person on the human canvas of the year ahead is a flash of creation’s first light, and it calls forth from us our own spark: of compassion and justice, of high ethical standards and deep decency.

The canvas before us is never empty, and it never stops calling to us, summoning our God-given creative potential for healing and justice and hope. The canvas of a new year awaits our sacred artistry, and with Bereshit, the work of illumination has already begun.