The room was dark. I held my toddler son in my arms while our off-key voices sang the words of the familiar blessings, culminating in the final act of separation--I extinguished the candle in the grape juice. My daughter joyfully turned on the light as my spouse and I started to sing Shavua Tov...May you have a good week. My son squirmed out of my arms, ran into the other room, and buried his head in the couch cushions. As I sat down and looked into his teary face he angrily said, “Mommy, you just made the world cry.” In response to my confusion, he continued, “You just ended Shabbat.”
At the time I smiled at his innocence. I have since learned his wisdom. Separation can make the world cry.
As I look at an empty sanctuary in this deafening silence, I hear echoes of your voices. Crying. The cries of those who have lost loved ones and been unable to be with them when they died, or be with loving family and friends at a shiva. The tears in the voice of a Black mother who asked me simply, “When will people stop killing our children?” The frustration of so many people struggling with depression and anxiety, who feel so far from health. The worry of people who have lost their jobs. The fear of business owners not sure if their business will survive. The disorientation of people whose jobs remained but had to be done completely differently. The exhaustion of healthcare workers. The longing of parents and grandparents who are unable to hug their children and grandchildren. The loneliness of people sheltering at home--alone. The exhaustion of parents trying to manage the impossible demands of full time childcare and full time work, feeling those roles can never be fully separated, or integrated. My son has been crying too, sometimes explaining his sadness, and sometimes just screaming, unable to find the words.
And here we are. It is Yom Harat Olam--the day the world was created. It is Yom Hazikaron--the Day of Remembrance. It is Rosh Hashanah, the first day of a new year. We separate the year that past and the year that is about to begin. We are separated in our homes and together on the screen. About to speak words that have echoed through the generations. But some of us may just want to cry.
It is a tremendous act of faith and courage to enter these Days of Awe and try to celebrate creation. We are unsure what to expect. Because even the power of these Yamim Noraim cannot restore all that was lost. Or fix what feels broken. For some of us, it may be a long time before we can look around and see the world as “very good.” Some of us may go through cycles of separation and creation multiple times in the hours and days and weeks to come. But our task today is to look ahead while feeling the presence of what has come before.
And so I want to look back--all the way back. Today is the anniversary of the creation of the world. And as we look back at the start of God’s creation, we find separation. Separation can make the world cry. L’havdil, to separate, is the verb in Havdalah, as well as the root when God separates light from darkness, and when God separates water into waters in the heavens and waters on the Earth. Aviva Zornberg, in her book on Genesis, points out that this break was painful, too. Bereshit Rabba 5 describes the reaction of the water:
וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יִקָּווּ הַמַּיִם, כְּתִיב (תהלים קד, ז): מִן גַּעֲרָתְךָ יְנוּסוּן מִן קוֹל וגו'
God said, “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may appear.” It is written in Psalms 104:7, "They fled at Your blast, rushed away at the sound of Your thunder."
אָמַר רַבִּי בֶּרֶכְיָה, לֹא פֵּרְשׁוּ הַמַּיִם הַתַּחְתּוֹנִים מִן הָעֶלְיוֹנִים אֶלָּא בִּבְכִיָּה, הֲדָא הוּא דִּכְתִיב (איוב כח, יא): מִבְּכִי נְהָרוֹת חִבֵּשׁ.
Rabbi Berachyah said, "The lower waters did not separate from the upper waters, except through crying (bechiya). This is what the verse means when it says, "He dams up (mibchi) the sources of the streams (Job 28:11).
They...well...squirmed, ran away, and started to cry. In the midrash, the water began to weep and told God it refused to be separated. The water beneath the sky weeped especially, fearing it was being further separated from God. The water rebelled, it cried, it both grew angry at, and yearned for, God.
But God made those separations in order to end the chaos that preceded it. The separation of light was not the way our world started. Our creation story and our Torah begin in chaos and darkness.
Our world was formed out of chaos and darkness and water. As Dr. Tamara Cohn Eshkenazi comments in the Torah: A Women’s Commentary, “God brings order out of the chaos by separating the swirling mass into coherent bodies (land, contained water, sky) which will provide a habitat and sustenance for life.”
Those elements existed before, and as many commentators argue, they existed in the attempted creation of other worlds. The first three words of our Torah, “Bereshit bara elohim” have been translated as “in the beginning God created” but of course every translation is an interpretation. A translation truer to the Hebrew would be “when God began to create.” As Rashi and others have pointed out, the creation of our world was not the creation of time, or of God. God had been around for awhile. And what was God doing? Creating and destroying worlds until God was satisfied with the outcome. Our world was an attempt at separating and creating and reordering, and as Rabbi Avi Strausberg pointed out in her text study two weeks ago, each new world incorporated the wisdom of God’s previous attempts. Our world does not just include the raw elements of what came before. It includes the lessons God learned.
And God learned to create out of the separation in human relationships as well. There are twenty chapters in the book of Genesis between the birth of our world and the birth of Isaac, which begins our Torah reading this morning. In those chapters, God destroys most of the world with a flood, separating the residents of the ark so they can begin anew. God asks Abraham to separate himself from his family and birthplace in order to create the Jewish people. And then we get to this morning’s heartbreaking separations.
Sarah, who is 90 years old and has suffered through decades of devastating infertility, has given birth to Yitzhak, to Isaac. The name Yitzchak contains the root for “to laugh” and Sarah says:
"God has brought me laughter." But then Sarah’s joy at this new life is plagued by the disorder she feels in her family.
After the great feast celebrating Yitzhak’s weaning, Sarah sees a boy “מְצַחֵֽק”, commonly translated as playing:
He is Ishmael, the son of her slave Hagar and Abraham. Sarah has a violent reaction to seeing him--insisting to Abraham that he throw out Hagar and her son, permanently separating them from the family.
What could Ishmael have been doing that was so abhorrent that he and his mother deserve to be cast into the wilderness, presumably to die, because to Sarah, their lives did not matter?
Commentators have wrestled with this question and looked for meanings of “mitzahaek.” Perhaps, Rashi suggests, he was worshipping idols, or Ishmael was molesting Isaac, or, Rashi concludes, Ishmael and Isaac were quarreling and they went outside and Ishmael shot arrows at Isaac
Other commentators dispute this interpretation and suggest that Isaac was likely a toddler at the time, and Ishmael significantly older, so they were probably not arguing or playing together. Perhaps Ishmael was simply making fun of Isaac.
But in the next verse Sarah expresses her distress at the possibility that the son of a slave may share some of Isaac’s inheritance:
The verb mitzahaek includes the same root as Yitzhak. Perhaps there was too much risk that Ishmael was trying to be equal to Isaac. Sarah struggled her whole life with infertility and now that she finally has created a son, she doesn’t want someone else's son in the way. So he must be removed.
After Hagar and Ishmael are forced into the wilderness, we get perhaps the most haunting image of separation. Hagar assumes her son’s death is inevitable and self-isolates from him so she does not have to see it. But this separation, of course, leads to crying. God hears Ishmael crying and intervenes. God brings Hagar and Ishmael back together and creates a new life and future for them.
It is not entirely a happy ending. A family is torn apart and enmity between the Israelites and Ishmaelites extends far into the future.
Because separation and re-creation do not mean that the past is forgotten. In a chrysalis, the body of a caterpillar becomes liquid again--starting from scratch to build a butterfly. Its separation from the chrysalis reveals a dramatic act of recreation. But despite this complete metamorphosis, scientists have demonstrated that a butterfly can remember life from when it was a caterpillar. Because perhaps we can never fully let go of, or at least we will always remember, what came before.
Today is not only Yom Harat Olam, it is Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembrance. Because as we honor the cycle of destruction and creation, we remember that tremendous change often comes with loss. And we honor loss with memory.
In this period of profound separation we would give anything to get back the people we’ve lost--individually and collectively. Or, for some of us, the health or financial security we enjoyed. We look back, honoring the memories of our loved ones and recognizing the privileges we took for granted. We do not need to separate completely.
We can carry both. When Moses returns from Mount Sinai with the tablets, he sees the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, a total disordering of the very first commandments written on those tablets. So what does Moses do? He breaks the tablets. And then God creates new ones. The cycle of chaos--separation--re-creation occurs in revelation as well. And according to the Talmud, something remarkable happens. Not only does God make new tablets, the separated fragments of the original tablets are not buried, they are collected, and they are carried in the ark alongside the intact ones.
The brokenness and the possibility to recreate exist together.
As we look back to six months ago we also see that there was a lot about the world that needed to be changed. We have realized that much about the way things were before was chaotic. And perhaps the only way to make sense of the disordering is to reorder. To recreate.
There was something else I learned that night that, according to my son, I made the world cry. I tried to explain to him that I didn’t choose for Shabbat to end, Shabbat ends when there are three stars in the sky, something which I cannot control. But of course there too he was right. I cannot control the order of the cosmos, but I can control what to do about it. Technically, we can choose to make Havdalah, to make that separation, anytime between Saturday night and Tuesday. We choose to end Shabbat within that window when we are ready to create again. When we are ready to turn on the lights, to get back to the work of changing the world.
And, I discovered, that is true of many of these cycles of chaos and separation and re-creation. At some point after it has grown and eaten enough, the caterpillar decides that it is time to form a chrysalis. After Moses chose to break the tablets, at some point the Israelites decided to carry the fragments in the ark. Even God had to make a choice. There was chaos and darkness and water and wind, and God chose the moment to say “Let there be light.”
And of course, that choice is before us. We did not choose this chaos. Too many of us did not choose the separation of death and unemployment and the shattering of our expectations in the world. However, we do get to decide when and how to recreate. And we must.
Today is both Yom Hazikaron and Yom Harat Olam. We will not forget what came before, we will never forget the ones we’ve lost. Drawing on the lessons from the past, we will decide what kind of world we want to build. And we, b’tzelem Elohim, in a reflection of God’s creative power, will recreate out of what has been broken and separated. Hayom Harat Olam. Today the world starts anew.