Blog: The Ethical Echo Chamber
The War to End all Wars
This Sunday evening, Jews around the world will begin their observance of the week-long festival of Sukkos. There’s much to learn from this celebration that concludes the annual cycle of Jewish holidays. So I’m returning to these thoughts from September, 2001, which remain more relevant than ever.
Once upon a time there were three little pigs. One built a house of straw, until the big, bad wolf blew it down and gobbled him up. One built a house of sticks, until the big, bad wolf blew it down and gobbled him up. But one built a house of bricks and was safe from all the huffing and puffing of the big, bad wolf.
Society teaches values to successive generations through its children’s stories. The story of the Three Little Pigs is one of our most enduring fables, teaching the importance of good planning and disciplined effort. But it also carries with it a more subtle message, that safety rests in our own hands and our own labors, that security can be bought for the price of a pile of bricks and a bucket of mortar. This ideal, if it was ever true, went up in flames together with New York City ‘s skyline and Washington’s military nerve center on September 11.
More appropriate now than the Three Little Pigs is Robert Burns’s adage about “the best laid schemes of mice and men.” Indeed, the World Trade Center towers were each designed to absorb the impact of a Boeing 727; what the architects failed to factor in was how the fuel carried aboard a transcontinental airliner would create an inferno capable of compromising the structural strength of steel support beams. Of course, we don’t blame the architects; none of us imagined the acts of incomprehensible evil that brought down those towers.
Which is precisely the point. We cannot imagine the design and the reach of evil. We can make our best effort, erect walls of brick around ourselves and roofs of steel over our heads, but we will never be completely safe. The world is too unpredictable an arena, the mind of the wicked too dark a cavern.
As if to drive home the instability of temporal existence, observant Jews around the world will disrupt their normal lives this week by moving out of their homes into little stick houses to live as our ancestors lived in the desert after their exodus from Egypt. But more than an attempt to recreate the experience of a fledgling nation traveling toward its homeland, the holiday of Sukkos offers us an opportunity to attune our minds to a most fundamental principle of Judaism — that however great our strength and the might of our own hands, however elaborate and well conceived our plans, life strews unexpected obstacles in our path that can scuttle our most certain victories and demolish our most solid edifices.
A sukkah may be built of virtually any material: wood, brick, steel, canvas, or even string may be used to construct its walls. But no matter how stable or how precarious its walls, the roof of a sukkah must be composed of s’chach, thin strips of wood or leaves, through which the light of the stars can shine at night. And when one sits in the sukkah and looks up at the s’chach — the barest representation of a roof, which will not protect him from even the lightest rainfall — he is inspired by the recollection of his ancestors who trusted in the protection of the Almighty, the One who took them out from under the rod of their oppressors and guided them through the inimical desert before bringing them safely home.
In his visionary writings, the prophet Ezekiel describes a great battle on the eve of the messianic era, when the all forces of evil in the world combine themselves into a great army called by the name Gog and Magog. The brilliant eighteenth century thinker Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch interprets the prophet’s vision not as a military battle but as an ideological war between the philosophy of gog — “roof”– and the philosophy of sukkah, where those convinced that their fate lies in the power of their own hands and their own resources will attack the values of those who recognize the limits of human endeavor to influence the world.
In the immediate wake of the World Trade Center destruction, cries rang out for vengeance and military retribution. Since then, more measured voices have asserted that this war will be like no other, without defined enemies or defined borders, without clear strategies or decisive victories. This is an unfamiliar kind of crisis, where we find our capacity to respond in our own defense or to secure our own future profoundly diminished in a new world order.
So now the citizens and leaders of the world’s last remaining superpower must grapple with the uncertainties of a violent present and a murky future. Some will respond by declaring that we must work harder to take control of our own fate. Others will concede that we will never be secure again. And they will be right: no building, no bunker, no shelter made of brick or concrete or iron will guarantee our safety from the perverse imagination of extremists who can rationalize indiscriminate mass murder.
Yet for all that, the Jew sitting in his sukkah will look up at the heavens and be at peace. He will recognize that the best laid schemes often come to naught and that, after doing all that can be done, we are best off leaving our fate in the hands of the One who placed the stars in their courses, the One from whom protection ultimately comes for those who trust not in their own strength, but in the source of all strength.
As the winds of autumn blow with the first hint of winter, we may shiver with cold but never with fear. The illusion of the roof we can see reminds of the invisible reality of the wings of the Divine presence. We neither abandon ourselves to fate nor try to seize hold of it, but turn with confidence to face the future, secure in the knowledge that we have prepared ourselves as best we can to meet whatever life holds in store for us.
Walking in Circles
As the two contenders for the job of Leader of the Free World continue to confirm our worst fears about their competence and character, it’s worth revisiting these thoughts from 2010 about how we keep ending up in the same place.
“The whole world is a narrow bridge,” taught the great Chassidic master Rabbi Nachman of Breslav (1772 -1810), in one of his most famous aphorisms, “but the main thing is to have no fear at all.”
According to German scientist Jan Souman, however, it seems that we have good reason to be afraid. After exhaustive research devoted to the study of walking, Dr. Souman has amassed a mountain of evidence proving that human beings possess a natural inclination to travel in circles.
Like some impious prankster, Dr. Souman took his subjects out to empty parking lots and open fields, blindfolded them, and instructed them to walk in a straight line. Some of them managed to keep to a straight course for ten or twenty paces; a few lasted for 50 or a hundred. But all of them ended up circling back toward their points of origin.
Not many of them. Not most of them. Every last one of them.
“And they have no idea,” says Dr. Souman. “They were thinking that they were walking in a straight line all the time.”
Dr. Souman’s research team explored every imaginable explanation. Some people turned to the right while others turned to the left, but the researchers could find no discernable pattern. Neither left-handed nor right-handed subjects as a group demonstrated any propensity for turning one way over the other; nor did subjects tested for either right- or left-brain dominance. The team even tried gluing a rubber soul to the bottom of one shoe to make one leg longer than the other.
“It didn’t make any difference at all,” explains Dr. Souman. “So again, that is pretty random what people do.”
In fact, it isn’t even limited to walking. Ask people to swim blindfolded or drive a car blindfolded and, no matter how determined they may be to go straight, they quickly begin describing peculiar looping circles in one direction or the other.
And if, as the research indicates, human brains are hardwired to lead us in circles, why does Rabbi Nachman insist that “the main thing is to have no fear at all”?
After all, a narrow bridge is a dangerous place to walk in circles.
Perhaps the answer lies in the words of King Solomon: G-d made man straight, but mankind sought many intrigues (Ecclesiastes 7:29).
The sages teach us that, in his original form, Adam towered above every other manner of creation and radiated a light of spiritual illumination. The inner purity of the First Man shone forth through the physical body that clothed his supernal soul, and the godliness that defined his essence drove him forward in unwavering pursuit of his divine purpose.
But Adam allowed his desire for spiritual elevation to confound his reason, rationalizing that by consuming the forbidden fruit he could internalize the influence of evil and thereby conquer it from within. Despite his noble intentions, by violating the divine word Adam strayed from his straight course and lost himself amidst the winding paths of a crooked world.
The history of Adam’s descendants testifies to the crookedness of man. The moral corruption of the generation of the Flood, followed by rebellion in the formof the Tower of Babel, marked mankind’s steady drift away from the path of Truth. The incipient Jewish nation, even before they had the opportunity to receive G-d’s Law at Sinai, twisted their spiritual yearning into worship of the Golden Calf and condemned themselves to wander directionless in the desert for 40 years.
Only upon entering their land did the Jews have another chance to find their way back to the straight and narrow. But again they lost their sense of purpose, refusing to accept upon themselves a leader who might steer them back on course toward a renewed national mission. And so the prophet declares that, “In those days there was no king; every man did what was upright (yashar) in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).
The Hebrew word yashar, rendered here as upright, translates literally as straight. Indeed, no matter how much the Jews may have then convinced themselves of the straightness of their path, they were truly wandering in circles.
Dr. Souman explains what might otherwise seem obvious, that there is a simple solution to the circular inclinations of the internal human compass. With external clues, like a mountaintop or other promontory on the horizon, people have no trouble at all traveling a straight line.
Perhaps now we are ready to appreciate the meaning of Rabbi Nachman’s metaphor. We walk through life as if blindfolded, unable to see either the true nature of the world or the true purpose of our existence, bemused by all the material vanities that surround us and vie for our attention. The world is indeed a narrow bridge, with the winds of fad and fancy buffeting us on every side, relentlessly threatening to topple us into the abyss of spiritual oblivion if we place one foot off the path to either side.
But if we raise our eyes above the fray, if we pull the blindfold from our eyes and set our sights upon the mountaintop that beckons us across 3300 years of history, then we can march confidently into the future with no fear of straying from the true course that promises to lead us safely home.
Give a little, get back a lot
Remember what they taught you when you were a kid:
It’s better to give than to receive.
Sure, it sounds nice. But no one really believes it.
After all aren’t these our basic assumptions about human nature and the ways of the world?
- No good deed goes unpunished (Clair Boothe Luce).
- When a fellow says, “It is not the money but the principle of the thing,” it`s the money (Kin Hubbard).
- Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody (Agatha Christie).
- If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing (Napoleon).
- The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization (Ralph Waldo Emerson).
It may be a cynical way of looking at life, but we had better learn to live with it if we want to get ahead.
Or do we?
Political Correctness: the root of all evil
After last week’s wackiness at James Madison University, it’s time to revisit this post from last April. I fear there will be too many opportunities to do so.
A letter to the future president of the United States:
If you want to fix the country, you can start with the root cause of all that ails our country:
Political Correctness.
The truth is that political correctness is not a new idea at all; it is simply the new label for an old, established moral postulate once accepted by all.
The word civility shares its linguistic root with the word civilization. It means taking into consideration the comfort of others before expressing what I think or doing what I want. It means remembering that other people have rights before I assert my own. It means reflecting upon how my actions are going to affect my community and recognizing that I have a responsibility to a society that is more than the sum of autonomous individuals.
So what was wrong with the term civility that the concept needed rebranding as political correctness? Most likely, it was the connotation of political ideology that spawned this illegitimate offspring of cultural nobility.
An Ode to Almustafa
If memory serves — after all, it has been 32 years — I was somewhere between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Waycross, Georgia. It was late winter, but the southern air was mild and the sun brightened the sky.
Hitchhiker’s weather, to be sure.
I was waiting at a rest stop with my thumb stuck out when a pickup towing a large camper lumbered to a halt in front of me. I climbed in and uttered my heartfelt thanks.
The driver, wearing a red flannel coat in hunter’s plaid, surprised me by identifying himself as a pastor on vacation. He asked the usual questions — where was I headed, where was I from, why was I traveling this way — then launched into his story.
There are two ways hitchhikers pay for their rides. One is by talking, by entertaining a driver lonely from the road and weary of recorded music or talk radio. The other is by listening, by letting drivers unburden themselves without the cost of therapy, secure in the knowledge that their disclosures will vanish into the air the moment the passenger exits the vehicle … comfort of strangers and all that.
Clergy have gotten a bad rap in recent years — much of it their own doing. Corruption is bad enough from politicians and business executives, but we have every right to expect more from our religious leaders. The entire edifice of theology suffers from every single act of spiritual infidelity.
But there are still many sincere men of the cloth, and my benefactor appeared faithful to the integrity of his office. He saw his mission not only to minister but to shepherd his flock toward pastures sown thick with the morality and ethics of scripture, to challenge them to challenge themselves and prod them to pay closer attention to the calling of their conscience.
And sadly, like spiritual leaders from Moses until today, he had found ample cause for disappointment.
Why Feeling Good about Yourself Is Not Always Good for You
Take a ride in a glass elevator, from ground level to rooftop in a single ride. How do you feel?
If you’re like most people, you feel – no surprise here – like you’re on top of the world. You feel good about yourself and believe in your ability to overcome any obstacle and conquer every challenge. The only downside is – well, going down. By the time you get to the bottom, not only have your feelings of grandeur evaporated, but now you feel a bit puny, somewhat insignificant, and less than capable.
But wait! You can save yourself the effort. Researchers have discovered that you can awaken the same responses by merely imagining yourself soaring skyward or plummeting earthward. With a little visualization, you can create your own mood.
But what happens next?
That’s what Max Ostinelli, David Luna, and Torsten Ringbergat wanted to find out. The three University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, psychologists had people imagine themselves rising up into the sky, then asked them to solve a series of SAT-style math problems. With all that positive and high self-esteem pumping up their neural pathways, certainly, their performance should have increased significantly. Right?
Wrong. They did worse. A lot worse. In fact, the performance gap between those who had their self-esteem artificially inflated and those who had theirs artificially diminished was between 20 and 30 percent.
As Max Ostinelli explains to NPR,
“When we boost self-esteem in this way, people are motivated to maintain their high self-esteem. So they say, well, I’ll withdraw from the task.”
In other words, when we know that our feelings of accomplishment are unearned or undeserved, our defense mechanism kicks in to protect our fragile bubble of fantasy from the nasty pinprick of reality. Conversely, when we feel we have to prove ourselves, an inner voice prompts us to engage and persevere rather than sit around wallowing in our feelings of inadequacy.
A Present for Heaven
When my youngest daughter was three years old, she discovered the helium balloons in the flower section of our local supermarket, handed out free to every child who asks for one. I tied the string around her wrist so the precious balloon wouldn’t escape up to the rafters. She bounced it on its string as I tugged it this way and that to avoid bumping other shoppers. She hugged it as we climbed into the car for the ride home.
As I pulled into the driveway, my daughter flew out of the car, her balloon bobbing along behind her, raced in through the front door and out again to our back yard, slipped the string off her wrist and gazed upward as the balloon rose into the sky and slowly drifted away.
“Why did you let go of your balloon?” I asked, slightly miffed that she had so casually cast away the new toy she had been fussing over for the last half hour.
My daughter just shrugged, giggled, and watched the balloon disappear from sight.
After our next trip to the market she did it again. Then again, over and over for months. Every time I asked the same question. “Why did you let go of your balloon?”
Finally I got an answer. My daughter looked me in the eye and replied with a smile, “It’s a present for God.”
* * *
She doesn’t do it anymore. And part of me mourns for the pure, innocent faith that prompted a little girl to give up her toy as an offering to the Almighty.
For all our experience and the sophistication, for all our indulgent smiles at the simplicity of our children’s beliefs, is it not likely that our children know something we don’t, something they themselves soon won’t know or even remember they once knew? And perhaps it is precisely their power of belief that sets them apart from the adults they will become.
Children believe in God, believe in their parents, believe in their country and their school and their friends and that good will always win out over evil. Their trust and faith haven’t yet been sullied by the lies of politicians, the corruption of law and justice, the avarice of sports heroes, the superficiality of Hollywood or, most importantly, the cynicism of their parents, who may try for a time to put on an act to spare their children from their own disillusionment.
But what if it worked the other way, that we could learn an old lesson from our children instead of imposing yet another new lesson upon them? What if we could turn the clock back and recapture even a whiff of the innocence of youth? Would we reach out to grasp it, or have we grown too jaded even to try?
This Rosh Hashana, Jews around the world will fill synagogues to inaugurate the first day of the Jewish new year. But Rosh Hashana celebrates much more than the beginning of another calendrical cycle. It celebrates birth and rebirth; it celebrates beginning and renewal, for it commemorates nothing less than the Creation of the world and Mankind.
As we approach the New Year, let us ask ourselves how we can turn back the clock, exchanging bad habits for new challenges, routine for renewal, and cynicism for enthusiasm. Instead of smiling with adult condescension at the innocence of children, let us consider instead that the difference between childhood and maturity is not whether we give presents to our Creator, but what kind of presents we choose to give. A child serves God by sending a balloon up into the sky. An adult serves God by releasing his spirit to soar to the heights of Godliness.
Have we given charity in proportion with our means? Have we visited the sick and comforted the distressed? Have we consistently spoken with kindness to our neighbors, with respect to our superiors, and with patience to our children? Have we honored the Sabbath and studied the ancient wisdom of our people?
It’s not enough to make resolutions; we need to inspire ourselves to see them through. We need to awaken in ourselves an awe of the Almighty by reflecting upon the vastness of creation, the unfathomability of the stars in their courses, the mysteries of life, and the limitless potential of the soul — to behold for a lingering moment the immeasurable beauty and majesty of our universe.
And if we can follow through, if we can make the moment last without slipping back into our well-traveled rut of discounting every noble and beautiful thought and deed, then perhaps we can retain our faith in those things truly worthy of faith throughout the coming year.
Originally published in 2008 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Aish.com.
Rosh Hashanah Tailor-Made
Nobody likes fundraising dinners. The speeches are dry, the menu is dull, and the seating arrangements seem to have been drawn up by the Marquis de Sade. No one looks forward to these affairs, and we attend them only out of a sense of obligation.
Since one dinner I attended last year, however, I have become more wary than ever of this kind of event.
The evening began unremarkably and proceeded unremarkably — up to a point. The food was better than usual, the speeches ran longer than usual, the company was as good as could be hoped for, and I never saw the dinner plate that slipped from the tray of the passing waiter and struck me squarely on the forehead.
“I didn’t hit you, did I?” asked the waiter in response to the alarmed gasps and cries from the people who shared my table, several of whom assured him that he had, indeed, scored a direct hit.
“Are you all right?” he asked, inevitably. A silly question, really.
A pound-and-a-half of glazed ceramic packs quite a wallop after accelerating at thirty-two feet-per-second-squared from a height of six feet in the air.
At least I was still conscious, still sitting upright, and I didn’t think I was bleeding.
“Get a doctor,” someone said.
“He doesn’t need a doctor,” said someone else. “Get him a lawyer.”
The manager arrived with an ice pack. “Here, take this.”
“I was hoping for scotch with my ice,” I said.
He laughed, but didn’t bring me any scotch. “I’ll need your name and address, sir,” he said, handing me a pen and paper.
“Don’t sign anything,” yelled someone from the next table.
I scribbled my vital statistics. “I’m really very sorry, sir,” he said.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Just the scotch.” He laughed again and went away. I had figured the manager would offer me vouchers for a complimentary night’s stay. He hadn’t. (I never even got a letter of apology.) I hadn’t gotten my whisky, either.
I began regaining my bearings to a medley of more lawsuit jokes. From across the table, however, my next door neighbor offered the only profound comment of the evening: “What were you thinking about before you got hit?”
I knew exactly what he meant. According to Talmudic philosophy, there are no accidents, no coincidences, no random events. Everything comes about through the guiding hand of Divine Providence, what we call hashgochoh pratis: the spiritual imperative that governs how the external world acts upon each and every one of us. In other words, if I got smacked on the head, I must have had it coming to me.
This is a far cry from the popular notion that whatever I want, I have coming to me. As much as contemporary culture may insist that privileges and entitlements are birthrights, the Talmud recognizes only our responsibilities, both to other individuals and to society. When we live up to our obligations, we may expect certain rewards to come our way. But if we do receive an apparently undeserved blow, great or small, we should assume that the equilibrium of the cosmic scales of justice somehow needed to be set back in balance, and we should reflect upon the message that has just been sent us from on high.
Sometimes we can easily identify a concrete lesson to glean from such mishaps. Other times not. But the principle holds, even when we can’t perceive any clear cause and effect: this was necessary; now we need to brush ourselves off and get on with life.
The traditional Yom Kippur liturgy provides a poignant example in its narrative concerning Rabbi Yishmoel, the High Priest, who died as the skin of his face was peeled away to suit the whim of the Roman governor’s daughter.
The malachim, the divine beings who inhabit the heavenly spheres, protested in outrage: “Is this the reward for living a life committed to holiness?” they demanded.
“Be silent!” commanded the Almighty, “or I will return the world to void and nothingness.”
The incomparable 18th century genius, Rabbi Elyahu of Vilna, explains G-d’s reply with an allegory: a king once received a gift of fine Turkish wool, the most luxurious fabric in the world. It was so beautiful, in fact, that the king could not bear to think that even a tiny piece of it should end up as scrap on the cutting floor. He went to every tailor in his kingdom and asked each to make him a suit without letting even one thread of the wool go to waste. But every tailor claimed that such a feat was beyond his ability.
Finally, the king found a tailor who agreed to do the job. When the king returned to the tailor’s shop on the appointed date, he discovered that the tailor had indeed produced an exceptional suit of clothes. The king was elated.
“But have you fulfilled your promise?” asked the king. “Did you use every thread?”
“You really don’t know,” answered the tailor. “And the only way you will ever will find out is if you tear your beautiful suit apart and lay out all the pieces in the original shape of the fabric.”
Similarly, we often think that life is full of unfair knocks or is missing essential pieces. But to know for sure, we would have to see all of human history undone before our eyes. Only then would we have the right to assert that there were flaws in the slow sculpture of creation.
The days from Rosh HaShonnah to Yom Kippur — the traditional season of judgment — afford us the opportunity to strengthen our trust that the Master Tailor has done His job well, that He has stitched together the fabric of eternity according to a plan He understands far better than we do — even when bricks, or china plates, fall out of the sky upon our heads.
Should I have sued the hotel? the waiter? the school holding the event? the principal, who was speaking when I got hit? No doubt, I could have found any number of lawyers eager to take the case. If a woman could receive 4 million dollars for spilling a cup of coffee in her own lap, this should be worth at least as much.
But life is full of honest accidents resulting in superficial scrapes and bruises. It’s better for us (and better instruction for our children) to look for what we can learn from life’s bumps and knocks, not to look for whom we can blame and how much we can squeeze out of them.
The waiter returned, contrite and apologetic, perhaps more shaken than I was. “In twelve years this has never happened to me,” he said. Evidently, he also had a date with Providence. “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”
“I wouldn’t mind a scotch on the rocks.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
He did. It wasn’t four million dollars, but it was better than a knock on the head.
Rooting for Everyman
If you’re one of the disgruntled majority who feel they have no choice but to vote for one unfit presidential candidate against another who is even worse, a white knight may have appeared on the horizon.
Yes, I’m talking about Tom Kirkman, aka Kiefer Sutherland, aka Jack Bauer.
Okay, so he’s not a real person and he’s not really going to be the next president. But in this age of surreal politics and reality television, the lines between life and art have grown so fuzzy that we might as well blur them a little more.
Kiefer Sutherland’s new incarnation as Tom Kirkman is a kind of alter ego to Jack Bauer, hero of the iconic series “24.” Where Jack can fight his way out of any situation, Tom has probably never thrown a punch in his life; where Jack instantly assesses every situation and acts with confidence, Tom seems overwhelmed and indecisive; where Jack commands respect and awe, Tom evokes skepticism and doubt.
But all of this is what makes Tom Kirkman a more compelling hero than Jack Bauer. As an American James Bond, Jack is larger-than-life and therefore inaccessible. In contrast, Tom is as ordinary as any one of us – indeed, he could be any one of us. And that is precisely his appeal.
Rosh Hashanah and the Mysteries of the Universe
Originally published by Jewish World Review in 2003.
96% of the matter in the universe is invisible. Mysterious “dark energy” is pushing all of space apart. Empty space is not really empty, but filled with subatomic “foam.” At least seven parallel universes exist, each a trillionth the size of a proton.
Science fiction? Fantasy? The product of opium hallucinations?
Guess again. According to an article in U.S. News and World Report, these hypothesized phenomena represent the mainstream of current scientific thought.
In the wake of observations reported last March by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, astronomers and physicists are resorting to these and other fantastic models to explain anomalous temperature variations in the background radiation permeating the heavens.
And who knows? They may be right. After all, once upon a time a round earth, a heliocentric solar system, and manned flight were all scorned as flights of the wildest fancy. Perhaps entire universes really do exist, wrapped up in a particle of dust beneath your finger nail.
On the other hand, increasingly complex and convoluted theories begin to look like the frantic flailings of scientists drowning in the mysteries of human existence. Indeed, one noted physicist confessed that, if he’d been presented with these theories not long ago, “I’d either ask what you’ve been smoking or tell you to stop telling fairy tales.”
Of course, one almost has to feel sorry for these scientists. Every discovery, every revelation, every insight, opens up a new Pandora’s Box of inexplicable phenomena. A few short decades ago, we knew of about half a dozen known sub-atomic particles. Today there are hundreds, with the number growing all the time, and often only the haziest guesses as to why they exist. Relativity theory and quantum theory both seem to describe the workings of the universe, but only the most strained and unproven theory suggests how to unite these two approaches.
It’s almost enough to make one contemplate — dare we say it? — Divine Creation. Indeed, man’s desire to plumb the secrets of the universe is nothing new. Newton, Descartes, Galileo, Aristotle, all of these and many others grappled with physics and metaphysics in their labors to comprehend the vast expanse of time and space that stretches toward the boundaries of existence.
But long before the first scientist or philosopher raised his eyes to gaze into outer space and contemplate the stars, another man searched inner space seeking understanding. His name was Job.
A righteous man who lost his fortune, his family, and his health, Job questioned whether there was any rhyme or reason to explain the suffering of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked. And as he sank into the mire of self-pity and nihilism, a Voice from above answered him:
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” asked the Almighty. “What is the path where light dwells? And darkness, where is its place, that you may take it to its boundary, that you may understand the paths of its home?”
The Creator never explains Job’s suffering, but He does provide Job with the answer that restores his faith: The complexity of creation is not only more that you know, but more than you can begin to imagine. Every star above you in the sky, every drop of water in the sea, and every grain of sand upon the shore resides in its place and follows the course chosen for it; so too is every seeming whim of fate rather an unfathomable pulse from the primordial machine that steers the unfolding of eternity.
And so we say in the Rosh HaShanah liturgy, “This day is the anniversary of the beginning of Your handiwork, a remembrance of the First Day.” As we stand in the murky spiritual twilight between the end of one year and the start of another, we contemplate that amidst the mystery and uncertainty that surrounds us, one constant offers us security and safety if we take hold of it: the indivisible relationship between the Creator of all and His ultimate creation — Mankind, for whom He brought all else into being.
This day. This day of Rosh HaShanah begins a new year, a new season, a new opportunity to draw near to the Master of Creation. This day offers us a poignant reminder of how to cling to the godliness the resides within us, to strive to become more devoted in our relationships and less demanding in our expectations, more focused on others and less fixated on ourselves, less passionate about material gain and more ardent in our pursuit of spiritual fulfillment.
This day reminds us that we hold in our hands an awesome privilege, as well as an awesome responsibility. How willingly are we seduced into looking for simplistic solutions to the moral and ethical dilemmas that life throws at us day after day? How longingly do we embrace superficial cliches and bromides that urge us to pull the warm covers of apathy over our heads?
This day. Rosh HaShanah is our wake up call, and the sound of the shofar signals our reveille to open our eyes and behold the breathtaking magnificence that is Creation. And if our minds reel as we try to grasp the limitless expanse of the universe, we can yet grasp onto this certainty: that the One who placed us in its midst has revealed Himself through His Word and has given each of us a priceless gift, no less than the sand and the sea and the stars — an indispensable role to play in the completion of His masterpiece and the means through which we can become one with the infinite and with the divine.
Yonason Goldson 