These are the Days of Awe. Grand days. And while we think of them as being about introspection and atonement, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this holiday, Rosh Hashanah, has a cosmic quality to it. Its tone is not somber but majestic. In our mystical understanding it is our re-crowning of the Divine. It is Yom Teruah, the day of the shofar blast which, in eras before amplified music, you could imagine might make you quiver in your boots. It is a day of awe.
On Rosh Hashanah every year we say hayom harat olam – the world is born today, or reborn today, or continuing to be born today. And because olam in Hebrew can mean either the world or the infinite Universe or eternity, you could also translate hayom harat olam as “this day births the infinite.” Rosh Hashanah is caught up in the bigness of space and time.
Many of our Jewish holidays draw us into connection with stories and events of our Jewish history. But this one, Rosh Hashanah, whisks us right back to Creation itself, to the Big Bang, to whatever cosmic event started it all off. Pulling us way out of ourselves, and reanimating the awesome, the majestic, the cosmic, in us.
Because the cosmic is indeed in us. A fact that we overlook nearly all the time. The cosmic feels not quite relevant to our lives. Cosmic scale is hard to get our brains around. And the equally vast and marvelous microscopic world seems only relevant when it results in Covid on Rosh Hashanah. Mostly we live our lives in between, at human scale, unaware of the infinite or the infinitessimal. Here in this human scale is where we busy ourselves with love and life, family and work, aches and pains, entertainment, politics, profit, and culture. This human scale is entirely consuming; it is the scale where our actions and ideas and words seem to have impact.
But Rosh Hashanah startles us with the shofar blast and cracks open the shell of the familiar world, inviting us to remember that we are part of a vast Cosmos. We are the vast cosmos.
This came home to me over the summer with the publication of images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. I don’t know about you, but I was hooked on them. In this era of computer-generated imagery and animation, it takes a while to understand how remarkable these actual images are. They are computer-modified, translating wavelengths of light beyond human vision into color that we can see. But they are actual images, not something out of Skywalker Ranch.
Once you start looking at them, and trying to make sense of what you’re seeing, you are swept into an awareness so vast it makes your brain hurt. There are nice new pictures of the planets in our solar system, with new details – rings around Jupiter, who knew? Then there are pictures of planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy – exoplanets as we call them. Then there are nebulae that are immense star incubators. And then, beyond all this, there are other galaxies, at unfathomable distances. With the most distant of them, the light has taken so long to reach us, that what we are looking at are old snapshots from close to the Big Bang. And what a gift, that here we are in this moment, in the right place and time, with the right technology to receive and translate that light, to read that greeting card from the beginning of time.
I suppose absorbing these images could have the effect of making one feel small. Because truly our size is so insignicant with respect to all of this. At galactic scale we are microscopic, we are subatomic.
But I find it has the opposite effect on me. It makes me feel bigger. Connected to a vast and still unfolding universe. I am a citizen of a bustling Cosmos. I try to imagine the planets out there, wondering how many of them are in the sweet spot to bear life – sweet spot in terms of elements, temperature, gravity, stability. And that’s just the sweet spot for life as we know it. What other kinds of life could there be that we haven’t had cause to imagine?
Feeling like a citizen of the Cosmos lifts my vision. Makes me feel less alone, less trapped. It makes me see the trees and squirrels and starfish and amoebas of this planet not as strange things, alien and incomprehensibly different from me, but instead as fellow earthlings, fellow astronauts on this spaceship of Earth. In moments when I feel the annoyance of little things happening at human scale, I think about the James Webb Space Telescope images and I begin to breathe differently. I am no longer caught in the dense thicket of my own problems. I am instead feeling into galactic scale; I am an agent of the Earth branch of the much bigger experiment of Olam, of Cosmos. Or, if I’m really lucky, duality slips away and I know I am Cosmos, inseparable from all of it.
Now this is the point where you might be wondering what is Jewish about this. It’s Rosh Hashanah and you are reasonably expecting the rabbi to give over some Jewish.
Judaism has always noticed and cared about the stars. The stars of the heaven have been our regular Torah metaphor for the uncountable. Our ancestors in antiquity knew many of the planets and assigned them as guardians over the different hours of the day and days of the week. They knew and clocked the Zodiac and would create images of the twelve signs in mosaic on the floors of their synagogues. Talmud worries about whether we are stationary and the stars are in motion, or whether they are stationary and we are in motion.
And the old midrashic chestnut that many of you have heard that there is no blade of grass that doesn’t have its own angel hitting it with a stick and saying, “Grow, grow!” Well, that is a loose translation. The Hebrew doesn’t say malakh, “angel.” It says mazal. There is no blade of grass without a mazal, a star in the firmament, that whacks it and tells it to grow. And from that you might have now figured out that when we say mazeltov, we are actually wishing each other the providence of a favorable star.
And then there is the matter of our Hebrew calendar and our cycle of holy days. All of which connect to our shared story of who we are. But our holidays don’t just live at a cultural level. We have Shabbat which, when you think about it, marks every seventh rotation of the Earth on its axis. We have Pesach and Shavuot and Sukkot and these very High Holy Days that occur at specific conjunctions of the Earth’s orbit around the sun and the moon’s path around the Earth. Calling this “calendar” makes it too mundane. Our cycle of holy days is sacred astronomy.
This universe spun out our galaxy, our Solar System, our particular orbit, our conditions, our evolutionary journey. There is nothing here that does not come from that beginning. Our forms might have evolved, but not our atoms. Those come from the Big Bang itself. “We are stardust,” Joni says, “billion year old carbon.”
So a question I might ask is, “Is our Judaism big enough? Is our Judaism galactic?” This was a question Adam Shemper raised with me a few weeks ago. It’s true that we think of our Judaism in ways that are contained. Contained within our stories, told usually inside buildings and rooms. At least for Jews of the Diaspora, it takes Sukkot (or COVID) to force us to do Jewish practice outside at all.
Inside our homes and synagogues, our Jewish lives only have to account for the specificity of our people, and our shared story. But outside, our Judaism has to have something to say about the hills and the trees and the trout in the stream. And if we have any notion of a Divine, it must be a notion big enough to incorporate not just the Jewish people and not just humanity and not just this planet but the entire Universe.
Psalm 147 says, moneh mispar lakokhavim l’khulam shemot yikra. God counts the stars and calls them by their names. This is the psalmist inviting us to look higher and beyond the life of the day-to-day and beyond the life of this Earth and to see God there as well. Or as our medieval, mystical Zohar says, M’malei kol almin v’sovev kol almin. You, God, fill all the worlds and surround all the worlds. Umibal’adekha eyn shum m’tziut klal. And without you there is no reality at all. That is, God does not just fill and enfold the Universe; God is the Universe – every star, planet, nebula, and us too.
So there you have it. The James Webb Telescope is behind a renewed sense of wonder that I’ve been feeling these last months. Mah nora hamakom hazeh, how wondrous is this place, as Jacob says in the Torah portion we’ll read tomorrow. I look at images of the Cartwheel Galaxy and say, mah nora hamakom hazeh.
Holding this expanded sense of wonder with me has made my days more sacred, more exciting, without anything else having changed at all. It affects my dreams and my meditations and my prayers.
It also raises for me a different kind of accountability. The distances in space are great. The Earth experiment will play out without intervention by any extraterrestrial species, despite our imaginative sci-fi film life. But I find that our being just one experiment in this Universe makes me not want to be the experiment that failed. It makes me want to do my best, it makes me want us to do our best. That if we are part of a cosmic community, and we are the only part of the cosmic community that we will ever know, that we do our best. That we do our planet proud. So that when the light our Sun emits today reaches the clever space telescopes of other civilizations on far planets deep in our galaxy, although the light might be mute, we will know that it conveys that here, in this system, there is a planet that figured it out.
This world is sacred. These lives of ours are sacred. We are stardust. And we are love and joy and possibility. And so is everything on this planet. We are on a galactic course to who knows where. We are the Universe, Earth Branch.
And on this holy day, when we say, Hayom harat olam, today the world is being born, there is also an invitation to teshuvah. To return. An invitation to return to our primordial, galactic, universal knowing. To feel our way into knowing that we are part of something immeasurably bigger than us. And that that makes us more accountable rather than less.
So let us tend to the sacred in our lives by remembering that we belong not only to our families and our communities and our nation-states, but to this planet and this galaxy and this Cosmos. We are one corner of the Milky Way, at one corner of the Universe. We may never meet our fellow travelers from off-world, but we have plenty of beloved fellow travelers here on Earth. May we honor all life and see the Divine in all of it. And then may we act accordingly.
Hayom harat olam. This is the day the Cosmos is born.
Mah nora hamakom hazeh – how wonderful is this place?
Shanah tovah.