Let There Be Light

Rabbi Jill Crimmings 

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5778 

Let There Be Light 

As we sit together during High Holy Day services, our thoughts can easily skip from one thing to the next. We may be following along with a familiar tune, looking around at the people we haven’t seen in awhile, or letting our mind wander to our weekend plans or maybe even our grocery list. But when we focus on the text in the machzors in our hands... 

The weight of the liturgy can leave us trembling in our seats. Avinu Malkeinu, we all just read… Avinu Malkeinu, have mercy on us, save us, inscribe our names in the Book of Life. Regardless of our theology, it is impossible to hear these words and not consider our own mortality. In this coming year of 5778, who will live and who will die? We pray and we hope, that we, and our loved ones, will see another year; and yet each of us knows that none of us are immune from pain or strife, sickness or death. 

This past year, our congregation faced this difficult reality with the tragic loss of our Cantor, Sarah Lipsett-Allison, who was beloved by not only her family and friends, but by so many in our community. 

Cantor Lipsett-Allison’s death has been a difficult communal loss for Bet Shalom. We know, of course, that so many of you have also suffered personal losses of your own. Some of you may have lost someone you loved in the past year, and others are sitting here tonight worried about the difficulties that may come your way in the year ahead. Some are battling illnesses or struggling through a broken relationship. Some are facing difficulties at work or school. Some are caring for a loved one in need of physical, emotional, or spiritual healing. Some are struggling with infertility, others with a mental health issue. For some, it isn’t a personal tragedy or internal struggle. Instead, it is the weight of what is going on in the world around us, of being witnesses to the suffering of others that pulls us down into a feeling of hopelessness, desperation, and fear. 

And it is during these times that we turn to our tradition to guide us, searching for a glimmer of light in what can sometimes feel like a darkened world. On Rosh Hashanah we are celebrating the creation of the world, re-telling the stories of creation as described in the opening verses of the Torah. The first four verses of Torah, from the book of Genesis, read: 

When God began to create heaven and earth - the earth being chaotic and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water - God said, “Let there be light;” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. 

Many rabbinic commentators were struck by this initial description of earth as being “chaotic and void,” wondering whether chaos and void were pre-conditions to creation or part of God’s creation plan. Some commentators argue the former, that chaos and void existed first, and then God arrived, saw the mess, and decided to act… ultimately creating the earth that we know today. 

Others disagree. Rabbi Hezekiah ben Manoach says that the chaos and void were part of God’s initial creation. Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim Luntshitz agrees, saying that earth, by nature, is chaotic and full of void. This was simply the condition of the earth that God created. 

And then as the text continues, it is specifically and unequivocally from this state that God created light in the world. God did not take away the chaos and the void and replace it with light. Rather, God added light to creation, to sit alongside the darkness. In this way, these opening verses of Torah teach one of the first and foundational lessons of life… That the world, our world, is and always will be full of darkness and void and our job is to find ways to create light to sit beside it. 

Of course, there exists extensive scholarship on coping with grief, written not just by scholars and psychologists, but also by people who unfortunately had to learn by doing. In their new book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant discuss this process in what feels like a modern midrash to those opening verses of the creation story. Sheryl recounts her personal journey of grief after the tragic death of her husband, Dave Goldberg, and describes how she found herself living in a life that would only ever be her “Option B” world. Option A, having Dave back, was never going to happen, and yet she was still alive, and had to figure out how to live in this dark place. 

Sandberg and Grant describe a number of hurdles people face when they are experiencing loss, a setback at work or school, a broken relationship, or any other kind of struggle. The first of these hurdles is what they refer to as “personalization.” They describe how many people facing adversity blame themselves, regardless of how irrational that may be. We tend to fixate on the things we think we could have done differently, as opposed to accepting a worldview that reflects a reality where sometimes bad things happen to good people. 

Perhaps, as the creation story suggests, the world is simply a chaotic place, a place that is filled with inexplicable void and darkness from which none of us can escape. When God decided to add light to creation, God did so by speaking the well known words, “vayahi or, let there be light.” 

Both Sandberg and Grant, and also the rabbis of our tradition, discuss the significance of speech in the process of bringing light into the world. Rabbi Hezekiah ben Manoach notes that God spoke these words before creating humans or even animals, and so God was not speaking to a partner or companion. When God spoke these words out loud, God was actually speaking to God’s self, as an articulation, or declaration of belief. Rabbi Manoach therefore teaches that whenever a human being expresses thoughts verbally, it is at this point that her thoughts enter the realm of existence, regardless of whether others hear them. Rabbi Larry Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, has declared that if you can’t articulate your thoughts, either out loud or on paper, then those thoughts don’t actually exist in the world. 

This is a difficult reality to accept. Aren’t our thoughts real, even if they only ever exist within our own heads? How many times have we all debated whether to speak up and share the truth we are formulating in our brains, ultimately opting to remain silent, never bringing those thoughts into existence? 

In their book, Sandberg and Grant write at length about the need to not only process grief outloud, but also the need to articulate the idea that hope and light are possible. Sheryl talked about the comfort and support she has found in sharing her story with others, both in being able to connect to those who have experienced parallel loss, and also by teaching others how and what she needed. Sandberg talked about how many well-meaning friends and colleagues didn’t know what to say to her, and ended up avoiding her out of fear of saying the wrong thing. She learned that by speaking up and guiding people she was able to more authentically engage in the world… telling people to stop asking, “how are you?” and start asking, “how are you doing TODAY?” This slight change acknowledged to that she wasn’t okay and provided an invitation to go beyond pleasantries and speak her reality authentically… 

Sandberg also describes the many letters she received from people who told her that it would never get better, that 30 or 40 years later, they were still living in the same void as they were a month after they experienced a tragic loss. In turning to her co-author Adam Grant with fear that she would never again find joy, he dropped everything to travel to see her and convince her that if she wanted to find light and joy, the first step would be speaking and believing that it is possible. God could not create light without first declaring the possibility that light could exist in the world. 

The same is true for us. We cannot see change in ourselves and in the world if we don’t start by speaking the change we want to see. This means opening up to ourselves, and then to the world around us. To get past the pleasantries that define our Minnesota Niceness, and enter a realm of intimacy that can deepen our connections with one another, and ultimately lead to greater fulfillment and joy. 

This is true for the challenges we face as individuals and also as a community. As individuals, it is up to us to decide which struggles we will share out loud with others, and which struggles we will share out loud with God. As a community, however, we need to work together to decide how we will collectively speak the light we want to see in the world. At Bet Shalom this means we need to acknowledge that this is our first High Holy Days in 18 years without Cantor Lipsett-Allison. 

We need to know that it is okay to acknowledge the void and the pain that so many of us feel. At the same time, we need to be able to articulate our desire for light. One way we can do this is by saying out loud how blessed 

we are to have Cantor Shore here with us for these holidays. To give her permission to be our light this year, to help us find the hope and joy we want to see for ourselves, our congregation, and the world in the year to come. 

In the creation story, the next verse after God declares, “let there be light,” states: God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin, wrote that we can understand this verse in two ways. The first understanding is that the light was good for the goal for which it was needed. Even though the main purpose of light is not to create goodness in the world, nevertheless, light happened to be a good thing. The second understanding is that light is intrinsically a good thing in the world. That when we look at all of God’s creations, some are definitively better than others. In separating light from darkness, God was declaring that both good and bad exist in the world, and the best way to fully experience the joy of light is to separate it from the pain of darkness. 

Judaism has evolved around this concept of separation. We separate that which is holy from that which is profane, we separate Shabbat from the rest of the week, we even separate ourselves from other people, declaring the uniqueness of the people of Israel and our special relationship with God. 

This structure of separation began in the creation story to allow us to experience these different aspects of creation more deeply. In order to do this… to allow the darkness to envelop us, and to also soak in the beauty that lights up our world, we have to focus our attention without judging ourselves or others along the way. Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant suggest that one of the biggest barriers to allowing ourselves to living deeply is the fear of failing. We are so scared of how others will judge us, or how we will be able to handle another personal defeat that we decide to do nothing. The risk, they remind us, is always present… but the failure to try will no doubt leave us trapped in the void. 

As we enter these High Holy Days, my prayer is that we will each find the strength to identify the chaos that fills our lives... That we will overcome our hesitancies to share our struggles and also our dreams with those we love. I pray that each and every one of us will see a sweet new year that is filled with abundant light and joy. May we join together as one on this prayer of ascent… lifting our eyes toward the mountains and allowing God to be our help.