Rabbi's Chayva's Chat

How often have you been dumbstruck by the beauty of the world, or by its injustice? 

Rabbi Shai Held teaches that those spiritual feelings transcend human experience. This week, I had the opportunity to learn from Rabbi Held as he taught the Northern California Board of Rabbis, and I want to share some of his teaching with you.

The first days of creation are “a hymn to biodiversity,” as each element is created and celebrated as טוב tov, good. We are familiar with God’s pleasure, expressed by the repetition of “and it was good.” What we fail to see, though, is God’s surprise. 

There is a phrase in Torah that Rabbi Held has found almost always indicates a tone of surprise: וירא ____ והנה  vayar ____ vehinei____ , He saw X, here was Y. We see this phrase in this week’s Parshat Vayera, when Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac but he looks up, “and he saw: here, a ram…” to be offered instead of his son (Genesis 22:13, translated by Everett Fox). We see it in the story of the burning bush: “[Moses] saw: now here, the bush is burning with fire, but the bush is not consumed!” (Exodus 3:2, trans. Fox). The first time the phrase appears, however, long precedes these instances. In Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that God had made, and here, it was tov me’od, very good! And there was evening, and there was morning, a sixth day.”

I feel that sense of surprise and wonder when I look out from Mount Tam and see the blanket of fog beneath me; when I see the evening light illuminate an oak tree amidst the dusty forest; or when I spot a family of deer grazing in the grass of the hills. But as Dacher Keltner teaches in his book Awe, which I spoke about on Yom Kippur last year, the experience of awe can include dismay or shock too.

There is a midrash that says that God continuously created and destroyed worlds until this one, when God finally got it right. (A good thing to remember on days when it feels like you can’t get anything right!) That’s why God was so surprised - it finally worked! But sadly, its perfection didn’t last. The next time we see those words of surprise are in Genesis 6:12, when, in the age of Noah, “God saw the earth, and here, it had gone to ruin, for all flesh had ruined its way upon the earth.” God had told Adam and Eve to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth, but humans had multiplied their wickedness and filled the earth with lawlessness. In God’s shock and dismay, God prepared to destroy this world and start anew, as God had done before. Noah’s goodness, however, stayed God’s hand, and Noah’s post-diluvial sacrifice pleased and comforted God enough that God promised to never destroy the world again.

Rabbi Held suggested that God accepted the world with all its faults; instead of seeking something perfect, God changed God’s own lens and strategy. Rabbi Laura Geller, whom many of you met on Yom Kippur, observed that in order to change, God needed to feel seen and feel safe, which Noah provided through his sacrifice. I hope that all of us receive such offerings, and in turn are able to offer the same to each other, so that we might be able to continuously reorient ourselves to this ever-changing world with awe and with love.