Even Now: Creativity, Possibility and the Renewal of the World by Rabbi Adina Allen

October 3, 2024 // 1 Tishre, 5785

“Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the creation of the world,” wrote the Eish Kodesh, Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Writing at a time of unimaginable suffering, even against the backdrop of impossible circumstances, he knew this moment, the day in which we inhabit right now, to be one of creativity, possibility and renewal. 

This theme of creativity and Rosh Hashanah is perhaps expressed nowhere more poignantly than in the phrase Hayom Harat Olam. One of the many names by which Rosh Hashanah is known, these words come from one of the holiday’s most ancient piyyutim, recited in the sacred center of the Rosh Hashanah service, the haunting, evocative Musaf Amidah. To conclude each of the three special sections for Rosh Hashanah: Malchuyot (Sovereignty), Zichronot (Remembrances), and Shofarot (marking the appearances and meanings of shofar across Torah), the shofar is sounded in the proscribed pattern — wholeness, breakage, shattering, wholeness, followed by Hayom Harat Olam.

Like the Eish Kodesh teaches, today is the anniversary of the creation of the world. The Kitzur Ba’al HaTurim teaches that the words In the beginning, created, have a numerical equivalent of ‘On Rosh Hashanah was created’ (the world). Yet distinct from both the Eish Kodesh and Beresheit, here the image for how creation happens is visceral and vivid: that of giving birth.

By invoking birth, all of the holiday’s Torah and Haftorah readings become threaded together and deftly woven into the liturgy, stitched into the very heart of our Rosh Hashanah prayers. We call to mind Sarah who had long ago given up on the ability to create new life, whose laughter in the face of seeming-impossibility opens something within God and within her, this sign of surprise, flow and pleasure where the body contradicts the mind transforming her life and forever changing the story of our people. And Hannah, who refuses to settle for what anyone, most especially the men she encounters, tell her is impossible and turns to God in humility and with a similar audacity to Sarah’s laughter, in fervent prayer born from the deepest recesses of her heart. We feel in these stories the longing and the disbelief; the struggle and the surprise that birth can bring.

Here, today is not the day of conception, nor the day of childrearing, it is the day of giving birth: visceral, embodied, cosmic and mundane all at once. Just as we are invited to read ourselves into any character in Torah, so too can each of us see ourselves as one giving birth. We hear these words calling on the creative power of each one of us, expanding the notion of birth beyond the literal to all the myriad ways we bring that which is new and needed into the world: new ideas, new parts of self, new understandings, new paradigms, new beliefs. We are reminded of the ways that birth of any kind requires the powerful combination of total surrender and intense efforting all at once; it can be scary and overwhelming; it takes opening up and letting go, it is exhausting and all-encompassing and taps us into an inner well of strength and fortitude that we may have never known we had.

Today the world is born — and it is born anew through us. In the midst of grief as deep as Hannah’s and disbelief as all-encompassing as Sarah’s, Rosh Hashanah comes each year and places the stories of these women in our mouths, echoes of their prayers and laughter, sorrow and power in our hearts. In Jewish tradition, our season of renewal doesn’t wait for us to feel ready and capable, or for the time when our struggles are resolved and the world is at peace. It comes when that thin crescent of Tishre moon first appears in the sky. Amidst all our sorrow, heaviness, hurt and tears, hope and fears, tiny silver glow amidst the vast darkness. 

In his formative work Halakhic Man, Rabbi Joseph Soleveitchik writes, “In sounding the shofar we express the desire to…extricate [ourselves] from the straits of contraction–the Divine realm of strength–and enter into the wide spaces of expansion–the Divine realm of grace.” Today, the sounds of the shofar are our own cries as we open to the depths within us and make way for new life, new worlds, new ways of seeing, believing, relating and doing to emerge. Today we will sound the shofar 100 times: shattering, sobbing, bleating, resonating through the air, vibrating and recalibrating the pulse of our heart. Of these blasts, tradition teaches: ninety-nine of death and one of life. Of these 100 blasts, ninety-nine are cries of death and/yet 1 is that newborn cry of life. If we stop listening, tuning out after so many sounds of loss, we miss the miraculous, magnificent, cry of life. Like Sarah, like Hannah, perhaps we are in despair or disbelief, it may be that we long ago gave up, and yet, Hayom Harat Olam. Today the world is born anew — through me and through you. Tekiyah gedolah.

Ken yehi ratzon. May it be so.

BIO: Rabbi Adina Allen is a spiritual leader, author, and educator. She is cofounder and creative director of Jewish Studio Project (JSP), an organization that is seeding a future in which every person is connected to their creativity as a force for healing, liberation and social transformation. Adina is the author of The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creative through Ancient Jewish Wisdom (Ayin Press, 2024), from which this excerpt is taken.