Rabbi Adina Allen – Feminism and Religion

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.

In her book Pentimento, author and playwright Lillian Hellman describes a phenomenon that often occurs when we return to a piece of art we once worked on after much time has passed: “Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.” Hellman speaks of the way the aging paint allows for older layers to show through, offering an opportunity to see, in her words, “what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”

Like the painting Hellman describes, Torah, too, is a work in process. Layers and layers of interpretation have been added to it over time, according to the needs, desires, fears, and longings of those who devoted their lives to making meaning out of these sacred words. Some layers add to the beauty and power of the overall piece, strokes and shapes that bring the picture more clearly and compellingly into focus. And some accrue like varnish, making the painting hard and impenetrable. Each one of us is invited into this process of excavation, of peeling back layers of what we have been taught or what we think we know, and seeing, as Hellman writes, what is there for us now. And each of us is called to our creativity — to bring our brush back to the canvas anew, reencountering and reworking the stories, ideas, and images that lie at the very foundation of who we are and who we could be.