This is it, folks. The holiday season has ended for now, and we’re facing down the first full week of school since September. The change in routine of this season can be difficult and all of the days of rest can turn out to be pretty exhausting. But intermingled with the exhaustion is a sense of joy, community and a sort of resetting. I know that I am experiencing mixed emotions at the end of the holiday season. So I am going to keep my thoughts this week short, and hopefully sweet.
This week, we begin the weekly Torah reading cycle over from the beginning, Beresheet. As I’ve been studying with students in Kindergarten, first and second grade, this parsha details the creation of the world in six days, each day of creation summed up by God’s experience of it as tov, good, and the declaration “there was evening and there was morning day #”
This week I had several conversations with different people about why the sixth day ends slightly different. Not only does God look at all of creation and declare it tov me’od, very good. But the day is summed up, “there was evening and there was morning the sixth day.” The “the” constitutes just one extra letter “heh”, but in the context of the repetition, it stands out. One prominent midrash on this anomaly explains that the extra “heh” is a hint that all of creation is conditional on the sixth day, not of creation, but of the month of Sivan, many years later, when God gives the Jewish people the Ten commandmants and they accept them, thus entering into a formal and committed relationship with the Divine.
The midrash asserts that if we had refused this relationship, all of creation would have returned to the state of chaos that precedes God’s first declaration, “Let there be light!” While this midrash may seem, to the modern reader, a bit self centered and chutzpadik, it offers a motivation for God in creating the universe, the motivation to enter into relationship with human beings, which the midrash reads as fulfilled in the covenant at Sinai. It also points to the tendency of the world, and our lives, to return to a state of chaos, and the work that goes into continually creating order.
After the sixth day of creation, the Torah declares that the heavens and earth were finished. Immediately thereafter, it continues “God completed, on the seventh day, all of God’s work that God did, and God rested on the seventh day from working.” This leaves open, of course, the question of if the heavens and earth were finished in six days, what work did God finish on the seventh day. The simple answer, that the world was not complete without a day of rest, without God’s example of taking time to let the world be, holds, I believe, deep wisdom.
This time of year, there are many days of rest, many holy days, through which we feel both the joy of celebration, and the stress of seeing many elements of our lives descending into a more chaotic state than we are accustomed to. Parshat Beresheet comes to reassure us. The pauses in the work we do to create order are essential to the system. Were it not for the time that we take to build relationships within our families and communities, and with the Divine, the world might descend into a permanent state of chaos. Our holy days may be paradoxically refreshing and exhausting, joyous and chaotic. But this was written into the plan of creation, essential to the functioning of the world. We were never intended to fully succeed in creating order, just as God left of creating and allowed the world to sometimes just be, in moments of rest and joy.
May we all emerge into the newly available routine of full weeks and regular weekends, enriched by the total reset of a month full of holidays and the reminder of what chaos looks like. May we appreciate the order that may soon return, and trust the chaos that we plan to enjoy week to week.
Shabbat Shalom!