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"The world has changed; I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air." This is how the Lord of the Rings Trilogy movies begin, with Galadriel, the ancient sage, declaring that the world has somehow diminished, that something has receded. In this week’s Torah portion Noach, with the Great Flood, the question the Torah asks through the narrative is, can we truly ever fix what is broken? Can we ever truly begin again? The question seems so razor sharp this year with hope for a better year locked in a struggle with the darkness of the past, like two entwined battling dragons from a Tibetan rice print.
Consumed with this question, one phrase jumped out at me during the High Holidays. It wasn’t a phrase from the prayers themselves, but rather a note in the margin of the Lev Shalem Machzor (High Holiday Prayer Book) in a section about Teshuva, repentance, the central theme of Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur. The quote came from Eli Wiesel’s writings about the Torah: "G-d gave Adam a secret—and that secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again". I had forgotten that Professor Weisel said this. Reading the quote brought it all back to me. The long table in the seminar at Boston University, the students clustered around the soft-spoken, delicate but strong teacher and writer, whose eyes seemed both extinguished with sorrow but bright with hope at the same time. The gentle humor and eagerness to hear from his students.
Not beginning, but beginning again. It’s why the Torah doesn’t start with Aleph, the first letter, but with Bet, the second letter. Beresheet- בראשית. In the beginning. Because even that beginning wasn’t the beginning, but the rebeginning. The Torah stories are always about a great start, then a failure. The sin of the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood and the destruction and reconstitution of the world, the Golden Calf, losing the Promised Land and having to wander for forty years, the Exile and Return. We are a people who seem to fail and fall over and over and yet still persist, rise again, begin again. At age 21, when I first heard this teaching or at age 65, when a quick glance at the prayerbook brought it all back to me, the power and relevance of this truth is undiminished. Rabbi Nachman, whom I also studied with Professor Wiesel, spoke of falls and rises every day, every hour, every minute.
The strange thing is, I discover as I look back and ahead, that if I were to explain what this teaching means to me personally, I might put it differently:
whenever and whatever we go through, don’t ever ask if it matters. Instead, make it matter. On Yom Kippur, we don’t just confess our sins. We lift them up to G-d, we offer them; yes, even our sins, the worst of the worst of our actions, words and thoughts. If we do that with sincere regret and will and determination, even our worst moment becomes transformed into a ladder to greatness.
No one’s life goes smoothly or the way that we thought it would. The wisdom of maturity might claim that the most important thing is to learn to compromise. I must reject that outright. No compromise, no retreat, no surrender. We owe our dreams that much. We do not compromise but we do learn. We do change. And allowing our changes to happen without feeling that we’ve abandoned or betrayed our dreams is perhaps the essence of staying true to them and to our deepest selves.
In this week's Parsha, the Dove brings Noah a message: an olive branch. What does it mean? The Olive in Judaism is known not so much as a food but as the source of light through olive oil. But the olive does not yield its oil easily. It must be beaten out, crushed, pulverized. The olive is the raw material of light but only arduous human partnership with G-d through hard and bitter labor creates the oil of illumination. Like so many of the lessons of Judaism, the answer turns back on the questioner. Can we begin again? Yes. If we will it.
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