Rabbi Weitzman: Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5787

Begin with Bet

Lately I've noticed many of you remarking on how busy I must be, or telling me you know how much I have to do. And the answer is yes, I'm busy. But so are all of you. I'll admit I have the unfortunate personality trait of picking up one thing, starting it, getting distracted, and putting it down to finish later. Thankfully, when it comes to writing sermons, I've learned that starting early gives me plenty of time to catch up with myself.

But that need to fully complete a task, to check everything off, has never really been at the core of who I am. It turns out that actually suits me well as a rabbi, because this job makes it nearly impossible to check everything off by the end of the day. There is always one more phone call to make, one more sermon to write, one more visit to pay. And sometimes I'm in the middle of one thing when a lifecycle emergency needs to take precedence over all of it. This job has taught me to sit with myself even when there are many unfinished things still waiting to be done.

The irony, of course, is that what I accept and allow in myself, I don't always appreciate in others. Anyone who knows anything about therapy knows that the things that bother us most in other people, their little mannerisms, usually say more about what we haven't made peace with in ourselves than about the other person.

I've apparently passed along my genetic gift for starting and never finishing to my own kids. There are two of them in my house, and when I ask them to clean their rooms or put something away, they get close enough, but never quite perfect. Now I will say in a family of four you might realize which one of us makes lists and checks them off, and which three just closes the door on the mess and calls it done.

And here's what I've learned watching all of us: looking like something is close enough, or good enough, is not the same as it actually being done. It turns out I'm not the only one around here who leaves things unfinished. This congregation has been doing it for seventy years.

When our congregation moved to 100 Academy Road, the building was dedicated on Erev Rosh Hashanah, sixty-nine years ago, and it wasn't finished. Only the Sanctuary was done; our Religious School was still moving into an unfinished wing. It was nearly to this same night, on this very holiday, that this house was dedicated though unfinished, and the people came anyway. They didn't wait until everything was perfect. They came inside.

And this congregation wasn't built in a day, either. Long before this building, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise served as rabbi of Beth El and later founded Anshe Emeth, two congregations that weren't always at peace. Tensions ran high enough that on Rosh Hashanah in 1850, the police were called to stop a fight breaking out at services. 

And yet in December of 1885, those same two congregations chose to share the Beth of one and the Emeth of the other, and become Congregation Beth Emeth, the House of Truth.

Two communities became one. And they didn't erase what came before them. They built something from it. In our liturgy we read the words Hayom Harat Olam, not that the world was born already, but that the world is being born again, today and every day, over and over again. And if you think about it, every time, every day, every year, another chapter of this congregation's world is exactly that: it is a changing story, with another chapter, another turning page, another step forward.

In this Sanctuary, we have generational members, first-time attendees, people grieving, people celebrating, people quietly wondering if there's still a place for them in the congregation as it evolves. Whatever stage of life you're in: a new baby, a first Rosh Hashanah after a loss, a b'nai mitzvah year in progress, or just here for any number of reasons, today is a fresh page for all of us.

I think many of us become part of a community because we like knowing things will stay the same. And in a sense, that's true, this congregation will always be Congregation Beth Emeth. But how it looks has certainly changed over the years: from the early days of no yarmulkes, to a different building, to new families joining, to new faces in our office, to, if you've been here for many years, another new rabbi.

Yet the idea that things should stay the same isn't how God designed the world. Look at the very end of Genesis 1: our creation story ends with "very good," not "finished." It never says the world is perfect. And it's not just an ancient claim. Every single morning, not only today, we say it again, in the blessing over creation, the Yotzer Or: God is the one who "renews every day, continually, the work of creation."¹ Ma'aseh bereishit. Not renewed once. Renewed daily.

There's a song that says this better than I ever could, words that will always be a central core memory for me sitting in the pews while growing up. Here I invited the congregation to join me in singing "This Is Very Good."²

"God took clay from earth's four corners" isn't just poetry. It's a teaching from the Talmud, Sanhedrin 38a, that the dust of the first human being came from every corner of the earth, so that no person, no people, could ever say, "you're not made of what I'm made of."³ We are all clay from the same four corners.

And then Genesis gives human beings another extraordinary role. God creates the world, but God doesn't finish it. In Genesis 2, we begin to see the creation of animals and trees, and yet there is still no one there to till the ground and work this creation. It is not until the creation of humankind that God brings the animals to the human beings, to see what they would call them. God does not name the creatures of the land, the fish of the sea. It is for us to decide. God delegates the most defining creative act. For if God were omnipotent, we would not need to be potent. If God were all-powerful, then you and I would have no power in this world. God leaves something unfinished, and gives us a role in finishing it.

The oft-quoted text from Pirkei Avot says: "You are not obligated to complete the work, nor are you free to desist from it."⁴ Lo alecha. You don't have to finish it. But you also don't get to walk away.

Now one of my favorite teachers was Rabbi Bernard Zlotowitz, z"l, who used to tell a story about creation, a riff on an old midrash.⁵ It went something like this: After the Torah was finished, all of the letters asked God why God chose the letter Bet to begin the Torah, and not Aleph, which is the first letter of God's own name, and the first letter of the aleph bet. God looked down upon the letters and said that the letter perfectly designed to begin the Torah is the one that has a top, a back, and a bottom. It is open only toward the front. It is that idea of openness and moving forward that God chose to begin the Torah with, because we don't get to decide what came before us. We only get to build from this moment on.

The Bet is also shaped like a bayit, a house. The Torah opens with a house, a place that needs to be built piece by piece from the ground up. In Gematria the letter Bet has a numerical value of two, because it reminds us that the world requires partnership. One person alone isn't yet a world. One person alone can't build a world. Just like Adam in the Garden of Eden, we also need partners.

I also like to remind myself that the word for blessing, bracha, begins with the letter Bet. The word for curse, arur, begins with Aleph. The simple act of creation begins deliberately in blessing. So, when we build, when we create, when we begin anything, let us do so with blessing.

And that brings us back to this house. Beth. Emeth. House. Truth. It's not a coincidence. This congregation's name is a claim: we are still building the house, and building it honestly, together, is what makes us partners in an unfinished creation, not occupants of a finished one. Remember what I said earlier: if God were omnipotent, we would not need to be potent. Same teaching, two different centuries, two different languages, not by being right, but by being true.

And truth also means being honest about where we are. The last eighteen months have been exactly that kind of building. We welcomed a new executive director. We welcomed new staff. We welcomed Cantor Sharon Kohn back, and we welcomed a new assistant rabbi with Rabbi Mandell. We replaced our aging HVAC system with the generosity of our members and the strength of our endowment. In the upcoming spring, we will replace the roof so that Steve can finally get rid of all the buckets. After that, the parking lot. After that, the windows around this very Sanctuary. We will continue to build for our future.

So many of our staff are new, and inside all that change, there have been moments when we, as a team, missed the mark: a call that didn't get returned, a visit that didn't happen when it should have. I want to name that plainly, the way today asks us to. Because being a house of truth doesn't mean pretending that everything is perfect. It means telling the truth about what is good, and telling the truth about what still needs to be built. We know mistakes have been made: arur. And still, we move forward with blessing: bracha. Like the Bet. That's what a blessing does. It keeps moving forward, past the person who first spoke it.

This past year, this congregation has been asking itself the same question our community faced in 1885, and has faced every year since: Who do we want to be? There have been meetings, letters, a task force, all of it in service of that question. Beth Emeth has been blessed with steady, forward-thinking leadership for nearly 190 years. Now it's our turn to answer the call.

Yet, whenever a community asks "what should we become," someone always hears "what are we leaving behind." That's not what this is about. We are a congregation that builds upon building upon building. It is why we continue to refresh and reimagine, not just our programming, but our sacred space. You just heard the list. We will make sure this building will be here not just for this generation, but for generations to come. And we will prepare a refurbished foundation for futures beyond our own.

A house does not stop being a house just because someone adds a room or an addition. It stops being a house, being a home, when no one keeps living in it. That's probably why so many of us still feel a connection to that original building, even though there are new people inside it. It's still Beth Emeth, and it probably always will be.

Think back to the beginning. God did not simply speak the human being into existence the way God spoke light, or sky, or sea. Genesis tells us God formed the human by hand, the same word Torah uses for a potter shaping clay, molding a body out of dust, out of the ground itself. And then God did something closer still: God breathed into that body, and only then did it become a living soul. Hands, and breath. Labor, and voice. That is how the first human being was made, not spoken about from a distance, but built up close, and given a voice by God's own.

Which brings us back to where we started. If God were omnipotent, we would not need to be potent. God used hands to shape us and breath to wake us, and then handed both back to us: the hands to keep building, the voice to keep naming, the labor to keep filling in everything that "very good" left unfinished.

So here is what I want to ask of you, not just to think about, but to do. This week, we begin the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Awe. Ten days is really not long enough to finish anything. It was never supposed to be. But it is long enough to start. It is long enough to name something to begin.

So, name one thing. Somewhere in your own life: a relationship, a habit, an apology owed, a piece of unfinished business you've been carrying. Whatever it is, name the one room in the house of yourself that is "very good," but not finished. Not your whole life. One room. And before Yom Kippur, take one real step into it. Not a resolution. An act. Not perfect, good enough, and real.

And also name one thing here, in this house, that you would like to begin. Name one way you will show up for what this congregation is building right now: a conversation with the task force, an hour volunteered, a return to something you'd let go of. Not a donation to the idea. A hand on the work. Because that's what we do in a house. We show up. We build. We live in it.

And there's the other side of the Bet, if you look at it: yes, there's a door moving out. But it could also be a door which moves in, an invitation to be with us, as we have for generations. Come inside.

This blessed building, this blessed family, this blessed community is also very good.

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1. From the first blessing before the morning Shema (the Yotzer Or): “ha-mechadesh be-tuvo b’chol yom tamid ma’aseh vereishit,” standard in the daily liturgy.
2. (Klepper & Stern, 1995)
3. Talmud, Sanhedrin 38a. The Gemara there debates where Adam’s dust was gathered from and concludes it came from every part of the earth, specifically so no nation could claim its own origin was more exalted than another’s.
4. Pirkei Avot 2:16 (numbered 2:21 in some editions), attributed to Rabbi Tarfon.
5. The underlying midrash on why the Torah opens with Bet rather than Aleph is in Bereishit Rabbah (Genesis Rabbah) 1:10, attributed there to Rabbi Yona in the name of Rabbi Levi.