Was it Good or Was it Bad? (Breishit)

Yesterday I saw a meme: “Sorry I didn’t answer your text messages. It’s been a Jewish holiday for the past thirty days.”

It’s truuueeee!

Every year since I started observing all the Jewish holidays, I’ve been floored by the intensity of them and how exhausted I am by the end.

Were they good? Well, they were definitely different this year—which is good; a little more ease being with others in person. I know what I need and want now, which is also a good change.

This past Tuesday in the park, on Sh’mini Atzeret, the second-to-last holiday in the fall cycle, we prayed for rain. This custom is tied to the arid climate of the Middle East, but we still do it here in the Diaspora.

Rain was actually predicted for New York City that day, but I really thought it would hold off. That’s what my phone was implying, in any event, but you can’t really trust your iPhone to be terribly accurate about the weather. It’s inconsistent from phone to phone, and sometimes it says it’s raining when it’s actually sunny!

The accuracy of technology aside, we had prayed for rain, and it started drizzling. We giggled. It was good.

In fact, it didn’t seem so bad at first, and then, as we were going through the Yizkor service and the rituals for remembering lost ones, (yizkor means remembering), it started to really pour. We stood under a Ginkgo tree, which was good but not shelter enough to keep us dry anymore. We felt the magic of heavy rain, which was good.

We were chilled by the time we headed towards home, but there’s something thrilling and invigorating about being caught in a heavy downpour. By that point, there were only three of us huddled together in person and one other on Zoom (the group I led was no very small to begin with). We were soaked through and high on singing and connecting, and I felt giddy and alive. It felt really good.

And we laughed about being careful what you pray for.

If only it were as easy as a prayer and a few words to change the weather and the general course of things.

On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing that our words aren’t as effectual as we sometimes think.

When we look back on this past year, we mostly think of it as hard and bad, and we’ve named it thus.

We’ve labeled it, and thus it is so.

Or, the opposite happens; overloaded on fatigue around how hard the year has been and having talked so much about it, we decide not to name it at all.

This week, as we start reading Torah again at the beginning, it feels like we’re starting with a bang, all about creation and life. It’s all good—we are told.

All that is needed is a word—God’s speech—and God creates light and darkness, heaven and earth, water and land, the sun, the moon and the stars, the animals and Adam.

Things start to get more complicated than just naming things when Adam is created. It takes a little thought to decide on a partner for him, and two contradictory stories come out of this. Also, we have the Garden of Eden and the serpent and the Tree of Knowing good from bad. What follows is the banishment of the first humans from the garden where, in the diaspora, they will break their backs to get food and giving birth to new life will involve pain. Life gets more complicated.

In other words, it’s not all good. This is the beginning of the human conscience and the desire to acquire the power of insight, but also for human emotions like jealousy, as in the story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s first children, which famously ends in murder.

This is the foundation of our Story and everything that will follow, all starting with God’s speech.

God saw that it was good.

And then it was bad.

God is disappointed enough in his creation of human beings that he is ready to destroy us by the end of chapter 6. The Torah tells us that God is sorry; he suffers from regret. God already needs comfort (the word for sorrow and regret shares its root with the word for comfort.)

God is in emotional pain at seeing how the human heart and thoughts bend towards the “bad.”

The labels “good” and “bad” are simplistic, yet humanity is clearly not simple. Maybe the fact that there are two creation stories points to how complicated human beings were to become; the biblical God couldn’t even decide how to make us! Ha!

For instance, it may feel good to not talk about the hard year it’s been, by which I mean lighter, and not talk about the ways in which the world is different and we are different since the pandemic began. We no longer have to convince others that gathering together is a good thing. But the disadvantage of not naming is that we don’t also get to take the time to say how our needs have changed.

As we begin a new Jewish year, with new intentions, and as we begin to slowly gather again in small groups, let us be intentional, as God of the Bible was in creation, every step of the way, in how we gather, in naming how we feel and naming our needs, and in finding new ways to walk in the world.

And remember that how we name things may be true or not, because life is never simple, but our words do have power—for good and for bad. We need to make a conscious effort to lean our hearts toward “good.” It’s just the way it is. Our negativity takes over so easily.

Also, even a downpour could be seen as good or bad, depending on our perspective and where we are in the world. So, yes, let’s be careful what we pray for.