While playing, my friend's sister began humming. Absent-mindedly I joined in, as did my friend and her mother. While waiting for my friend's brother to rearrange (and then re-rearrange) the tiles on the table, I registered which song it was we were humming. --"One Day" by Matisyahu.
I turned to my friend's sister and spoke the kind of truth that occasionally is shared among surrogate family: the slightly embarrassing but (hopefully) endearing kind. "Sometimes, when I'm running, this comes on my iPod. It makes me feel epic." She smiled and repeated my last words as though tasting them, "It makes me feel epic."
We continued to play and sing, building harmonies, breaking down rhythms, making a mess of Rummikub tiles.
There are, of course, a million things to talk about when it comes to Bereshit, Genesis, the story of creation. This year, what rests most weightily with me is the immediacy of the story --everything happens in a day.
This is the way the world begins:
Day One: Separation between light and dark, designation of Day and Night.
Day Two: Separation between sky above and waters below.
Day Three: Separation between land and water. Creation of plants to cover the earth.
Day Four: Creation of the heavenly bodies: the sun, the moon, and stars.
Day Five: Creation of fish to fill the sea and birds to fill the sky.
Day Six: Creation of animals to roam the earth and of human beings.
Day Seven: Hashem took a breather, a Sabbath day.
The story of creation orients us to our place amidst the cosmos. We are but dust of the earth. Our lives are merely an exhalation. And yet. On day six, Hashem turned the world over to humanity to guard, to rule and to look after. The Torah teaches us that we were made in Hashem's image, that our history, mythical or otherwise, is our great act of creation.
Will we create light where there is darkness? With what will we fill the earth and sky?
Feel epic. Feel epic because today we can build one another other up. Today we can break one another down. The world is ours.
What will we make of it?
