In the beginning, there was nothing. Nothing but the silence of an infinite darkness. But the breath of the creator fluttered against the face of the void, whispering, let there be light. And light was. And it was good. The first day. And then the formless light began to take on substance and shape. A second day.

And our world was born. Our beautiful, fragile home. And a great warming light nurtured its days. And lesser light ruled the nights. And there was evening. And morning. Another day. And the waters of the world gathered together, and in their midst emerged dry land. Another day passed. And the ground put forth the growing things. A thick blanket of green stretching across all creation. The waters, too, teemed with life. Great creatures of the deep that are no more. Vast multitudes of fish, some of which may still swim beneath these seas. And soon the sky was streaming with birds. And there was evening. And there was morning. A fifth day. Now the whole world was full of living beings. Everything that creeps, everything that crawls, and every beast that walks upon the ground. And it was good. It was all good. There was light and air and water and soil, all clean and unspoiled.

There were plants and fish and fowl and beast, each after their own kind. All part of the greater whole. All in their place. And all was in balance. It was paradise. A jewel in the Creator’s palm.

ְוֹיאַמר ֱאֹלִקים ַנֲעֶשׂה אָָדם )בראשית א:כו…(

And God said, “Let us create human beings.”

Who was God speaking to? Who is “us”? The Midrash explains that when God began to create the world, all of God’s attributes began to argue with each other.

ֶחֶסד אוֵֹמר ִיָבֵּרא ֶשׁהוּא וֹגֵּמל ֲחָסִדים. ֶוֱאֶמת אוֵֹמר אַל ִיָבֵּרא ֶשֻׁוֹלּכּ ְשָׁקִרים

The attribute of Chesed (loving-kindness) said, “Holy One! You should create humankind, as they are filled with
loving-kindness!” The attribute of Emet, Truth, said, “O Holy One! Do not create humankind, as they are filled with lies!”

ֶצֶדק אוֵֹמר ִיָבֵּרא ֶשׁהוּא עוֶֹשׂה ְצָדקוֹת, ָשׁלוֹם אוֵֹמר אַל ִיָבֵּרא ְדֻּכֵהּלּ ְקָטָטה.

The attribute of Tzedek, Righteousness, said, “Create them, for they will establish justice.” The attribute of Shalom, Peace, said, “Do not create them, for they will be in constant strife!”

Imagine that. The world was perfect. It was paradise. And yet God was unsatisfied. The world didn’t feel complete. God had this grand idea to create human beings, and the attributes are split. Lovingkindness and righteousness come out in our favor – We are kind! We will do justice – oseh tzedakot. But truth and peace are against us. We are liars and warmongerers – the lot of us. Two to two. An impasse.

So what does God do? We need a tiebreaking vote. God lifts up the attribute of truth and hurls it to the Earth. Immediately, the ministering angels appear and berate God, “how could you do this? Why do you despise and punish truth, your signature attribute! Let truth arise from the Earth! As it says in the Book of Psalms, “Emet me’eretz titzmach.” (Psalms 85:12).

When I read this midrash I am left with so many questions. Which attributes are right? Are human beings violent liars? Or are we loving pursuers of justice?

Maimonides, in his law treatise the Mishneh Torah, writes in the chapter on repentance that we should NOT think that God from the outset decrees for a person to be righteous or wicked at their beginning creation. Rather, every person is capable of being righteous like Moses our Teacher or wicked like [King] Jeroboam, wise or foolish, compassionate or cruel, conservationist or wasteful, and so on for all of the attributes. A person of their own will and awareness leans toward whichever path they want.

We contain multitudes. My friend and Jewish composer Eliana Light wrote a chant that I hold with me and a mantra that I come back to when I need to remember this concept. Try it with me, repeat each phrase after me:

I contain Multitudes I am Infinite

Infinitely worthy Precious
And holy

I contain Multitudes I am Infinite
Infinitely loved Loving
And lovable I contain

Multitudes I am Infinite
Infinite connection Compassion Direction

We contain…

We contain multitudes. How can we possibly be boiled down to one thing? To one action? To one attribute?

Did God do the right thing, throwing truth to the ground and creating humankind? Beginnings are always messy. They start with chaos. But they also start with infinite possibility, infinite opportunity. Over and over again on the high holidays we enumerate God’s attributes, honing in on 13 key characteristics. In the introduction to the 13 attributes in the liturgy, we say that God is mitnaheg bachasidut, God acts and behaves with lovingkindness, oseh tzedakot im kol basar v’ruach, acting charitably, with justice, with all beings and spirits. Over and over we remind God of God’s own attributes that supported us from the very beginning.

And then we take it one step further. Every single morning, in our opening prayers, we recite a paragraph from the midrash Sifre Deuteronomy in which we empower ourselves to “walk in God’s ways.” lalechet b’chol d’rachav. And two examples of walking in God’s ways are provided. Which two? Tzedek and chesed, justice and lovingkindness, the same two attributes that stood up for us on the day we were created.

But what do we do about truth? Emet. Truth was thrown to the ground. Imagine a glass sculpture of truth crashing to the ground and breaking into a million tiny pieces. Impossible to put back together. Entirely incoherent and incomprehensible. Truth was lost from the very start.

We have a crisis of truth in the world today. People no longer share the same basic understanding of facts, and it is harder and harder to discern where the truth lies. Fake news and those who shout that facts are alternative contribute to this proliferation of confusion and chaos. A Pew study conducted recently concluded that almost two thirds of American adults said that they had a hard time telling the difference between what is true and what is

not true when listening to elected officials, and almost half said it was hard to tell what’s true and not true on social media.

20 years ago, Stephen Colbert coined a term for this, “truthiness.” It now appears in Webster’s dictionary and is defined as something that is “a seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true.”
A mentor of mine, Rabbi Michael Siegel, gave a sermon a few years ago about truth, and in it he quoted the American Sociologist Philip Reif who explained that “For most of human history, people read the Bible, studied Greek Philosophy, and read great literature in search of truth, morality, and goodness. Truth was what you sought to discover outside of yourself. Reif argued that in the wake of the psychological revolution, we began to focus our attention inward. As a result it was possible to believe that truth grows only out of the soil within us, or as is commonly heard today, “my truth”, as if each person is the sole arbiter of what is Emet.

There is a power to looking inward, to finding ideas and values that speak to you personally and individually. And at the same time, there is a clear danger as well. If each one of us picked up one of those tiny sharp shards of truth on the ground, we’d each only be in possession of a partial truth.

Truth is hard to find. If we take the midrash at its word, it is scattered amongst the grasses of the earth, shards as infinite as the sands on the beach. So how do we know when we’ve found it? Amidst all of the chaos, how can we make sure that we are walking the right path?

I’ve shared this before because it is one of my favorite teachings, but even the word Emet in the Hebrew gives us a hint as to how to achieve this. In the Talmud there is a beautiful moment in Masechet Shabbat where a group of little children enter the study hall of the greatest sages and start noticing and explaining things that even the likes of our leader Joshua son of Nun could not have understood. They look at every single letter and find powerful connections and significance. Then they arrive at Shin and Taf, the last letters of the alphabet. Shin, they say, represents Sheker,

Lies, and tav represents Truth, Emet (shin is the first letter of the word sheker and tav is the last letter of emet).

These little children look at the letters, and instead of pontificating on some deep hidden truth, they simply notice the order of the letters themselves. They notice that the letters of the word Sheker, Shin Kuf Resh, are right next to each other in the alphabet, (tzadik kuf resh shin…), and that the letters of Emet, aleph mem tav, are far from each other, one at the very beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end of the alphabet. Why, they ask? Because while falsehood is common and easily found, truth is not. Lies sit there on the surface, right next to each other. Truth takes discernment, it takes focus, it takes time and understanding.

And then, like a Rorschach test, they notice the shapes of the letters themselves. Look! They say. The letters of Sheker are all precarious, all standing on one end or one foot or seemingly about to tip over. But the letters of truth? They are sure-footed, their bases wide like bricks. This is because truth stands eternal and falsehoods are destined to fall.

But Truth doesn’t just stand on its own, it requires us to gather it and lift it up. If the first act of the Creator was to attempt to create order out of the chaos, then so too that must be the role of the created. Truth was flung to earth to be our partner in this endeavor. Most days we forget, get too caught up in the world around us and the task at hand to engage in the search. And so, over and over again, throughout history, we have failed.
The version of the creation story I began with this morning comes from the opening scene of the Darren Aronofsky movie, Noah from 2014. But that isn’t the end of the opening sequence. It continues,

“Then the creator made human beings, parents of us all. He gave them a choice: Follow the temptation of darkness, or hold on to the blessing of light. We broke the world. We did this. Everything that was beautiful, everything that was good, we shattered. Now, it begins again.”

There are actually two versions of the creation story in Genesis. The one where Adam and Eve sin is actually the second version, in the second chapter of Breishit. But the Torah begins with a

different story. “God created human beings in God’s image. God blessed them and said, Be fertile and multiply. God said “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit, they shall be yours for food. And it was so. And God saw all that God had made, and found it very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”

That’s how it could have been. Maybe that’s how it still can be. Hayom Harat Olam. Today the world is born. Today the world is pregnant with possibility. Which path should we take? To which direction should we turn? Who should we believe?

I just finished reading the book Overstory by Richard Powers, an environmental novel with interconnected stories of nature and creation and human beings, and there is a conversation between psychologists about conservation and how to protect the trees.
One of them says to the other, “You’re a psychologist, how do we convince people that we’re right?” The other responds, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

So let me tell you a story from that book in the vein of those I have already weaved this morning. It is a story as old as time, and as powerful. It is, for lack of a better word, the Overstory.

Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. From dawn to late morning a million
million years of branching…

Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles.

The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine
p.m. brings jellyfish and worms.

Later that hour comes the breakout-backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.

Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.

Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight…And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.

Four seconds before midnight. In the span of time since the very beginning as far as we understand it, we are less than a small speck of dust. (one, two, three, four.) – that’s all we’ve been present for. What have we done with our four seconds that is worth taking note of?

Rav Simcha Bunim of Peshischa teaches that the world, as far as we are concerned, is still in Bereishit, Still “in the beginning”.
Because this particular creation is not like a typical creation that is made by the hands of an artist, where after it is made it no longer requires “a maker” like a piece of art created, signed, framed, and hung on the wall of your home. Rather, every single day and at every hour the world is in need of renewing, and should energy and a higher power cease to be put into it (God forbid), the world would return to chaos and disarray.

Imagine the world on a pottery wheel – constantly being molded and formed, and if the foot on the pedal stops, the whole thing goes back to mush. Each one of us has that power. That power to renew. To create. To hold up a shard of truth and gently and carefully do our part to put it back together.

Right now, the world feels more precarious than it has in a long time. And yet, I wholeheartedly believe that this is not the way the story goes. The only way to move from creation story two of sin, lies, war, and fratricide back to creation story one of possibility, love, and harmony is to confront our prosecutor, the

attribute of truth, with all of the best tools we have at our disposal – our lovingkindness, our compassion, and our desire for justice and goodness.

What will the next proverbial second in the span of time look like for each of us, for all of us, for the world? This year can be different. It can be different because we can be different. Each step begins with us.

Shanah Tovah.