Everyone knows that all the holidays of Tishrei are about renewal, starting again, literally re-Creation. On Rosh Hashanah, we connect again to the "birthday" of that strange problem child, humanity. We return on this "Day of Remembering" to re-member and connect ourselves again to the mysterious origin of life. Through teshuvah and tefillah, awe and joy, we start over again during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, allowing God to clear off the debris of last year's mistakes. Finally we enter the protective womb of the Sukkah, the awe and struggle of the ten days of Teshuvah having opened us to the awareness and joy of God's encompassing love and presence. Please God, this year's Tishrei should be filled with the heights of awe and simchah, and the calm depths of true Shalom, for the Jewish people and Your whole world…
Yet somehow it is not so simple. Can we really start over? After all, I've started over before, and always fallen back into mistakes… This year, I am finding it very hard to really pick myself up again - against the power of Creation I feel a voice that says the whole project is doomed to failure, that starting over is just an invitation to make the same mistakes over again.
A good friend recently pointed me in the direction of an incredible Torah which opened my eyes to what I have been struggling with. According to our holy tradition, this struggle that I have been feeling is rooted in the creation of humanity. Our Rabbis teach in a Midrash that the angels (which were created before human beings) were opposed to our creation. "Let's face it, it's hopeless - they'll just make mistakes and go against You. Of what value is man?" If you want something done right, get an angel. Well, we all know that God created us anyways. But were the angels really wrong? Not so simple. In fact, in one famous version of this story God had to "throw Truth to the ground" to create this crazy world, not to mention people.
Well, this argument between God and the angels didn't just occur at Creation. Whenever humanity or the Jewish People were recreated or brought to a new level of being, the angels again protested. The Midrash says that when we crossed the Yam Suf leaving Mitzrayim, the angels argued that the Jews shouldn't be redeemed. When God came to give us the Torah, the angels again said it was a terrible idea - they'll just make mistakes, either rebelling against Your Torah or interpreting it to suit their own corrupt purposes. And lastly, once a Jew has been created, left Mitzrayim, and received the Torah, if he or she does make a mistake and tries to do Teshuvah, the angels stand ready to block the Jew's way back to God. But again, just as He created us, took us out of slavery, gave us His Torah - so too, God creates new and secret paths and tunnels of Teshuvah that lead directly to intimacy with God, even closer than the angels can reach.
Rebbe Nachman writes in the first Torah in Likutei Moharan Tinyana that the Jew's destiny is to have dominion over the angels, and that every Jew must strive to reach this level. For a long time, I found this idea impossible to understand. Reb Nosson, Rebbe Nachman's closest disciple, writes that this can be understood in terms of the Jew's need not only to transcend the limitations of the physical world - which must be respected in those realms that they apply - but also not shrink or obscure the spiritual limitlessness of the soul. The angels represent the apparent rules and limitations of the spiritual world. According to those rules, things have to be done in the right way, and if not, it is worthless. According to those rules, humanity as it truly exists seems literally worthless. People who strive to be "as angels" can end up as judges and accusers of humanity as well. The danger of the perfectionist model of spiritual growth, its destructive quality, is expressed powerfully in the Torah in the person of Noach, whom the Rabbis see as a failure for his easygoing acceptance of God's plan to wipe everybody out. It's as if that's what Noach was thinking all along, anyway. Ironically, Noach is the only person whom the Chumash itself calls a tzaddik - as if to say, and that was his problem… Noach, by giving no value to mistakes, made the biggest mistake of all and caused the destruction of the world! No wonder he got depressed and drunk afterwards…
Anyway, in all of these arguments, and against all of these protests, we know that God refused to be swayed by the angels. It is tempting to ask "why?" Yet I am conscious of the fact that almost all of these stories in the Midrash end with God throwing the angels out of the picture, telling them to shut up, or simply ignoring them. Never do we find God attempting to explain and justify the value of human existence. According to the Kabbalah, in the Shofar's wordless tones we hear God's "simple Will" to create the world, to give us the gift of being.
Yet the Shofar also expresses one profound hint of what it is to be a human being. The sound of the Shofar is the sound of all the sighs, cries, yearnings and longings of the human heart. The Kotzker Rebbe says that the purpose of Creation is the longing and striving to fulfill God's will, not the actual doing of the mitzvot themselves. How can this be? It's simple, says the Kotzker - if God wanted those who would always do it right, He would have made only angels. This was exactly what the angels thought when they argued against man's creation. But God longed for the longing of the human heart, the struggle of a human life. The angels who praise God each day may long to praise Him, and call out to one another beforehand (as we say in davvening every day.) But they don't know what it is to long for something, to strive for it, knowing you might fall flat on your face. Only a human being has the strength to long again, after falling a thousand times, to long to start again even though "you seen what happened last time this started." May the Life of the World give us all the strength to stand up again and never give up, until the Moshiach comes announced by the "great Shofar" of all our thousands of years of sighs and longing!