Creation as a Second Life
On Rosh Hashana, Nitzavim, and Beginning Again
When all these things befall you—the blessing and the curse that I have set before you—and you take them to heart amidst the various nations to which your God יהוה has banished you, and you return to your God יהוה, and you and your children heed God’s command with all your heart and soul, just as I enjoin upon you this day, then your God the Lord will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. [God] will bring you together again from all the peoples where your God the Lord has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there your God the Lord will gather you, from there [God] will fetch you. And your God the Lord will bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and [God] will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your ancestors. Then your God the Lord will open up your heart and the hearts of your offspring—to love your God the Lord with all your heart and soul, in order that you may live. (Deuteronomy 30:1-6)
It is taught in a baraita: Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai says: Come and see how beloved the Jewish people are before the Holy One, Blessed be He. As every place they were exiled, the Divine Presence went with them. They were exiled to Egypt, and the Divine Presence went with them, as it is stated: “Did I reveal myself to the house of your father when they were in Egypt?” (I Samuel 2:27). They were exiled to Babylonia, and the Divine Presence went with them, as it is stated: “For your sake I have sent to Babylonia” (Isaiah 43:14). So too, when, in the future, they will be redeemed, the Divine Presence will be with them, as it is stated: “Then the Lord your God will return with your captivity” (Deuteronomy 30:3). It does not state: He will bring back, i.e., He will cause the Jewish people to return, but rather it says: “He will return,” which teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, will return together with them from among the various exiles. (Talmud Megilla 29a)
In Nitzavim (Deut. 29:9 - 31:30) God promises the people not a straight path to triumph, but a switchback hike to repair after inevitable failure. God further promises that the return to the Promised Land will yield more treasure than the initial entry. The Promised Land will no longer mark a point of escape relative to Egypt or Ur Kasdim, but a site of homecoming relative to Exile. The evocative meaning of Israel will be transformed from the fulfillment of a promise into the recuperation of an apparently broken one.
The timing of Nitzavim in the run-up to Rosh Hashana suggests a parallel between Teshuva (repentance) and return from Exile. The classical interpretation posits repentance as the mechanism by which the displaced people will once again return to their land. But a more Midrashic reading yields the idea that Teshuva itself is a kind of homecoming. Every year, we track a return to self that parallels and expresses a kind of return to Jerusalem. The same words we read in this week’s Torah reading are found quoted in Nechemiah as evidence that God has not forgotten us in our exile—there will be a return. Each year, as we enter the days of awe, it is as though we are “remembered” and afforded a return.
Rosh Hashana is the start of the year, but it is also the re-turning of the year. By making Rosh Hashana a time specifically of Teshuva, the Jewish calendar demonstrates the principle that beginning is returning and returning beginning. Every beginning is a second beginning. In the beginning was the return. In the beginning was the second chance. God said “Let there be light,” and re-discovered the light. Read poetically, Creation becomes not invention but rediscovery. It turns out we can have a feeling of natality more profound on the second and third and fourth go around than on the first. “Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards,” says Kierkegaard. Rosh Hashana marks the Creation of the World as a second life—the ability to live forwards and understand backwards at the same time. The fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham does not culminate in the Book of Joshua, with the conquest of the Land, or in Kings with the erection of the first Temple, but in the Book of Nechemiah, with the ingathering of Exiles and the rebuilding of the destroyed Temple. Thus we live in the open parenthesis of history, awaiting an as yet, and always already unfulfilled promise.
According to Talmud Megilla, the return to Jerusalem from Exile marks not just a return to God, but a return with God. God goes into Exile with us. That means, allegorically, that Rosh Hashana proves to be a time not just of human repentance, but a time of divine turning as well. God returns with us and to us in the very moment that we seek a second beginning. Relative to God, return does not mean going somewhere else to meet God, but simply turning to face God. While geopolitical and collective Exile are dramatized in the Torah, the Talmud offers us a humbler image: return from Exile simply means the opening of the heart. We are exiled from ourselves, and God from Godself, as it were, until our hearts are opened. We need our closed hearts so as to open them. An open heart cannot be opened.
The only thing higher than a totally righteous person is a baal teshuva, a master of repentance. The only beginning greater than the Creation of the world is the restoration of the world. The only heart more powerful than an open one is an opening one. In his interpretation of Plato’s Cave Allegory, Heidegger emphasizes that the philosopher discovers truth not outside the cave but in the moments of transition between inside and outside, in the hermeneutic friction created by turning. If the pre-Socratics had a close relationship to Being they were like Tzaddikim disadvantaged by their immediacy. Only “latecomers” can become the baalei Teshuva who take up the forgotten question of Being. They do not know how to call Being by name, but they have the question of Being to guide them. One of the great questions they must meditate on is how Being itself allows itself to be forgotten. Or in theological terms, why does God allow Godself to be lost? This is the problem Jewish Kabbalistic dubs “tzimzum.” Why does God retract from the world? Why is there evil, sin, failure, forgetting, misalignment, error, blockage?
The answer afforded the Baal Teshuva, the master of repentance, is that all of this is part of divine generosity. All this waywardness is all for the glory of God. All this oblivion is itself a gift if only we could see it. We cannot, of course. But that is the meaning of God being in Exile with us. We are accompanied even when we don’t know it. What we reveal on Rosh Hashana, in Teshuva, and in the return to Jerusalem described by Moses and prophesied by Nechemia, is that God was with us the entire time. The tzimtzum was an illusion meant to draw out our search for God, Exile a ruse to awaken our desire to become ourselves, again and again.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins