Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
October 28, 2005

This week marks six months since my wife and I moved into our new place. I was speaking to my dad this past week, and he asked me how we were settling in. I told him that we were done with the exception of a few unpacked boxes and a remnant of painting left to do. Then, of course, I told him that we weren’t sure if our heating was ready for the winter, and I complained that the electrician had left some stuff in our front landing. After a pause, I said, “well, I guess we are not completely done.” At which point, my dad said to me: “Elliot, in Scotland there is a river call the River Forth. It’s a big river, and over it is a big bridge that used to have train tracks but now is just used for cars. Now, there is a painting crew assigned to paint the Forth Bridge, and every time they finish the long process of completing their task, they realize that it is time to start painting again.” “Let me tell you something,” he said, “to own a home is akin to painting the River Forth Bridge. You are never done, there is always a project, there is always something to do. You may get close, and in your mind you may even be there, but, Elliot, we live in the same house as the one in which you and your brothers were born into – and let me tell you – we are still working on it.”

To live in a home, indeed to live in this world, is to concede the fact that we are never done, that we are always in progress. This morning is Shabbat Bereshit. It is the story of creation, a story that Matt spoke beautifully about, and the Parasha tells the rhythmic and systematic act of creation at the Divine command; in essence, the six days whereby God took the primordial tohu vavohu, and shaped and molded it and created a home in which all of humanity and all of God’s creatures could dwell. And yet it strikes me as theologically noteworthy that at the completion of each day, the adjective that God uses to describe the Divine handiwork is Tov – Good. It occurs to me that God knows Biblical Hebrew as well as anyone in this room and that it could have been described with an assortment of adjectives. Shalem – meaning whole, metzuyan – excellent, tam v’nishlam, complete and without flaw. Instead it gets the adjectival B+: good, not great but good. Only on the sixth day, just as the Sabbath approaches, is creation designated as Tov Meod – very good. Only with the introduction of humanity does creation bear the potential for being very good.

It is an extraordinary thought, really, that the world in which we live was left unfinished, even as God was putting on the final touches. Indeed, the charge which Adam and Eve receive from God, as our story progresses, is to tend and to till to the land. Leovdo u’leshomro. Humanity was given the task of stewardship over creation. Rashi, the great commentator on the Bible, asks why the story of the Bible doesn’t begin later with the Exodus of Egypt and the birth of the Jewish people. I find an intriguing question to be why the Bible doesn’t end a lot sooner, why does it go on with the flood, Abraham, the Joseph story, the enslavement, the exodus, the wilderness wanderings and beyond. The answer lies somewhere in the fact that the story of humanity is a work in progress. Our story, the Jewish story, is the narrative of a geographic and spiritual journey. And the bittersweet irony is that we end the annual cycle of Torah readings before the children of Israel enter the promised land. We arrive at the borders of Canaan, only to be sent back to the Garden of Eden. The cycle of the Jewish year is predicated on an eternal journey. It is an ongoing partnership between God and humanity, an obligation to go from tov to tov meod, from good to great. And there may be moments of greatness, but the bridge is always being painted, and there is never a moment of completion.

The Jewish spiritual posture is based on this quiet but powerful realization. To this day, we are all charged with acknowledging our role as the handymen and women of God’s edifice. To involve ourselves in the perpetual upkeep of the world is to heed the message of this morning’s parasha. Tomorrow, there is a mitzvah day at Anshe Emet, and it is an extraordinary sight to see. Hundreds of people sign up to deliver meals, to do tzedakah projects, to visit a senior citizens’ home, and to get involved in an array of activities. I am delighted to announce that every project has the green light, and though there is space still for interested parties, we have more registrants than ever before. For example, there is a family I know that goes to the Inspiration Café every year. They volunteer their time to help those who are in need, they have done it for years, and, I bet, they will keep doing so for many years to come. There is also a member of our community who plants flowers at Gill park across the street every year like clockwork. These people tend and till, as Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden, as we will do in tomorrow’s events and beyond. They feed the hungry and work the land in a sustained partnership with God in a good but unfinished creation. It is this sort of commitment that Rabbi Tarfon spoke of in his well-known teaching in Pirkei Avot - Lo alecha ham'lacha ligmor,V'lo atah ven chorin l'hibateil mi-menah. That is: “It is not [incumbent] upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist from the task.”

But the thing is that the theology of our parasha extends well beyond any call to social action. It is not just our relationship with God and God’s creation that needs to be seen as a work in progress but rather our relationships with each other. The most dangerous thing in a relationship is stasis. I constantly remind my wife that I am a work in progress, that there is hope around the corner, that how I am today is not necessarily how I will be tomorrow. When one person views the other as fully finished, as over and done with, then that relationship has exhausted its potential for growth and possibility. Any relationship worth having must be tended and tilled, le’ovdah u’lemshorah. There must always be a dynamic state of maintenance, whether it is with a spouse, a sibling, a colleague or even your rabbi. The moment you allow yourself to become complacent in a relationship, you resign yourself to the idea that however things are at that moment are the way things will always be. It is at that point that a relationship loses its supple character; it loses its ability to renew and redirect.

There is a beautiful midrash, a rabbinic legend told in the Talmud of creation. The Talmud explains that when a child is conceived, an angel brings the fetus before God. The angel asks, “Will this child be tall or short?” And God decrees its height. “Will this child be smart or not smart?” and God decrees its intellectual capacity. Then the angel asks, “will this child be good or bad?” and God is silent because moral volition is not a matter of divine decree, not a matter of predestination, but of individual choice. (Byron Sherwin, Why Be Good 52) The promise of the creation story is that moral development is constantly around the corner, that nobody is incapable of change. The ability to change is the promise of being human, that it is really just a question of whether two people are willing to grant each other the possibility that they are works in progress.

And beyond our identities as Jews, beyond the relationships most dear to us, the true power of our creation narrative lies in its applicability to each of us. Do you view yourself as a work in progress? We are not just partners in creation; rather, we are expected, ourselves, to be acts in creation. There is a Jewish concept coined by the medieval Jewish thinker the Maharasha, called tikkun atzmo, technically translated, “repairing yourself,” but really it is the process of viewing your life as a work of art, a constant and sustained commitment to self-improvement, self-actualization and self- construction. The great prophet of self-construction in America was, of course, Benjamin Franklin, who, through his publications like Poor Richard’s Almanac, popularized the very American idea that each person was capable of fashioning him or herself, that contrary to traditional Christian theology, nobody was irredeemable, nobody was beyond virtue. Later in his life, Franklin explained:

Some people have naturally some virtues, but none have naturally all the virtues. To acquire those that are wanting, and secure what we acquire as well as those we have naturally, is the subject of an art. It is as proper an art as paining, navigation architecture. (Howe p. 30)

Each one of us needs to cultivate his own artistic sensibility, as architects of his life and navigator of his own world. Each one of us needs to view herself as capable of self- construction. Biologists tell us that many of our cells are in a constant state of replenishment, so the question is whether our souls are also engaged in this process of spiritual regeneration. It was Rabbi Joseph Soleveitchick, the great spokesperson for modern orthodoxy in this past century, who set the bar when he explained that, “The peak of religious and ethical perfection to which Judaism aspires to is the individual as creator.” We need to view ourselves, therefore, as bearing the potential of going from Good to Very Good, of recreating ourselves. The real question for us on this Shabbat Beresheet is whether we are using this moment, and every moment, for new beginnings. Do we recognize our God-given creative capacity, or do we view creation as complete? As Dostoevsky put it, “Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.” It is a frightening and thrilling prospect to head into new territory, but it is our calling today.

There is a beautiful midrash that is told about God and the creation of the world. The midrash states that before God created this world, the one in which we all live, God had, in fact, created many worlds but was unhappy with them and decided to destroy them. It was only after several failed attempts did God finally settle on our current configuration. Think about it for a second: this is God we are talking about, and God doesn’t make mistakes, yet this midrash tells us that even God had to have that painful realization, that moment of reflection, necessary to leave one world behind and create a new one. Even God had to allow for the possibility that renewal and regeneration was a possibility. Today is Shabbat Beresheet, a day we ask from ourselves to be creators of worlds, to be partners and participants in the divine act of creation. We look at the world in which we have lived, and we ask if it is the one which we want in the year ahead.
There is no question that the world that God has given us is a good one. We thank God for having created us and having established the Jewish people as part of the tapestry of humanity. But anyone with eyes to see knows that, though our world is good, it is far from perfect. There are cracks everywhere, and we are commanded to work towards the day when the world is repaired. Every one of our acts, no matter how modest, is a step towards that repair. And as Walter Rauschenbush, the great preacher of social gospel, once taught, “though we may not ever have a perfect world, every approximation to it is worth while.”