The comments below were written for a Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Reader compiled by my synagogue’s social action committee. I highly recommend reading the entire packet if you have the time and interest.
Hayom harat olam are the familiar opening words of a beloved short piyyut, a liturgical poem, recited three times in the repetition of the Rosh Hashanah Musaf prayer. There are two main conundrums that this piyyut raises: 1. What is the meaning of these opening words? 2. What is their connection to the rest of the piyyut, about God’s judgment of us?
1. The opening words are nearly always translated “Today is the birth of the world.” The notion that Rosh Hashanah is the time when the world began accords well with our sense of the holiday. Rosh Hashanah marks the conclusion of the previous year and its transition into the new one. On this day, the ledger book is opened, the deeds from the previous year are recorded; for the next ten days, those deeds are weighed in a scale, we still have a chance to adjust the weights with our deeds, and on Yom Kippur, the final balance is measured. From then on, the world begins anew, our lives are refreshed, and the valence of our deeds is measured from scratch.
The problem is, the word harah means conceive, become pregnant, not give birth (which would be leidah). The words thus mean, “Today is the conception of the world.” This phrasing appears to hearken to a disagreement in the Talmud between Rabbis Eliezer and Yehoshua (Rosh Hashanah 10b-11b) about whether the world was created in Tishrei or Nisan. If the world was conceived in Tishrei, it emerged in Nisan, in time for Passover.
The notion that the world underwent a period of gestation as it took shape renders the Earth as not only the habitation of life but as a creature itself alive. It also suggests, without fully stating it (for fear of the anthropological and heretical possibilities), that God is the world’s Mother. God carried the Earth from conception in Tishrei to birth in Nisan. With the creation of humanity, God entrusted the world to people’s care. Our mandate is to serve as the Earth’s foster parents, to raise and protect the world that God created through a process as intimate, endowed with God’s own Being, as the process of birth itself.
2. Right after the announcement of today as the day of the world’s birth or conception, why does the piyyut jump right to the theme of judgment: היום יעמיד במשפט כל יצורי עולמים, “This day stands all the world’s creations up in judgment”? The usual answer is the one I gave above: as the commemoration of the birth of the world, today we mark the end of the old year and the birth of the new one. According to our tradition, the process of that transition, the human role in moving the world forward toward regeneration, is through reflection upon and repair of our ethical lives and relationships. Only when we have worked to make ourselves more whole can we usher in a new world, a world renewed.
I would like to propose another reading, in line with my thoughts here of humans as custodians of the world, God’s child. The piyyut aligns two ideas about Rosh Hashanah, as a time of judgment, drawn out so movingly in the prayer Unetaneh Tokef, and a time of creation. The connection is drawn in the beginning of the poem, as the word olam, world, is repeated twice—literally, This day brings to judgment all of the world’s creatures. As creatures of the world, we are judged for our treatment of that very world, teeming with life and a living testament to God’s birthing forth of the universe. The world of life can be restored anew only if people, granted supreme, God-like powers above all other creatures, can correct our much abused relationship with the planet and regard it with the reverence due to it as God’s intimate, Godly creation.
This summer, a number of stark events have made us aware that the Earth as a living organism, as God’s child, is in grave peril. The climate crisis is sharply increasing along multiple paths. Extreme heat waves, even in places with weather that is supposed to be mild or cold (Denver, Siberia) witnessed nightmarish temperatures, sparking weekslong forest fires devastating vast tracts of land. Extended droughts are threatening crucial water supplies and the long-term viability of human habitation in Western states. Towns across Europe and Malaysia experienced catastrophic flooding. Hot weather caused mass extinctions on land and sea: estimates of more than a billion sea creatures perished off of California and Florida, salmon and other fish vanished from some Western rivers, thousands of flamingos died in Turkey. And we know that these trends, which have been accelerating in recent years, will only get worse in the years ahead. For example, it is estimated that upwards of a million species, and as many as 60% of the millions of life forms, may become extinct by the end of this century.
In August, the latest report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the leading scientific agency reporting on the effects of the climate crisis around the world, said that the crisis has now reached “code red.” Some impacts, such as the melting of the ice caps, are now considered irreversible, meaning that, in the coming decades and centuries, coastal settlements such as New York City will become uninhabitable from rising sea levels (based on the heating of the Greenland ice cap, that time span could be much shorter). The report does offer some hope: if people can rapidly stop emitting greenhouse gases—first and foremost carbon dioxide from gas and oil, as well as methane from oil production/pipelines and cows—then we have a chance of holding the global increase in temperatures to 1.5C and eventually cooling back the planet. This requires a level of coordinated action by governments, businesses and individuals that has never been seen before, along with the will to achieve these necessary aims.
This day, we are held in judgment. God gave birth to the world; we must not let it die on our watch. This year, we must take these words to heart and ensure that this beautiful birthling that sustains us—this great gift from God, the Earth—endures. For the sake of our children, our people and all people, and all living beings. Our calling is nothing less, as Jews, as humans, as creatures of God.