Begin the Year with Sweetness

Dear Friends,

I’m about to head out to pick apples, first fruits of the New Year, over which we’ll pour the sweet sap of honeybees, the taste of sweetness we hope will appear on our tongues like today every other day of the year. Coco is going to meet me in the orchard to help pick the apples and choreograph the last details of the service. She is our teacher in the significance of the gestures and the metaphors of the gestures of our lives. She texted, picking an apple is certainly a gesture of prayer. 

I imagine these moments are like the humming darkness of the primordial matter in the instants just before creation when the great mother goddess was conceiving the world, though it had not yet been born. And god’s breath hovered over the face of the water as a mother bird flutters above the chicks of her nest. And she said, Let there be …

My studies collecting the Catalog of Prayer led me to this question — What if God did not create the world with light? What if another of the elements was the primary matter from which the world was created? Buried in the manuscripts of my great-grandfather’s library I found this piece of commentary which substantiates the hypothesis.

The Shechinah is made entirely of light. And from the light of Shechinah, light was made for all the people of the world on the first day to illuminate the world. And some say the light was made from water, as it says, “the breath of god fluttering over the face of the water” For every illumination of the eyes comes from the water inside them, as “My eyes are entirely tears” (Lamentations 2:11). (Midrash Lekach Tov Genesis 1:3)

As with the apples we should let all the limbs of our being begin the year with sweetness. Let the mind begin its year with the taste of sweet questions, ideas, fresh inspiration, let the body begin the year in the sweetness of postures of prayer, chest to the earth, hands open to the sky over the heart behind the ears, let the soul begin the year in the sweetness of song, music that rocks us gently like the ocean like a mother, all the lessons and love of the world contained therein.

Shabbat Shalom, Shannah Tovah!
Rabbi Zach Fredman