This year is different! Ordinarily, when Shabbat Bereshit arrives, I dread to think of sermonically taking it on. After all, what could be more overwhelming a subject than the story of Creation? For this year is different. Even more mind-boggling than Creation is our effort to comprehend destruction, and we have seen all too much destruction since 9-11-01. This year, I am simply driven to take comfort in the unknowable of Creation. For a while, will you luxuriate with me in the scientific obscurities attendant to this world's birth? Yes, let's retreat and take comfort in the theoretical uncertainties of most every detail concerning the origin of the cosmos!

You see, I am not at all embarrassed by my ignorance of such an incomprehensible subject as the creation. I am appalled, however, by my shocking inability to account for the stubborn savagery of my own species. Yes, let's go ahead and escape for just a while from those numbing images of destruction and instead lose ourselves this Shabbas Eve in the unlimited glory and in the holy mystery of the birth of God's universe.

"In the beginning. . . God." Note that quite unlike our own sorry times, the Torah's poetic telling of the Creation proceeds from chaos and void to order and structure.

The Midrash tells of a heretic who came up to the great Rabbi Akiba (1^st century of the Common Era) asking, "Who created the world?" Akiba replied, "The Holy Blessed One."

"Give me a clear proof," the heretic challenged, to which Rabbi Akiba asked, "What are you wearing right now?"

"A garment."

"Who made it?"

"The weaver."

Akiba replied, "I don't believe you. Give me proof."

And the heretic replied, "In which way can I prove it?

Isn't it obvious that the weaver made it?"

And Akiba countered:

"And yet you do not know that the Holy One created the world?"

"How was your answer clear proof?"

And the Sage replied,

"My students, just as a house testifies that there is a builder, and the garment a weaver, and a door a carpenter, so does the world testify that God created it."

Scientist and author Paul Davies echoes this conclusion in his famous book, The Cosmic Blueprint, when he admits:

There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . . It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe. . . .The impression of design is overwhelming.

The human mind is not capable of grasping the universe. We're like a little child entering a huge library-the walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how.

Through my scientific work, I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation.

Every year now, when we go to New York City with our confirmands, we make a point of visiting the newly-dedicated Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. There, in that fantastic architectural globe, which seemingly floats in a 10-story glass cube, we are treated to 30 minutes of sheer and compelling theology. Surrounded by the pitch dark, suddenly the stars appear so close that we could almost kiss them. And then, in magnificent narration and inspiring music, the birth of the planets is described in a manner of extraordinary reverence and awe. Silently, when the doors of the planetarium opened, we file out, newly impressed with our nature: from star dust to Sibelius!

You and I need such moments of humility-perhaps we now know that more keenly than ever before!

Says Einstein:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

I have. . . a terrible need. . . shall I say the word? . . . of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.

God says to Abraham, "But for Me, you wouldn't even be here." To which Abraham replies, "I know that, Lord. But were I not here, there would be no one to think about You."

Our Judaism teaches us that there is a kind of mutual dependence between the Creator and the created. As Heschel puts it: God is in search of Man--and Woman--to continue Creation toward its greater good and ultimate purpose: the civilizing of ourselves!

Oscar Wilde sets it right when, in his De Profundis, he observes,
 

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains onself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

Although science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it cannot answer the question, "Why does the universe bother to exist?"  I don't know the answer to that.

Through the ages, our Jewish people, watching the night sky, have always been called to take human existence personally. We are not here merely to be, but to become. And judged we will be, by how, as long as we live, we love our neighbors as ourselves. Philosopher Immanuel Kant puts it so very well:

Two things continue to fill the mind with ever-increasing awe and admiration: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

And it is because of that moral law, and because of its urgent nature that we (you and I) cannot continue to linger any longer hidden in the theoretical thoughts of cosmology and the birth of the universe. This world of ours needs our active and thoughtful presence. We are the protagonists in a great drama!

No one picks his or her times or circumstances, and up until now, my generation has surely had an easy time of it. But generations beside one another, we're all in this together-the eternity of the very heavens calls us to choose goodness over evil, significance over convenience, and sacrifice over indifference.

"Bereshit barah Elohim-in the beginning, God." Tomorrow morning, all over the world, a new generation of B'nai Mitzvah will join Allison in reading those timeless first words of our precious Torah. Beginning at the beginning, we will hold their hands in ours, and with faith facing whatever is to come, continue our journey of destiny under God's starry heaven.