At sundown, Rosh Hashanah begins. It’s the Jewish New Year, but more broadly it’s the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve. Tradition holds that the entire universe was created so that God could then create mankind to occupy it.
If the world exists so that we may live in it, we must surely be accountable for how we live in it, how we treat ourselves and each other and our surroundings. This too is part of Rosh Hashanah. The two most common images used to describe our relationship to God portray him as a king ruling over us, and as a shepherd tending to us. Shepherds and kings both hold the power of life and death over their charges.
On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time.”
So says one of the holiday prayers, in which we acknowledge this aspect of our relationship with the Creator.
I certainly don’t think we’re meant to see God as the Grim Reaper, or an actuary, tallying our merits and marking the errant for death. There is equally an emphasis in the liturgy on repentance and atonement, and God’s forgiveness, and his boundless love for us. But what most of the world has forgotten is not that we are mortal, but that our mortality is within the domain of a greater power.
It is a mark of our decadence and arrogance that we have written God out of the equation. When doctors decline to care for a premature baby because they’ve decided his life isn’t worth living; when the elderly are denied care because their quality of life calculation is too low; when babies are aborted because their arrival doesn’t suit their parents’ schedules; when patients are euthanized, even with their consent, because the care they are getting doesn’t ameliorate their suffering – we are not only taking it upon ourselves to end another’s life, harming them, we are perverting our relationships with God, society, and ourselves.
May we all learn to hold life as dear as God did when He created a glorious world for us to inhabit, replete with smoked salmon, apple challah, flannel sheets on a cold night, bonfires in the fall, and the giggle of a toddler. Shana tova!
by 
“Tradition holds that the entire universe was created so that God could then create mankind to occupy it.”
I think this made a lot of sense, back when the universe was thought to consist of the earth, a few planets, and a dome or sphere of stars. But now the universe has been observed as far larger, it seems far less plausable.
The visible universe is 46.5 billion light years across. It is 13.7 billion years old. No, I don’t know how that works either, the science be beyond me but somehow it does. It contains somewhere between three and seven times-ten-to-22 stars. Humans are just creatures clinging to the shell of a chunk of rock orbiting an unremarkable star in an insignificent galaxy. When I look at the sheer scale of the universe compared to us, I just can’t accept that the whole indescribeably vast universe was created with the intention of using only one miniscule planet in a position of no great significence.
I disagree with you on the age of the universe, Suricou. And actually, can’t you go as many orders of magnitude smaller in size by using the microscope? Otherwise, you seem to agree with King David in the Old Testament, except that he comes from a position of faith. Read Psalm 8. I think you have maybe unwittingly showed God’s great grace.
Consider His grace to Israel: “The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers, the LORD brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” (Deut. 7:7-8)
Consider His grace to the New Testament Israel (the Church): “For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God.” (1 Cor. 1:26-28)
The sheer scale of the universe is not its greatest wonder. There is a greater creation than the universe or man. It is the new creation, the centre of history, the God-man. Nothing else would do. God Himself came to the earth to achieve atonement for man’s sin. Why? He did so for His own greater glory and for man’s happiness. He did so because He is gracious and gives that which is not deserved.
“But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.'” (1 Cor. 1:30-31)
Suricou, read the post. Whether what tradition says about the purpose of the universe is accurate by purely historical or scientific measurements is not the point. Stop being such a nitpicky antagonist.
Rebecca, thanks for posting this reflection. I thought it was beautiful, appropriate and thought-provoking.