Alumni Creation Still Creating
Parashat Nitzvaim-Vayeilech (Deuteronomy 29:9-31:30)
We have traveled nearly the full arc of Elul. The new year is close now, the sweetness of Rosh Hashanah and the soul realignment of Yom Kippur just ahead. For weeks, we have been turning toward what is to come, accompanied by the daily sounding of the shofar. Soon that sound will usher us across the threshold. The spiritual practice that has oriented us throughout this season, and will carry us into the Days of Awe, is teshuvah: return.
Each morning, the sound of the shofar calls us back. We lift the hollowed horn to our lips and inhale, drawing the world into our bodies. Then we blow. The breath that sustains us passes through the remnant of a life once lived and emerges as sound.
The shofar’s call to begin again draws us forward and backward at once, toward the self we are becoming and back to the beginning of beginnings, that from which we came. From darkness and depths emerged dry land and sea. God gathered earth and formed us, adam from adamah, breathing into our nostrils nishmat chayim, the breath of life.
We are earth breathed alive. Across eons and epochs, destruction and devastation, beauty and brutality, that breath has never stopped moving. It has passed from life to life, body to body, generation to generation, carrying something of creation’s first stirring all the way to us.
The oxygen entering our bodies was released by the leaves of trees and swaying grasses, by kelp forests glimmering in sunlight and microscopic plankton carried on the waves of the sea. Our exhale leaves our body to become material for other lives. Breath moves between creatures, between species and across generations. With every breath in and out, the world passes into and through us, each life receiving from and returning something to the whole.
Even this most intimate and seemingly individual act is collaborative. None of us breathes alone.
We are each distinct expressions of a creation that began long before us and will continue long after we are gone. Inhale, the world enters us; exhale, we enter the world anew. The boundaries that make us who we are are real, yet porous. Our lives are continually made and remade through a wider, vaster web of relationship than we can even know.
And so we return to the shofar, and to the breath passing from our bodies into its hollowed horn. What has been invisible becomes vibration, resonance, sound: the world moving through us and calling us back. Teshuvah. Return. But return to what?
We often conceive of return in this season as a retracing of our steps to encounter some earlier, better, purer version of ourselves. Here, teshuva becomes an act of peeling away what has accumulated in order to recover something essential underneath. Yet the living world teaches there is no such purity. There is no organism untouched by its environment, no body made only of itself. Every life is a composite and collaboration, carrying within it traces of countless lives, constituted by what it has inherited, absorbed, metabolized, and passed on.
Perhaps the work of return, then, is not to become pure, but to remember that we never were—that we have always been made of and through one another.
To return in this way is to remember how much of who we are has come to us through lives beyond our own. Before we were separate, striving selves, we were adamah and breath, matter and the ever-unfolding mystery. Ancestors and ecosystems, histories and habitats, wounds and wisdom, love and loss flow into and form us. There is no disentangling ourselves from all that has made us, no clean line where one life ends and another begins. We may be responsible for our lives, but we are not their sole creators. There is humility in locating ourselves within this larger story.
Rosh Hashanah holds two names that illuminate this truth. It is known as both Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembering, and Hayom Harat Olam: today the world is conceived, today the world begins anew. Held together, these names blur the boundary between beginning and becoming. To remember is not simply to look back at a world once created, but to awaken to creation still creating, unfolding in and through us now. We are not only its products but its participants, shaping and being shaped by the life around us.
This is the radical possibility of teshuvah: to return to ourselves as we actually are—earth and breath, singular and entangled, each of us a particular form through which the life of the whole moves. There is humility in remembering that we are neither wholly self-made nor wholly separate, neither solely responsible for what has shaped us nor without responsibility for what we shape. To return is to find ourselves again within this vast aliveness, and to know that neither we nor the world are finished.
The shofar gathers all of this into a single breath. Air drawn from a world we did not create moves through our bodies, through the hallowed, hollowed remnant of another life, vibrating the air, resonating in the bodies of all who hear its sound. No part of the sound is wholly its own. And still, from this mingling of lives, something singular emerges: a call to remember, a call to return, a call to begin again.
Rabbi Adina Allen `14 is a national media contributor, popular speaker, and award-winning educator who teaches about creativity as a vital tool for Jewish learning, spiritual connection and social change. As Founding Rabbi and President of Jewish Studio Project (JSP), she has worked with thousands of Jewish organizational and communal leaders, educators, and clergy across the country to access and activate their inherent creativity. Adina is the author of The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom (Ayin, 2024). She and her family live in Berkeley, California.
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