Rosh Hodesh Rosh Chodesh Sivan: Renewing Torah Amidst a Circle of Listening Companions
The early rabbis teach in the Mishna, the first collection of rabbinic teachings published around 200 CE, that from the day the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70CE, there is no day without curse, the dew does not descend for blessing, and the fruit has lost its taste (Mishna Sota 9:12).
A few centuries later, the rabbis of the Talmud elaborate on the bleakness of life without the Temple, saying the curses actually increase each day. People go to bed at night longing for the previous morning because the one that is coming will surely be worse (Babylonian Talmud, Massechet Sota 49a). Absent the Temple, with God seemingly unavailable, we are living, says the Talmud, in Job’s world (Job 10:22):
אֶרֶץ עֵפָתָה כְּמוֹ אֹפֶל צַלְמָוֶת וְלֹא סְדָרִים וַתֹּפַע כְּמוֹ־אֹפֶל
A dark land, gloomy and deathlike, without order, whose light is like darkness.
How do we live in a world turned upside? Without order? What gives life stability, meaning, purpose? Or as the rabbis say in this passage of Talmud, on what does the world stand?
To this timeless and timely question, the Talmud responds cryptically that the world rests on two things: kedusha disidra and kaddish.
Kiddusha Disidra, literally the holiness of the order, is the closing section of the morning prayer service. It’s content is the kedusha — a liturgical passage declaring God’s holiness to be available in all of creation, even when God seems absent — that we say three times in the service. But this final kedusha of the morning service adds a twist. After saying the liturgy in Hebrew, as we do in the previous recitations, we then also say it in Aramaic. Though incomprehensible to most of us, for the rabbis who authored this section, the addition of Aramaic is significant because it was their vernacular, the language of their daily lives.
Kedusha disidra is the radical idea that Torah is not just a book, but a process. It is the Jewish people’s ongoing millennial conversation of how to live with God — how to make our lives holy. Our invitation and obligation as Jews is to join the conversation, to listen deeply to the teachings of our ancestors about how to live well and translate their timeless, eternal wisdom into the vernacular of our lives. When we do so, the Talmud implies, Torah becomes redemptive — it becomes a Temple rebuilt, bringing order, resilience, and hope to a chaotic world.
But we can’t do it alone. We need a community — people to say amen when we say yitgadal, viyitkadash, shimay rabah, when we say kaddish. People who can prayerfully hold us in hard times and dance with us in joyous ones, keeping us tethered to a sense of a better world, however remote it may seem. When we create and participate in such community, we bring order, resilience and hope to a chaotic world.
This week we begin the Hebrew month of Sivan and this coming Sunday, we begin our celebration of Shavuot — our holiday celebrating the receiving of Torah at Mount Sinai. It is a time to reconsider, in these tumultuous times, on what does your world stand? And it is a time to renew our commitment to the timeless truths that make a life well lived. It is a time to reclaim our place in our Jewish conversation amidst a circle of listening companions.