On Friday, Sept. 15, 2023, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback delivered a musical sermon for Erev Rosh Hashanah, entitled “Who Is Like You God?” You can view and read other High Holy Day sermons, music, and photos on our High Holy Day Highlights page.
Music based on “Nobody Like You Lord” by Maranda Curtis
Additional lyrics by Cantor Emma Lutz, Dr. Tali Tadmor, and Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback
Arranged by Tali Tadmor
Featuring
Cantor Emma Lutz
Stephen Wise Temple Choir
Piano – Tali Tadmor
Bass – Larry Steen
Guitar – Yarone Levy
Percussion – Jeff Stern
Transcript of Rabbi Yoshi’s Musical Sermon
Tonight we celebrate the creation of the Universe. According to our tradition, our world came into being some five thousand, seven hundred and eighty-four years ago.
In truth, we don’t know exactly when or HOW it all happened. The latest models from NASA based on measurements regarding the rate of expansion of the universe suggests that our world is actually closer to 13.8 billion years old, give or take a billion.
There are some theories that our universe was created from the remnants of a previous universe that collapsed upon itself after billions of years of its own existence. Of course, if this theory is correct, there’s no way of knowing how many times this has happened before which means that our universe could quite literally be trillions and trillions of years old.
But the number isn’t the important part of the story.
Rosh Hashanah is the day our tradition asks us to focus on God’s role as “HaBorei,” THE creator of the universe.
Now, I’m guessing that for some of you, the idea of God as author of creation might be remote. But for a few minutes I want to invite you to open yourself to a sense of awe and wonder at the glory, the utter glory, of creation itself.
For the wonder of it all, we should be filled with a sense of gratitude.
We are here–all of us, all living beings, all that has ever lived, all that will ever come into existence.
And however it came to pass, we didn’t create this universe.
I believe that this world–yes our humble planet earth whose yearly journey around our sun we commemorate this day but more broadly, the whole megillah, the estimated 200 billion trillion stars in the universe: our world was created for a purpose and if all the Creator ever did was ignite the spark, that would be enough.
Here’s how the ancients who composed our High Holy Day liturgy think about God’s role in creation. In our Shofar service tomorrow we will declare:
!הַיּוֹם הֲרַת עוֹלָם
On this day, the world came into being!
This is the time when we celebrate whatever it is that happened those many billions of years ago: creation itself. Existence itself.
In awe and wonder I look to the heavens, I consider the magnificence of this Universe and I ask: Mi Chamocha Adonai! O Eternal! O Creator! Who is like YOU?
CANTOR/CHOIR
Oh God, Our God
Who is like You, Adonai?
From below
And from above
You are strength
And you are love
Oh, oh, oh – who is like you God?
Who is like you God? (4:25)
RABBI YOSHI
That our universe exists is a miracle.
And more granularly–our own human existence is a miracle as well. Yours and mine, too.
Here is part of my personal existence story.
My grandmother, born Julia Yetta Levinson in 1912 in–of all places–Parkersburg, West Virginia, the only daughter of Herman and Fanny, graduated Vassar College in 1934, no small feat for a Jewish woman in those days when most colleges had quotas. All the more so as the daughter of an immigrant father who came to this country in 1893 from Bessarabia with practically nothing.
After college, she enrolled in a master’s program in statistics at the University of Wisconsin. She was uninspired in her classes and ended up taking a leave of absence, returning home to El Dorado, Kansas. A few short months later, on a cold December afternoon, she found herself working the counter of her father’s department store when an itinerant salesman named Jacob Davis, himself an immigrant from what was then Czechoslovakia, walked into the store hoping to sell a few boxes of shoelaces. He struck up a conversation with the young woman working behind the counter and ended up asking her out on a date.
Just a few days after their first meeting, tragedy befell her family when her father died suddenly and unexpectedly.
Over the next year and a half, my grandfather would write my grandmother 61 love letters.
They married in June of 1938.
So here’s the miracle and the point of this whole story.
My mother Hermene’s existence–yes, she was named for the grandfather she never met–and therefore, my sister’s, my brother’s, and mine and then of course the existence of my three daughters as well was made possible through an extraordinary and improbable chain of events.
Had my Grandmother Julia enjoyed statistics more, she probably never would have met my Grandpa Jake and I wouldn’t be here.
Had she taken her lunch break that fateful afternoon just a bit earlier or lingered just a bit longer over her tuna sandwich, I wouldn’t be here to tell you this story.
There are literally a million variables that could have erased this one necessary step in the process of my ever being born.
In awe and wonder, I consider the miracle of my own existence and ask: Mi Chamocha Adonai! O Eternal! O Creator! Who is like YOU?
CANTOR/CHOIR
O God, Our God
Who is like You, Adonai?
God is here
And God is there
A sacred presence
Everywhere
Oh, oh, oh – who is like You God?
Who is like You God?
RABBI YOSHI
But what’s even more extraordinary of course is that the story I told you about my grandmother and grandfather is just one small piece of the chain of events that made my life possible going back hundreds of thousands and even millions of years.
Here’s how journalist and author Bill Bryson puts it in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything:
“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result–eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly–in you.”
Each one of us is a miracle. And for us as a Jewish community, how much more resonant is this idea when we reflect upon the extraordinary trials and tribulations we have overcome as a people. It’s truly a wonder that we are here.
This summer, Jacqueline and I experienced the great joy of having all three of our children back home for a little bit.
I consider all of the things I’ve ever created in my lifetime. Art projects from my childhood. Songs I’ve composed and recorded. The many sermons I’ve written. Articles I’ve published.
Nothing comes close, not even a little bit, to the miracle of participating in the creation and nurturing of a human life.
I know that not everyone here is a parent or wants to be a parent but, certainly, every one of us is someone’s child. Each of us came into being through an extraordinary, miraculous, improbable chain of events.
And God’s role in all of this? The rabbis teach in the Talmud that there are three partners in creation. A man, a woman, and God:
!תנו רבנן: שלשה שותפין יש באדם: הקב”ה ואביו ואמו
The very existence of the universe, the building blocks of literally everything–it’s all a wonder!
Me, you, every possible experience and emotion. The color of a strawberry. The taste of dark chocolate or Brussels Sprouts for that matter. The smell of pine needles and the rain. That it all exists is a miracle.
In awe and wonder, we ask: Mi Chamocha Adonai! O Eternal! O Creator! Who is like YOU?
CANTOR/CHOIR
Oh, oh, oh – who is like you God
Oh, oh, oh – who is like you God
Mi chamocha BaElim Adonai
Mi Kamocha Nedar baKadosh
RABBI YOSHI
There’s one more miracle for which I want to give thanks.
Our Torah teaches us that we are created in God’s image—b’tzelem Elohim. Some commentators understand this to mean that we are created to be like God—created in God’s likeness in one specific way: we are created to be creators, God made us to be makers, not of worlds as grand as the one God brought into being to be sure but creators nonetheless.
Each of us has this ability in one way or another.
A turn of a phrase.
A melody.
A dance move.
A stroke of the brush.
A “thank you” note that expresses our gratitude just so.
A new way to structure a loan, market a product, argue a case, bake a challah, or teach a lesson.
There is in each of us a small spark of creation.
In some it flows like a fire hose.
Irving Berlin composed an estimated 1,500 songs in his lifetime, scored 19 Broadway shows, 18 Hollywood movies, and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. Not too bad for the son of an itinerant cantor born into poverty in Siberia.
Hannah Senesh wasn’t granted length of days–she was cut down before her time, executed in 1944 at the tender age of 23 after having parachuted into what was then Yugoslavia trying to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. But after her death, a book of her poems was discovered that includes verses that have become well-known and deeply loved throughout the Jewish world including “Eli, Eli,” “Yeish Kochavim,” and “Ashrei HaGafrur” which, poignantly, reminds us that the match that burns up so quickly can have lasting impact when it kindles other lights that burn on and on.
We were created to be creators, made to be makers.
As we enter the fifth month of the writers’ strike and the third month since the actors guild joined them, we recognize just how profoundly their work touches our lives and just how mysterious the creative process is–it’s related, for me, to the mystery and the majesty of creation itself.
Every spark, every new idea, new melody, technological innovation (including, somewhat ironically, artificial intelligence), it all, ultimately, comes from the source of existence itself–from God.
Creator of the Universe—Who is Like You?
The answer is somewhat paradoxical:
NO ONE is like God and, at the same time, since we exist as part of the universe God created and since we, in some small, modest way, are capable of creating our own little universes, EACH OF US is like God.
As we welcome this New Year of 5784, let us express our immense gratitude for the vast, miraculous universe God created, for our own lives and for life itself.
And let us strive with all of our might to realize our potential as beings “created in God’s image and likeness”; or, more playfully, created to be creative LIKE GOD.
On this Rosh Hashanah, הַיּוֹם הֲרַת עוֹלָם, this Birthday of the World, with our hearts open in gratitude for the gifts of creation, we cry out–Mi Chamocha! Who is like YOU God? Who is like YOU?
CANTOR/CHOIR
Oh, oh, oh—who is like You God? Who is like You God?