Shattered Stories, Sacred Breath

Rosh Hashanah 5786

All beginnings are difficult. Kol ha’t’chalot kashot. This rabbinic saying speaks to a universal human experience: starting something new—whether it’s a school year, a new habit, or yes, writing High Holiday sermons—can feel like swimming upstream.

Many of us carry stories about ourselves that make new beginnings even harder. “I’m awkward in social settings.” “I never follow through on my goals.” Sometimes, these stories reach back not just to earlier in our lives, but to before we even existed. We discover patterns that seem to echo through generations: the anxiety about not having enough food for, say, Rosh Hashanah, narratives about whether or not it’s safe to trust the other, the way we communicate with family members.

Telling ourselves these stories is often an attempt to make sense of our actions or beliefs, to put them in the context of our broader experience. It may be as simple as a rationale for why we have a particular thought or behavioral pattern, or as grand as a belief we hold about who we are as a person. This storytelling is natural human behavior, but it can create a self-fulfilling prophecy:

I do this because I’m that type of person; I’m that type of person because I do this. Over time, this circular reasoning becomes so ingrained that our stories feel like inevitable truths. We may not even notice we’re creating these narratives.

Whether or not we’re aware of this tendency, we often begin to feel stuck. Who among us hasn’t felt deflated, thinking something is inevitable because “we’ve always been this way”? Or worried about falling into certain patterns because of how things were in our families growing up?

These stories that we perpetuate can obscure an eternal truth: we each, at every moment, have the potential to create ourselves anew.

On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, we read about God remembering Sarah, and her conceiving Isaac. Sarah takes issue with Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, whom he fathered with Hagar upon Sarah’s urging. Sarah has Hagar and Ishmael banished. Yet before we reach the end of the Rosh Hashanah Torah reading, God promises Abraham that Ishmael’s descendents will also be a nation. Sibling strife, embedded in the story of Isaac and Ishmael, is a central part of the Rosh Hashanah Torah reading.

Yet this is not the first time we encounter this story, nor will it be the last. Cain and Abel. Jacob and Esau. Rachel and Leah. Joseph and his brothers. At a certain point, it could be easy to wonder if this story of interpersonal strife is just an inevitable part of our people’s story.

Trauma-informed psychologist Dr. Mariel Buqué talks about how lived experiences…”from distant ancestors, to living ancestors, [to us] – can culminate in a layering of intergenerational strain…it lives within us, a mental, physical, spiritual, and cultural transmission of trauma” that determines how we engage with lives joys and challenges.

The deeper these patterns are ingrained, the more inevitable they can feel. Yet perception is not always reality.

In the generations that came after Joseph and his brothers, we encounter a radically different sibling dynamic. Moses, the younger brother, is instructed by God to go to Pharaoh. According to our tradition, he is not just worried about his speech impediment, or about the size of the role, but rather, he is also worried about his older brother.

When God instructs Moses to approach Pharaoh, Moses expresses concern about his brother Aaron. In the midrash, we find Moses saying, “Pray (bi) – Lord, You are doing me wrong. My brother is older than I; yet I am going ahead of him.”

Here we see Moses, descended from generations of sibling rivalry, where the younger displaces the other, worried about repeating the same painful pattern. In his gut, he knows the story. Brothers fighting. Pain, separation, and lasting wounds. Of course he’s worried.

Yet God says to him, “you have spoken rightly,” reassuring Moses that this very sensitivity to his brother’s experience is what will enable Aaron to take the news well, feeling gladness in his heart. Aaron, the older brother, rejoices in Moses’ elevation. The pattern that seemed so inevitable—sibling rivalry, jealousy, separation—transforms into something entirely new: celebration, partnership, shared purpose. Indeed, Moses and Aaron go on to write the next chapter of our people’s history together. And the narrative about sibling strife? It doesn’t go away, but it becomes less suffocating. An alternative path emerges.

Opening ourselves to the possibility of things not being the way they’ve always been is perhaps one of the most transformative steps we can take. If we can inherit the biological imprint of our ancestors’ experiences, we can also inherit their capacity for transformation.

Even with this model, this proof that we have the ability not to be defined by old stories and scripts, tapping into that potential can feel intimidating, or even unclear. How do we begin?

In the Jewish tradition, we often translate teshuvah as return or repentance, implying that there’s a more authentic, holier version of ourselves to which we’re trying to return. In many ways, I resonate with this idea. But it also gets tricky…how do we discern that truest self and return to it amidst those pesky stories we have come to believe?

Many Hasidic rabbis relate to the idea of teshuvah slightly differently. Kedushat Levi writes about the idea that teshuvah is actually a process of rebirth, or recreation. We often think of the idea of rebirth as something from Eastern religions. Yet it has long been integrated in various understandings of teshuvah. According to the Kedushat Levi and others, with each breath, God is creating us anew.

This is not metaphor. This is physiology meeting theology. Every inhalation brings oxygen to our cells, enabling new neural pathways to form. Every exhalation releases what no longer serves us—literally, carbon dioxide, but perhaps also, symbolically, the stories that have outlived their usefulness.

Three times on Rosh Hashanah we declare “Hayom harat olam” — today is the birthday of the world. But the Hebrew word “harat” is beautifully ambiguous, meaning both birth and conception. This phrase predates our liturgy and can also be found in Nevi’im. The prophet Jeremiah uses the phrase “harat olam” to refer to an eternally pregnant womb.

Jeremiah does not speak these words from a place of naivete, or false optimism. Rather, overwhelmed by the weight of his calling, he wished that his mother’s womb had remained “harat olam,” eternally pregnant. Implicit in Jeremiah’s lament is the reality that birth – and rebirth – can be scary. Yet on Rosh Hashanah, in adding the word “hayom,” the liturgists of old imbue this ambiguous turn of phrase with a sense of urgency and optimism. We can move through the fear of the new to embody ongoing creation.

The world is not something that was born once long ago. The world, and we within it, are being born right now. When we recite this liturgy, we are acknowledging that this moment, this breath, contains within it the potential for change.

You are not the same person who began listening to this sermon. Cells have died and regenerated, breath has come and gone. The Kedushat Levi understood what neuroscience now confirms—we are not fixed entities moving through time, but dynamic processes, constantly creating ourselves anew.

This is why the breath becomes so central to Jewish spiritual practice. Not as borrowed wisdom from other traditions, but as a recognition of something deeply embedded in our own understanding of divine partnership in creation. When we breathe consciously, we participate in the ongoing act of world-creation. In the pause between inhale and exhale exists a space of pure potential, where old narratives can dissolve and new ones may begin to emerge.

If this sounds intimidating, look no further than Bereishit Rabbah. Our tradition teaches that, before creating our world, God created and destroyed multiple worlds. Again and again, creation and recreation, until finally declaring a world worthy of continuation. If God can create and recreate entire worlds, then surely we, too, in God’s image and with God’s help, can harness this generative energy.

So when those narratives we hear in our head feel suffocating—when the story of “this is just how I am” or “this runs in the family” feels too heavy to bear—we can return to the breath. Not as escape, but as entry point into the most Jewish of insights: that we are created b’tselem Elohim, in the divine image, with the same creative power that spoke worlds into being.

Hayom Harat Olam. This is not a one-time event we’re commemorating, but an ongoing reality. Today the world is conceived. Today the world is born. Again and again, the possibility of newness emerges.

This isn’t just individual work. As Dr. Mariel Buqué writes, “Your healing quest is not just about you. It has collective motivation. You send ripples of healing backward and forward by becoming a cycle breaker. It’s a heavy task and one that, when chosen, or when it chooses you, has the power to liberate your lineage.”

When Aaron chooses joy over jealousy, he doesn’t just change his relationship with Moses. He transforms the story for all who come after. When we choose differently than our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, we don’t just change our own trajectory—we create new possibilities for those who live alongside us and those who will follow.

Being open to the possibility of rebirth has implications for our relationship with ourselves, our interpersonal relationships, and our global community. The next time it feels like something in society is inevitable, remember, “hayom Harat olam.”

Today—this very day—contains within it the seeds of all possibility. With each breath comes the opportunity for rebirth. Not just for cosmetic change or behavioral modification, but for fundamental transformation of who we are and who we can become.

After each chanting of Hayom harat olam comes the blast of the shofar. A sound that echoes the wail of a newborn, like the one born to Sarah, who laughed at the prospect of her life being any different than it was. Each blast reminds us: the pattern can be broken. New stories can be written.

Hayom harat olam. Today the world is born. Today, we are in the process of becoming. With each breath, God gives us the potential for transformation.

Kol hat’chalot kashot. All beginnings are difficult.

But today, we begin.