Two Truths to Guide Our Lives

Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa (c. 1765–1827), a trailblazing rebbe and a major leader of 19th-century Hasidic Judaism in Poland, taught that every person should carry two slips of paper in their pockets. One reads, “For my sake the world was created,” while the other says, “I am but dust and ashes.” Though these sayings from ancient Jewish sources seem to contradict one another, both truths are essential, each called upon in its proper moment. They also capture the spirit of the Days of Awe: celebrating the extraordinary gift of life while recognizing its preciousness and fragility.

That’s why I made them the theme for my High Holy Day / Days of Awe sermons this year, and here are some highlights of what I said:

For My Sake the World Was Created

Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of humanity, is a perfect time to reflect on this first saying. The late great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught that the idea that the world was created for each of us may be the greatest gift of Judaism: not only the belief in one God, but its resulting corollary.

“If we are each in the image of God, then every one of us has infinite value,” he taught. “This may well be the single most important consequence of monotheism. Discovering God, singular and alone, our ancestors discovered the human individual, singular and alone. This was simply not a value in the ancient world, nor is it one in tyrannical or totalitarian societies today”

What are the consequences of seeing the divine imprint on each person and creature? Well, if each of us contains that divine imprint, than each of us matters. The Mattering Instinct, is a new and influential book by philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein,

At the heart of the book is Goldstein’s idea that human beings possess a “mattering instinct”: we need not merely to survive or be happy, but to feel that our lives count—that we matter. There is a striking Jewish connection here, even though Goldstein approaches the subject philosophically. The idea that we each want to matter in the eyes of others and in our own eyes, takes us back to the two sayings:

Bishvili nivra ha-olam — “For my sake the world was created.” and

Anochi afar va-efer — “I am dust and ashes.”

The first saying could be called the very affirmation of mattering: I am of infinite significance. But Goldstein cautions against the dangers of the mattering instinct when we derive our importance from seeing others as “less than.” That’s where “I am dust and ashes,” comes in to remind us to be humble. Holding the two together gives us something close to Goldstein’s moral insight: I matter enormously—and so does everyone else. Mattering shouldn’t be a zero-sum game, but a way to connection.

The Miracle of Your Life

The events that had to unfold so that you and I are here at all are staggering. Whether you choose to believe that your birth was the result of divine will, awesome mystery, or just incalculable luck, a whole universe since the dawn of time has unfolded to make you and me and this moment possible. In the words of the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Just to live is a blessing. Just to be is holy.”

It can be enough to just soak in the gratitude and wonder of it all, and in fact, that’s what the Torah commands us to do one day out of seven. Gratitude is why we have so many blessings for the enjoyment of food and drink and spices. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, we will one day be called to account for the legitimate and kosher pleasures that we refused to enjoy with thanks to God.

From a Jewish perspective, gratitude is a beginning. Whatever it took to get you here was God’s a way of bringing a soul, a bit of the divine consciousness, first to appreciate it, then to fulfill a unique role, a mission if you will. My teacher Reb Zalman taught that the soul, on a journey of lifetimes, has been deployed to this time and place to contribute in your unique ways.

In the Jewish path, gratitude and enjoyment of this life necessarily leads us to generosity. It is a mitzvah to enjoy the world, precisely because if we refuse to enjoy it we won’t value sharing it with others. We might end up like the proverbial rich man who subsists self-righteously on bread and water and therefore thinks that the poor can live on stones!

The great Hasidic rebbe, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov put it thus:

“Each person must say: ‘The entire world was created only for my sake” [Talmud Sanhedrin 37a] And precisely because the world was created for my sake, I must constantly explore ways of making the world better, doing Tikkun Olam, providing something that’s missing in the world, and also praying for its behalf.”

Whether you choose to believe that your birth was the result of divine will, awesome mystery, or just incalculable luck, a whole universe since the dawn of time has unfolded to make you and me and this moment possible. In the words of the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Just to live is a blessing. Just to be is holy.”

In the Jewish path, gratitude and enjoyment of this life necessarily leads us to generosity. It is a mitzvah to enjoy the world, precisely because if we refuse to enjoy it we won’t value sharing it with others. We might end up like the proverbial rich man who subsists self-righteously on bread and water and therefore thinks that the poor can live on stones!

“I am but dust and ashes” (Genesis 18:27)– the Meaning of Humility

Yom Kippur asks us to hold both truths at once: We may be small, but our responsibility is great. Humility does not ask us to make ourselves smaller than we are. It asks us to know our proper size: small enough to listen, learn, and make room for others, and large enough to take responsibility for the life we have been given. Humility is knowing that we can see far because we stand atop a mountain of divine aid and human work.

Another Jewish teaching is that truly great people show humility by listening to and respecting others. Moses was known as the humblest of men. There are beautiful examples of people of high station paying respect to others, and this is an indicator of their greatnest.

To quote the prophet Micah, we are commanded to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” Humility doesn’t mean standing still in self-effacement, but by walking a godly path, always learning, serving, growing, and using our gifts for the greater good—while remembering that our perspective and stature really come from the mountain beneath our feet.

Truth and Peace

In my Yom Kippur morning sermon I looked deeper into the meaning of “truth,” and how it relates to the difficult conflict between Israelis and Palestinians:

A wonderful Midrash imagines the angels arguing when God is about to create humanity: The angel of Chesed, loving-kindness, says, “Create them, for human beings will perform acts of loving-kindness.” Truth objects: “Do not create them, for they are filled with falsehood.” Righteousness argues that we will do good deeds; Peace argues against us because human beings will always be in conflict.

What does God do? God takes Truth and throws it down to Earth.

The angels are horrified. “Master of the Universe! You have thrown Your holy seal of Truth to the ground!”

And God replies with the words of the Psalm: Emet me-eretz titzmach—“Truth will spring up from the Earth.” [Bereishit Rabbah 8:5]

The Midrash offers a striking image: Truth isn’t left pristine and untouched in heaven. It is thrown into the messy soil of human existence, where we have to struggle together to find it.

Truth asks us to remain faithful to the facts while trying to see the greater whole. The Hebrew word for truth, emet—aleph, mem, tav—contains the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Our tradition seems to be reminding us that Truth must be big enough to take us from A to Z.

There is another kind of truth: a moral truth that describes not only the world as it is, but the world as it ought to be. As in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” In 1776, that certainly did not describe the facts on the ground. Enslaved people were denied their freedom, women lacked basic political rights, and equality was far from the lived reality of the new nation.

Yet the failure to live by that principle did not make the principle untrue. Quite the opposite: this bold assertion of human equality became a standard by which Americans could challenge the nation to live up to its own professed truth. Sometimes truth doesn’t merely describe reality but gives us a vision toward which reality must grow.

When it comes to the Mideast conflict, we are constantly pushed toward binary choices: Whose suffering matters? Whose history is true? Whose fear is justified? As though acknowledging the pain of one people requires denying the pain of the other.

I have been recommending a deeply moving book, The Future Is Peace, by two friends and peace activists, Israeli Jew Maoz Inon and Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah. Maoz’s beloved parents were murdered by Hamas on October 7. Aziz’s beloved brother died at age nineteen after suffering abuse in Israeli custody during the First Intifada.

Yet Maoz and Aziz have become like brothers, working together for peace. The very title of their book declares their moral truth of the world as it should and must become. Neither asks the other to surrender his grief, identity, or people’s story. Instead, they travel the Holy Land together, learning to see places they thought they knew through one another’s eyes. Maoz and Aziz do not relinquish their own stories. They plant their truths beside one another and ask whether something might grow there that neither could produce alone.

Emet me-eretz titzmach.  Truth will spring from the earth.

Every time I feel myself getting pulled into another argument on social media about the Middle East, I try to remind myself that my time and resources might do more good supporting and encouraging the peacemakers on the ground. There are many of them. ALLMEP alone is a coalition of more than 200 organizations working toward cooperation, justice, equality, shared society, mutual understanding, and peace.

Their vision, which can be ours as well, is to cultivate the conditions in which a larger truth can grow: a truth in which my children’s future does not require the hopelessness of your children, and your children’s freedom does not require the fear of mine.

We don’t know exactly what that truth will look like. That is the nature of planting a seed. But we can decide whether to keep clutching our certainties in our fists, or open our hands and plant them. May we loosen our grip on certainty enough to listen to one another. May we plant seeds of truth, compassion, and peace. And may a better future spring from the earth for generations to come.