Where were you around 10:20 AM this morning?
Did you feel the earth move? How about the aftershock at around 6:00 PM?
There was a serious earthquake—well, serious for the northeast—which registered 4.8 on the Richter scale. Scientists are saying it was a fault line called the Ramapo Fault which is just west of us—some say the epicenter was in North Plainfield which is only about 14 miles from where I’m standing right now.
I was up in my attic office taking part in a Zoom call. Suddenly, I felt the house rocking and rolling, accompanied by a loud roar. For a brief moment, I thought a giant semi-truck must be barreling down the street, but as it continued, I knew that something bigger was happening.
Now, Judaism has a blessing for everything. We have a blessing for rainbows. For seeing an old friend. For surviving danger. And yes, we even have a blessing for earthquakes. You’re supposed to recite this as it happens, but I think we can be a little lenient today. Sometimes, you just don’t have time to react!
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’ אֱ-לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם שֶׁכֹּחוֹ וּגְבוּרָתוֹ מָלֵא עוֹלָם
Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech HaOlam, Shekocho ugvurato malei olam.
Blessed are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe, His strength and might fill the world.” Let us all say, Amen!
Why did the rabbis need to bless earthquakes? For one thing, they are downright frightening, especially if you’ve never experienced one before. I hadn’t! To have the earth move and rock underneath you for a minute or more is disorienting. In fact, I felt a little seasick for several hours afterward.
The bracha is to remind ourselves—and, more to the point, to reestablish for ourselves, that God is in control of the earth. Our rabbis teach that God causes these quakes. His goal, according to our sages, is to literally “shake us up” from our current state and remind us to fear Him. The ancients understood earthquakes to be caused by God clapping His hands or kicking His feet. Then, God is said to drop two tears into the ocean when he sees our pain in Galut, in exile.
We know the science of tectonic plates. We know that the earth is constantly shifting under our feet. It’s more volatile out west with multiple plates and fault lines, but we can get them here even with our bedrock foundations. But to feel it in your house, in your bed, or as one congregant told me, in your shower, is a whole ‘nother ballgame. It makes us grateful to live in an area of the world where such shaking is rare. It also reminds us that rare does not mean never.
It can focus our minds on our blessings, on our families and friends. For some, it may lead them to face mortality and frailty. None of us can know when a building may collapse, God forbid, Chas v’chalilah, or other natural disasters could occur. Just the other week, a friend of mine survived a tornado outbreak that damaged houses just yards from his—aside from a little roof damage, his house was spared. You never know.
In Judaism, the purpose of an earthquake is to develop a renewed sense of aliveness, of closeness to HaShem, of faith.
This Shabbat is called Shabbat HaChodesh, the Shabbat of the Month. On it, we announce the coming of the month of Nisan which starts Monday night. We read a special Maftir from Exodus which describes the creation of Nisan as the first of the months followed by a description of the first Passover. The first Pesach was held in Egypt, in slavery, in Exile. Many of you might not remember that. Freedom isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind. Freedom isn’t a physical location, but a spiritual realm.
What’s interesting about this announcement of the Month and the description of how to perform the Passover rituals is that it comes, mamash, in the middle of the plagues. They aren’t even finished, and here we are, already looking towards our liberation. Still to come was the final, deadly plague — the death of the first born. What is the connection between Nisan and these plagues? Why does it come right here?
The Mishnah teaches that the World was created with ten utterances, “Ba’asarah ma’amarot nivra HaOlam.” Nine different times the Torah says, “And God said let there be…” And they also count the very first sentence of Bereishit as number ten. Ten creative utterances. Ten plagues. Sages teach us that each and every plague is connected to, and sometimes is the opposite of, the acts of creation. God created Light. Now we have, Choshech, darkness. God created trees and grass. Now we have locusts who devour these same trees. God created man, now we have God killing man. You get the idea.
My daughter Annabel, who is studying physics, might say, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. She might be quoting someone, I couldn’t say.
So what is going on here?
The plagues are a second creation. God is re-creating the world, this time with eyewitnesses. No one was around the first time. We trust that God created. We believe in it. But we didn’t see it.
Rabbi Don Well brings down that in the Kiddush we just recited, there are two kinds of memory, “Zikaron l’ma’asei v’reishit” (In remembrance of the works of creation) and later, “Zecher L’tziat Mitzrayim.” (In memory of the Exodus from Egypt). Why two different words: Zikaron and Zecher? He explains that a Zikaron is a memory we believe in but nobody witnessed. A Zecher is something that we saw with our own eyes. We didn’t see creation, Adam and Eve were formed on day six but we all saw the Exodus. We saw the plagues, which paralleled the creative utterances, we saw that God who created nature can also overturn nature. The world was created again. Earth 2.0
And this renewal, this new beginning, comes to us each and every month. That is why the new month was inserted into a seeming digression. Our tradition holds that every single day of Nisan is a Rosh Chodesh. Every single day holds the potential of the fresh. Every day has possibilities of freedom and release. Every day, we can wake up in the morning with the energy of the Exodus. Every day, we have another chance.
I planted some bulbs last spring in my new garden. I must have planted them too deeply because they took a very long time to come up. Daffodils were up all over town and mine were just peeking out of the dirt. But this year, this week, they’ve sprung up. They’re kind of mini-daffodil called tête-à-tête. Small, dainty little yellow flowers. They brighten up these grey, rainy and cold days. I had wondered where they were, had worried about them, but now, at last, they have appeared. After the frost and cold, they forced their way through towards the light.
The poet Pablo Neruda wrote, “You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot stop spring from coming.” You cannot stop what is your time to bloom. Once a caterpillar nests in its cocoon, it will become a butterfly. It is the same and different, all that it was before and yet new and different.
May we all enter this holy month of Nisan with a sense of joy, trust, and faith that our time has come to burst forth and soar towards new light.