In what was surely one of the most heated and intense rabbinic

disagreements ever documented in the Talmud, the major early rabbinic

schools of thought of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel argued for two and a

half years on a question not of Halacha, but of our very existence as

humanity. They considered the ultimate existential question: should

human beings have ever been created? When I was learning this

Talmudic sugya in Tractate Eruvin 13b from the great Rabbi Pat Fenton

in my first year of rabbinical school, I shared my learning on this

primordial mahloket or disagreement with my dad, Mark Kaplinsky. He

listened patiently to my summary and then responded: “Who in the hell

do these rabbis think they are?” And he had a point, who DID these

rabbis think they were. Questioning the reality of God’s creation? Is that

not the ultimate hubris: to question a decision the creator of the universe

made long ago and then decide whether God was right in the end?

And beyond that, what exactly was the point of arguing about the

inarguable fact of human existence?

Fascinatingly, this argument—as seemingly impractical as it was—

lives on in our contemporary discourse, as many potential parents

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wonder about the benefits of bringing children into our increasingly

dangerous and frightening world. Indeed, we have witnessed these

global changes in dramatic fashion all summer and over the course of

the last decade: US cities covered in smoke and haze from wildfires in

Canada; dry, hot conditions leading to devastating fires in Maui; Europe

and the entirety of North America facing the hottest summers ever on

record—each year surpassing the previous year’s record; and just last

week: terrible flash floods in Libya where over 11,000 people are

confirmed dead and over 10,000 still missing.

And on our own turf, we, as a community, had the terrible

experience two years ago of spending Rosh Hashanah spread out over

the Southeast in hotel rooms because of Hurricane Ida.

And even today, I never expected that I would leave for High Holidays

with a hurricane approaching not New Orleans, but my new stomping

ground of New England!

While progress in the fight against climate change is being made, it

is clearly not being made quickly enough or on a big enough scale to

have an easily live-able planet to pass down to future generations. And at

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the end of the day, the science overwhelmingly proves that it us, human

beings, who are responsible for this catastrophe, and we have no choice

but to be the ones responsible for its repair.

So, given all this that we know about human destructiveness in our

own time, as well as in every era, what did the rabbis ultimately decide?

Thumbs up or thumbs down on humanity? The story continues that they

voted and concluded the following:

‫ ַﬠְכָשׁיו ֶשׁ ִנְּבָרא — ְיַפְשֵׁפּשׁ ְבַּמֲﬠָשׂיו‬,‫נוַֹח לוֹ ְלָאָדם ֶשׁלּ ֹא ִנְבָרא יוֵֹתר ִמֶשּׁ ִנְּבָרא‬

It would be better for humans not to have been created than

to have been created. Now that they have been created—they

should examine their deeds.

While the conclusion is indeed cryptic and more than a little off-

putting at first glance, the appendix to the decision reveals a more

personal and practical—perhaps even halakhic—purpose for this

argument than we might have initially thought. This debate was indeed

existential, but it was also trying to tell us something about our duties of

self-examination. Perhaps the disagreement could have been reframed as

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a question of whether we as humans can in fact make the world better

inherently by existing, or if the best humanity can hope for is to practice

self-reflection. However, unlike most action movies in which the good

guys fight for humanity’s capacity for goodness and succeed against

those who see only its dark side, our Rabbis’ conclusion is at once more

bleak and more balanced than the dominant cultural message.

It is bleaker in that the vote of Rabbis concludes that the world,

the universe, would have been better without us. It admits that we do in

fact inflict great damage on each other, on other living beings, and on

the planet itself. Even without considering the destruction wrought by

climate change, we as humans inflict so much pain on each other: we are

violent, we are cruel, we are indifferent to suffering,

al het sh’hatanu l’fanecha, ashamnu, bagadnu… These harsh realities of

human behavior lead us to a conclusion that the world may in fact be

better off without our presence—more kind, healthier, more in balance.

But again, it is instructive that the conclusion of the rabbis does not

simply state that we shouldn’t have been created, full stop. They do

not—and of course they cannot— decree that we should start creation

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over and just take out the sixth day. They know they have no choice but

to recognize the reality of human existence, so they add an element that

is actually within our control: “But now that they have been created—

they should examine their deeds.”

Humanity’s actions writ large here are, in a sense, being compared

on the smaller scale of individual sin. We know from our tradition and

our own experience, that when a person hurts another, that hurt does not

disappear from the world—the damage is, in a sense, done. That is why

we speak of God being nosei avon: lifting our sin from off us. At the end

of the unetaneh tokef we affirm that “prayer, repentance, and tzedakah

ma’avirin et roa hagzerah”— these things push off, let go, or transform

the harsh decree of God against us, but the decree is not erased.

It is just lifted off of us by God and by those we hurt. The only way to

make the hurt that we inevitably cause mean anything is through a

process of true self-examination and transformation. Y’fashpesh

b’maasenu: Digging deep and reflecting on how we are doing,

determining with whom we need to reconcile, and making and enforcing

a plan for how we are going to move towards change. We might best

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know this process as Teshuvah—reflection and return to the divine in

us, to our holy selves.

While I am often surprised by the swift arrival of another season of

repentance, and this year was no different, I realize now that my past

year had been full of the process of teshuvah, of introspection. For one, I

spent my last Jewish year studying in Yerushalayim, reflecting on my

relationship with the state of Israel, with the Jewish people in and out of

the Holy land, and my vision for the Jewish future in Israel and the

diaspora. By living in a foreign place, adjusting to a very different

culture, and growing in my Hebrew ability and practice—I was forced to

reflect on who I was.

Sometimes this came from the contrast between the way I interact with

people in my distinctly Southern American, happy-go-lucky manner, and

the much more curt, bordering on rude, way that Israelis often deal with

you on the street, in stores, and even in synagogue. Beyond this culture

shock, I was living in the country at a moment of great crisis and its own

process of self-examination as the most extreme right-wing government

in Israel’s history took power and aimed its sights on weakening Israel’s

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high court and strengthening their own power. I was at once inspired by

the commitment of the populace to fight this injustice in huge protests

throughout the country every week for months, while also feeling

disturbed that just over half of the country voted-in such an extremist

government. I was also troubled by the lack of presence of Palestinian

citizens of Israel in these protests. While they are likely to be the most

negatively affected by this overhaul, they also feel that the democracy

that Jewish Israelis are fighting to preserve is one that only minimally

represents them and their interests. All these upheavals and realizations

in the country seemed to happen in conjunction with my own formation

of what Israel means both to the Jewish people in and out of the land—

as well as to the millions of non-Jewish inhabitants of Israel and the

occupied West Bank and the broader world.

And in the midst of this cultural, personal teshuvah surrounding

myself and Israel, I also found myself looking inside to determine what

my future would be for my rabbinic studies. Being in the buzzing, albeit

stressful, environment of this past year of study in Israel, I kept being

confronted with the ticking clock that would eventually lead me back to

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Los Angeles and my studies at the Ziegler school. When people I met

would ask me if I was returning to LA after the year, I found myself

unenthused and a bit apprehensive about the idea. Without going in to

too much detail, LA never clicked for me as a city. I found individual

valued connections and learned much along the way, but I found myself

often unhappy, finding it difficult to be my fullest self in my school and

other environments. Ziegler taught me a great deal about how to engage

with Jewish texts, to improve my Hebrew, to get acquainted with many

peculiar studies that inform our tradition and my future work as a rabbi.

But something was missing.

As I acquired more skills to support my studies, I was also seeking a

deeper spirituality, a sense of community, mentorship, and inspiration to

take with me into my rabbinate.

And I learned at this point, that teshuvah—returning to our chief

priorities, our deeper spiritual needs, and the ways we can help ourselves

shine as our best—is often heart-wrenching and painful work. I very

much tore myself apart for much of my second semester in Israel trying

to determine if changing schools was a path that would bring out the best

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in me. And while that was the central question, I also wrestled with the

related issue of what that would mean for the friendships and

mentorships that I was privileged to acquire in my time at Ziegler. While

teshuvah is often thought about as changing how we act with others and

God, I began to realize that it is also about making changes that will

allow ourselves to shine more brightly in this world.

Moments like I experienced, that bring us face to face with our

priorities, our fears, our desires, and our hope for improvement are

incredibly difficult. In those moments, we too may sometimes ask

whether we should ever have been created.

But when we catch our breath for a second and refocus, we realize, like

the rabbis, that such a question is ultimately irrelevant. We are here.

Hinenu. We are called into this life to embrace the challenges of change,

of self-transformation, of making difficult decisions that could change

the course of our lives. We are called l’fashpesh b’maasenu, to reflect

deeply, to even wrestle with our deeds, and to believe that this difficult

investigation will ultimately yield a better, more mature, more joyful,

more holy, and wholly YOU.

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 So, we return to the question that we started with: would this world

actually have been better if humanity was never created?

I guess it depends on what you mean by better. If you mean that it

would have been better for managing ecological and interpersonal

damage control if humanity never existed…sure, in theory you could

call that “a better world.” But my question is, would it be a better life?

We are indeed messy, we are selfish, we are dangerous, we are greedy,

we are uncaring, and we cause hurt. There’s no way around that.

But if we didn’t have those difficult elements in the world, where would

be the opportunity for transformation? Where would be the teshuvah of

such a world?

The Talmud in Pesachim 54b cites a teaching that teshuvah was so

essential to the universal order that it was one of seven things created by

God even before the seven days of creation. What does that mean

practically? It means that the opportunity to learn, grow, make mistakes,

fail, make decisions that bring us closer to the divine and to ourselves

was one of the essential purposes of the creation of the universe and a

reason for why we exist. This life, according to our tradition, is

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worthwhile because of the opportunity for teshuvah, for second chances,

for moments of immense difficulty that yield a new path and a new life.

We exist to l’fashpesh b’maasenu: to look within and see how we can be

better, and do better for ourselves and others. While we think of this

process as unique to this season, Rabbi Eliezer—one of the great sages

of the time of the Mishnah—taught in Pirkei Avot, the sayings of our

ancestors, that a person should do teshuvah one day before we die. His

students asked him, how one can possibly know the day of their death?

He conceded that indeed a person cannot know the day of their death

and so they should do teshuvah every day. Every day is a chance for

some form of self-reflection, some envisioning of a better you, and

taking steps to act on it. Teshuvah, it turns out is the purpose and the

essence of a life well-lived.

And at the end of the day, teshuvah is also imperfect, just as we

are. We, each of us, try our best to make the optimal decisions in our

lives with the information we have available, with our intuition, and with

a little help from our friends, families, and trusted advisors. We cannot

know for certain if the choice we make will turn out the way we

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envisioned it. But to be alive, to be in this primordial process that

undergirds the functioning of the universe, we must do teshuvah. We

must look within, to be aware, to make tough calls when being your best

self is on the line. That is what this season is asking of us. Our liturgy

refers to today as the day of the world’s conception—today we return to

the beginning to figure out where we want to go in our lives.

On this day, we entertain the nascent universe void of our presence,

but we ultimately refuse to fall into it because we know we have a

mission in this one precious life: l’fashpesh b’maasenu, to examine our

deeds. May we all be brave this year, be willing to do the daily work of

looking within and making adjustments—finding out in the end that the

world was truly better for us having been created.

Shanah Tovah u’metukah.

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