Whenever I am back in Toronto visiting my parents’ grave, there are places that continue to draw me in no matter how many times I have been there. My old primary school. Junior high. High school. The temple I grew up in. All the places that were formative throughout my life. And the moment I’m standing there — hand on a railing, looking up at a building that seemed so much taller when I was seven — amazing memories come rushing back.

One memory leads to another, and another. In no time, there’s a whole gallery of people in my mind — teachers, friends, rabbis who inspired me and, though they’ve passed away, continue to inspire me still. Mostly happy memories. Some sad. But all of them help center me, reminding me of the roads and intersections that somehow led me to be standing at that exact spot, at that exact moment.

Call it God. Call it fate. Call it beshert — that lovely Yiddish word for “meant to be,” the thing that was written before you even knew there was a pen. Whatever you call it, arriving at that place brings forth memories and questions that only real reflection can bring.

I want to share a bit of my own beshert with you, since most of you don’t know me — and that beshert is how I got to Boca. I’ve been a congregational rabbi for forty years, serving in Mississippi, New Mexico, New Jersey, and, just last year, as an interim up the road in Gainesville. When my wife Stella and I were figuring out what to do this year, I sent in my application here without much expectation. B’nai Israel is unlike any congregation I’ve served. Still, I took the chance, and it has already changed my life and given me memories — and stories — I’ll treasure.

Something about B’nai Israel drew me here. As in most congregations, there is plenty of warmth and friendliness. But that is not why I came here. I sensed something deeper: a congregation searching for a rabbi who could listen, help restore connection, and continue building a temple that creates holy space for every one of its thousand families. Standing on this bimah tonight isn’t intimidating — it’s intoxicating, because I get to serve this congregation as we grow together into an even stronger Jewish community.

I share this with you tonight because I believe each of us is standing in a holy place this evening. It is a physical place we call home, in a building we call B’nai Israel. But it is also a spiritual place we call our Jewish identity. We come together tonight, as Jews have for thousands of years on this night, to reflect and recall who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

There are precious memories here, especially for our seasoned members — and the beginnings of precious memories for our newer members: a first High Holiday, the first time the shofar’s blast caught you or your children off guard. Each memory is a gift. We will recall many tonight. We will forget some — that’s alright too; memory was never a perfect filing cabinet. But every moment, remembered or not, has shaped who we are.

I think that’s why the rabbis called Rosh Hashanah the birthday of the world. On every birthday, memories are inevitable. And what is the Jewish birthday story? It’s found in the very first word of the Torah — b’reishit — literally “in beginning.” Not “at a beginning” — Hebrew doesn’t even give us the definite article there. Just b’reishit. As if Torah itself is telling us: don’t think of this as a single locked-in moment, long ago and finished. Think of it as a state of being. A perpetual condition.

And what does God do with this beginning? Genesis tells us the earth was tohu va’vohu — “formless and void,” or, as the old JPS translation has it, “unformed and void.” I love that word: unformed. Not nothing, not absence, but potential without shape yet. Chaos waiting for a voice.

Into that chaos, God does not perform some grand cosmic magic trick. God speaks. “Yehi ohr” — “Let there be light.” And there was light. The first act of creation in the Torah is not a hand molding clay. It is a word calling forth order from confusion. The very first divine act in our tradition is someone standing in the middle of formlessness, and speaking meaning into it.

Which is precisely what I was doing wandering my old neighborhood. Standing in front of a building that is, on the surface, just brick and mortar — tohu va’vohu, if you squint — and out of it, memory calls forth light. A face. A voice. A lesson learned the hard way. Order emerging from what looks, at first glance, like just… stuff.

I wonder if that’s what happens when you walk into this sanctuary tonight. On the surface — chairs, a bimah, stained glass, the familiar smell of prayer books. Just a jumble of stuff, if you’re only looking with your eyes. But look with your memory, and watch what happens. A bar mitzvah you stood up for decades ago. A funeral where this community held you up when your knees wouldn’t. A wedding under a chuppah right there. A baby naming. Our cantor’s voice on a particular Kol Nidre that still visits you in your sleep.

B’reishit. Every time we walk back into a holy place, we are re-enacting, in our small human way, that first divine act — speaking light into formlessness, taking scattered fragments of dates, faces, feelings, and calling forth from them a story. Our story.

Carl Sagan once said that we are made of “star stuff” — that the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, was forged in the collapsing furnace of long-dead stars. We all carry the residue of some ancient beginning inside us, waiting to be called into shape. B’reishit isn’t just something that happened. It’s something we carry.

So when we visit places we consider holy — like this sanctuary, on this Day of Awe — we are not merely being sentimental. We are doing the most Jewish thing a person can do on Rosh Hashanah: performing our own act of creation, taking the unformed raw material of a life lived, and calling forth light from it.

But Torah, thank God, does not stop at “let there be light.” Because a single beginning turns out not to have been quite enough. And in that truth lies the reason we celebrate Rosh Hashanah year after year.

There’s a midrash — one of my favorites, tucked away in Bereishit Rabbah — that imagines something startling about God’s process of creation. It says: bara Elohim olamot u’macharivan — “God created worlds, and destroyed them.” Not once. Not twice. Again and again, God built entire universes, looked at them, found them wanting, and swept them away — ad zeh, “until this one.” Until finally God looked at this world, tohu va’vohu and all, and said: “Zeh na’asah tov b’einai” — “this one pleases me.” This one, God kept.

The first time I encountered that midrash, I found it almost scandalous. God — infinite power, infinite wisdom — trying, failing, trying again? But the more I’ve sat with it, the more I think the rabbis were handing us something enormously comforting. If God’s own first act of creation required drafts, required starting again, then how much more so for us? How much more so for a community like ours?

B’nai Israel was not handed down whole, perfect, gleaming, on the first try. It was built and rebuilt, led by different rabbis with different skills and different boards with different visions and filled with different people with different ideas and priorities. There were olamot — whole worlds within this congregation’s life — that came and went. Building committees who argued for years over carpet color, which, believe me, is its own small act of creation and destruction. Members who moved away, members who passed away, members who found their way back after decades of wandering.

And this past year alone — who joined us who wasn’t here last Rosh Hashanah? Whose name did we add to the Mi Shebeirach list that we now get to remove because they’ve healed? Whose name did we add to the Yizkor list, may their memory be a blessing, that we now carry forward instead of alongside them? Every one of those changes is a small olam that existed, shifted, and gave way to the next iteration of who we are.

B’reishit was never a one-time event locked into ancient history. It is a verb, not just a noun. Ad zeh — until this one. Until this year. Until this community, gathered in this room tonight, breathing together, remembering together.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “Judaism is a religion of time, not space” — that we sanctify not buildings, but moments. That’s exactly what’s happening here tonight. This building is sacred space, yes — but what makes it sacred is the accumulated moments of us, together, calling forth light out of whatever chaos each of us walked in carrying. Your grief. Your joy. Your uncertainty about whether you even believe in any of this — and yet here you are anyway, which counts for a lot.

The Kabbalists teach that before God could create our world, God first had to withdraw — tzimtzum — to make room for something other than God to exist and grow. Creation begins not with expansion but with making room for another. That may be the deepest instruction Genesis has for a congregation trying to build belonging. Before we can create something new together, each of us may need our own small tzimtzum — a pulling back of ego, of “well, that’s not how we did it in 1987” — to make space for the newcomer three rows back who doesn’t know where the good parking is, or the teenager questioning everything, the way all good teenagers should. Making room is itself a creative act.

I want to share a true story from a Rosh Hashanah in New Mexico. I walked out of my office, right beside the sanctuary door, and merged with the incoming crowd. One of the oldest and most beloved members was talking to her friend as I slipped in behind them. I heard her say something I’ve never forgotten: “I can’t believe this is my congregation. There are so many people I don’t know.” Loss and sorrow, plain and simple. I said, “Bea, you and Howard built this congregation precisely to welcome all these new people. These people are your legacy. They are your spiritual children.” I will never forget her reaction — an acknowledgment that yes, she had lost something, but she had also gained something she never thought of: a legacy of a synagogue she helped build.

That is where B’nai Israel stands at the beginning of a new year. Change is not always easy, and change in a congregation is sometimes harder than most. But we are building something together, creating something that has never existed before in the entire story of the universe — a B’nai Israel in 5787 — and we are doing it together. Not as isolated souls each conjuring our own private light, but as a kahal, standing shoulder to shoulder in the same unformed dark, calling forth the same light, together.

That is belonging. Not merely comfort, not merely familiarity — though God knows we treasure both. Belonging is standing in the tohu va’vohu of a new year, none of us quite sure what it holds, knowing that the people around us are calling forth light alongside us. Building, un-building, and building again — ad zeh, until it works — together.

So today, as the machzor opens before us and the shofar waits to sound its ancient cry, hold both halves of this teaching. B’reishit — the beginning you carry, every memory that centers you and reminds you how you got to this seat tonight. And b’reishit — the beginning we build, together, imperfectly, lovingly, year after year, until, please God, this is the community that pleases us. That we choose to keep.

We are not written into the Book of Life alone this year. We are written together — B’nai Israel, children of Israel, one small holy world still being created, right here, right now.

B’reishit. In the beginning. Again. Together.

Shanah tovah.