Our community is only a few years old, still going up around us, and our synagogue is a portable structure set down on a lot where a permanent building will eventually stand. Inside it is lovely. Clean, comfortable, cared for. But it is bare bones, because nobody invests in finishes for a building that will one day be hauled away. There is no soaring ceiling and no stained glass. It is a room that does the job until the real one is ready.
And yet, on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) I felt so fortunate to be standing in that room.
Most of us here are olim, immigrants, people who packed up a life somewhere else and moved to Israel. That means most of us do not have parents down the block or siblings across town. So the community became the family. Someone has a baby and the meals appear for two weeks. Someone’s husband is called up for reserve duty and neighbors show up to take the children to school. On Rosh Hashanah I looked around at people who were strangers to me a few years ago, and I thought: I am home.
Why did a temporary building on an unfinished lot feel so permanent?
The Bible answers this question early on in Genesis.
The first chapter of Genesis describes God’s creation of the world. Everything He makes gets His approval. Light is good. Sea and dry land are good. Plants, sun and moon, fish, birds, animals, each one is inspected and pronounced good, and at the end of the sixth day the whole world together is called tov me’od, very good (Genesis 1:31). Everything passes.
And then, one chapter later, God looks at that same finished world and says that something in it is wrong. “
Adam is in a garden God planted for him, watered by four rivers, full of trees that are beautiful to look at and good to eat from (Genesis 2:9). He has meaningful work. He has no scarcity, no danger, no illness, nobody to compete with, and direct access to God Himself. Every single thing we spend our lives trying to arrange, he already has. And God looks at him there and says it is not good. Why? Because Adam was alone.
Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm captured what Adam discovered in one beautiful sentence. Adam, he wrote, “learned that a Paradise without Love can be a wilderness, and a wilderness with love can be a Paradise.”
But God doesn’t tell this to Adam, he lets him figure it out on his own. Instead of creating a companion right away, God brings every animal He has made to the man to see what he will call them, and Adam names them all. Then the verse tells us how the search ended: for the man, no “helper corresponding to him,” was found (Genesis 2:20). He had to look at every living creature in the world and come up empty before he could understand what was missing. Loneliness is not something anyone can explain to you. You only learn it by feeling it.
When he finally sees Eve, we hear him speak for the first time. Until that moment he has only been naming animals. Now he says something that sounds like a song: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). He had nothing to say until there was someone to say it to.
Then everything falls apart, and this is the part I keep coming back to. They eat from the tree, they are sent out, and the flaming sword closes the way back to the garden forever (Genesis 3:24). Paradise is gone. But look at what the text does not say. It never says they were separated. They walk out into a world of thorns and hard labor, and they walk out of it together. They lost the garden. They did not lose the thing that made the garden worth having.
Centuries later, God says the second half of Rabbi Lamm’s sentence Himself when He tells the prophet Jeremiah which era He remembers most fondly:
What God remembers fondly is not the era of Joshua, Samuel or even the Temple. He recalls the wilderness, which was not a lovely place. It is where the water ran out, where the golden calf was built, where a whole generation complained and died. It was a hard stretch in our history. And it is the one God looks back on with longing, because in the wilderness we had each other. It was a wilderness filled with love, and God remembers it as paradise.
A real building is coming, with proper entryways and a ceiling that does not amplify the rain, and I am looking forward to it. But I understand now what those walls will and will not do for us. Walls do not bring the meals that arrive uninvited, or take the neighbors’ children to school. Most of us spend our lives working on the walls. The first time God called something “not good,” the problem was not anything a person could build.
The Sages teach that Adam was created on the first day of Tishrei, the day we celebrate as Rosh Hashanah (Leviticus Rabbah 29:1). On the very first Rosh Hashanah, God looked at a perfect world and saw a man standing in it alone. This year, on that same day, I stood in a room with a ceiling that rattles in the rain, surrounded by people who were strangers a few years ago, and I was not alone.
So before the next renovation, look around the room and ask who is standing in it with you, and whether you have shown up for them the way you hope they will show up for you. The building is temporary. What we build inside it is not. A paradise without love can be a wilderness. We are living on an unfinished lot, and it is paradise.
