*Now We Begin Again | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | January 2, 2026*
Every time the calendar year changes, I feel as though the world is created anew.
An unfounded feeling. After all, in the end everything goes on as usual - the potted plants, the clouds, the green parrots on the tree - nothing is truly created again. And I, too, walk along the same gray sidewalk, along the same route between the school and the neighborhood grocery store, and from there back home. And still, I feel it: the world is created a little anew.
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Once, I discovered that in India, more than one creation story is told. That is, we have Adam and Eve, the apple and the snake. And sometimes an additional version involving Lilith. But in India, dozens of different creation stories are told. Different figures. Other beginnings. And that was how I fell in love with Hinduism, when I dove into all of these creation stories. It was long before the doctorate, long before I, myself, taught myself. It was when I myself was only beginning to learn. And the first thing I learned was that in a reality of reincarnation, not only is the human being reborn, but the world itself is created again and again. And every such creation comes with a story.
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One ancient Indian creation story tells that in the beginning there was Purusha - a cosmic being. He, and nothing around him. When he made a sound, the sound returned to him. There was no one else to hear it but him, and the sound returned like an echo in a very empty place. Purusha was seized by an overwhelming fear of loneliness. He was filled with an urgent longing for someone to be with him, and love began to surge within him, even though there was still no one there. Out of love, Purusha enlarged himself to the size of an embrace. That is, an empty embrace: he embraced the nothingness. And then he expanded the embrace, again and again, until it was large enough, and from within the embrace a woman was created.
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In the beginning there was the human being, and then fear, and then desire, and then love. And thus everything began.
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And in another story that I love deeply, humanity is created out of lies and betrayals. A goddess falls in love with a young man, married and deeply devout, and tries to force herself upon him. He manages to evade her and disappears, but she cannot remove him from her mind or her heart. When she becomes pregnant by someone else, she imagines her beloved so intensely that people ask: could it be that, from all this imagining, the child is actually his? A bastard child, the product of fantasy and lies, flight, and also love and desire - all the materials from which our humanity is made.
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And indeed, according to this story, he is considered the first human being. The great ancestor of us all.
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And it is not as though, in our own tradition, the first human being does not suffer from cowardice and an inability to stand his ground. Yes, he gives names to all things, such beautiful names, and takes part with God in the act of creation. But he also establishes a family which includes the first murderer, and the first murdered, and inevitably, incest.
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What can be said? Creation stories are not stories that try to beautify anything. Perhaps because they attempt to explain how we arrived where we are. What materials we are made of. And when you read them, and see your ancestors with all their beauty and weaknesses, sometimes you understand yourself a little better.
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Every time the year changes, I feel that the world is created a little anew. But that does not mean it is necessarily romantic. Anyone who knows creation stories knows that creation is not only a beautiful thing. In Judaism it begins with God arranging chaos, but it continues with lies, betrayal, flight, the fall from Eden, and the disillusionment of both God and human beings, who understand from the very beginning that whether you are human or divine, there seems to be a limit to what you can do - the mess is here to stay.
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When you are a woman, you sometimes feel this quite literally in your body. You get your period. Perhaps you have given birth. Perhaps you have passed through the corridor of menopause. Today we understand more and more, also through research, that at every such juncture, the feeling that you are being created anew is not merely metaphorical. Each such change leads to a different hormonal balance, a slightly different body, a different mood and even a different state of mind. Your character changes, your reactions, your anger or your calm, the speed at which you build muscle, and the way you see the world. Not only life changes. Not only maturation. You look at who you were several life cycles ago within this one life cycle, and that woman is utterly different from who you are today.
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And yes, like every act of creation, this too involves fear, loneliness, desire, love, flight and return, moments of real wretchedness and moments of immense beauty. How wise were those who told us these creation stories, trying to tell us who we are. Who we have always been.
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So I end today with a poem of mine, from Wherever We Float, There Is Home, which I wrote for my infant daughter. Today it is already understood that every birth is an act of creation - not only of a baby, but also of the one who gives birth to her. Even in a fourth, fifth, or sixth birth. And every creation deserves a creation story. Or a poem.
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*Baby Girl / by Maya Tevet Dayan*
Translated by Jane Medved
(From: Wherever We Float That’s Home”)
We are converging on you now:
wrinkled and beautiful, excited and bent
by destiny, ancient as crumbling papers,
and fresh as a dream. The fragments
of our hearts, and our moments
of happiness, stretch from the dawn
of creation to the milky lashes of your eyes.
Your fathers, and your father’s fathers, and their mother’s mothers –
All of us crowd together at your entrance.
Just as the entire night wishes to compress
into one small star, we are now
your fingers, your nose, a cry, the twitch of a mouth.
We were many endings.
We grew very tired.
Now we begin again.
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I wish us a good civil year, and especially now, a good act of creation
And may we all have Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*