Rosh Hashanah 5786 – Scroll Down for Video
Shanah Tovah.
As we sit here together and you all look east toward me, I am looking west, out the window behind you. There I can see the grandmother oak that has stood there since long before Congregation Ner Shalom and long before the Cotati Ladies’ Improvement Club, and whose memory might go back to a time before any Europeans arrived. Our collective gaze is often drawn to this tree. Our synagogue logo is based on this tree. We have read Torah under this tree. Some of you got married under this tree.
There are trees that just speak to us. In the Torah portion that includes the traditional Rosh Hashanah reading, there is a scene in which Abraham and Sarah receive a visit from three strangers who turn out to be angels, or God in the form of angels. The episode begins:
וַיֵּרָ֤א אֵלָיו֙ יְיָ בְּאֵלֹנֵ֖י מַמְרֵ֑א
Adonai appeared to Abraham among the oaks of Mamre,
while he was sitting at the entrance of the tent in the heat of the day.
The plot goes on from there – there are greetings and meals and announcements of impending miracles. But I want to hit pause and dwell for a moment on the setting. The oaks of Mamre. What are those? You could parse the Hebrew word mamre in a variety of ways, but for me the most enticing and straightforward is that Abraham was sitting under the Teaching Trees.
There are trees you just want to sit under and learn from, the one outside this window being high on that list. In a sense, all trees are teaching trees. We know this instinctively. Our desire to touch them or talk to them or be in their shade. Our childhoods spent in their branches, discerning the secrets of their depths and heights, their long lives and resilience.
This is teaching we need now – the secrets of endurance and resilience. We need this as humans and as Jews. We are in the most challenging and frightening moment of history that most of us here have ever experienced. How can we be rooted and resilient like a grandmother oak? How can we withstand the strong and contrary winds? How can we root deeper, reach higher, and connect side by side with each other?
I don’t know about you, but I have felt rootless of late. In lots of ways, but especially as a Jew. I have felt on the spot as a Jew in ways I never had – and I am a rabbi; I signed up to be a Jew on the spot! I have felt my Jewish presence in a room to be subtly provocative. I have found myself treated as a walking referendum on Israel or Zionism or the suffering of Palestinians. I have felt denied my authority over my Jewishness. Things done in my name, my name as a Jew, that I do not believe in or want. The destruction of Gaza is the biggie; but also the defunding of universities and the limiting of academic freedom supposedly done to shield me, to shield us, from anti-semitism.
There is of course a lot to talk about regarding Israel and Gaza and anti-semitism, and trust me – I will be taking it up next week on Yom Kippur, so you can buckle your seatbelts for that.
But for now, the immediate question I’m holding is about how we can be more rooted and resilient as Jews. So that in the moments that we are in controversy, or in disagreement with each other, or asked to be experts about something that maybe we’re not so expert in, or when we’re in the disquiet of rethinking our own beliefs, we can still feel rooted in our Jewishness. So that our Jewish identity is not defined exclusively by today’s headlines, but instead comes from a different place – of lineage and practice and intention.
Because what is at the core of our Jewish identity? Some learning, some memory, some experiences here, and some tricky cultural tropes that might not be good for us. For many, the core of our Jewish identity is the idea of not being Jewish enough. You have no idea how many conversations I have that begin with someone apologizing for being a bad Jew.
But I have an invitation for each of us with this new year: to take upon ourselves a new Jewish practice, something Jewish that we do not here, but in our own lives. To cultivate what we do as Jews when no one is looking. This is our chance to deepen at our roots. Because whether you notice them or not, the roots are there.
We are part of an ongoing lineage. This lineage carries within it a kind of ancient, spiritual DNA. And while it has been expressed differently in different generations and places, we can count on this: it is in our Jewish spiritual DNA to greet each day with blessing. It is in our Jewish spiritual DNA to approach food with consciousness. It is in our Jewish spiritual DNA to greet bedtime with atonement and forgiveness. To meet suffering with kindness. To meet hunger with sharing. To meet the Sabbath with rest.
All these things have traditional names and forms – maybe Hebrew words, motions, a particular order and way of doing them. These are practices we can recover and learn together. But the DNA of it – the Jewish mindfulness and belonging at the heart of it – that DNA is already in us.
It is with this in mind that we are rolling out a project at Ner Shalom that our friend Gesher Calmenson dubbed, “Crafting a Jewish Life.” A chance to visit the banquet table of rich offerings that our tradition has for us. Not with a goal of becoming more orthodox – tfu tfu – but to help each of the trees in our shared grove root a little deeper and stand a little taller. To find what can be adopted or adapted to help keep us upright, in all of that word’s meanings. To drink the groundwaters that have been here under our feet, practices that carry sweetness and real-world wisdom.
When we take on a Jewish practice, no matter how simple, like washing our hands with a blessing when we wake up, or offering forgiveness when we go to sleep, or reserving something of the seventh day for rest and repair, we are in conversation with the ancestors. We are de-assimilating from the generic whiteness of America, and standing in the specificity and richness of our lineage.
I had a dream the other night. I ran into two of my great aunts. Seeing them, white haired and more stooped, I was amazed. How was it that I had thought they were dead? But there they were, alive and unsurprised to see me. Aunt Hattie told me there was going to be a gathering at her apartment, which even in my dream I knew was at the corner of Sheridan and Surf in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. And then she was gone. The invitation had been issued and it was my job to get there.
I discovered I had a scooter, an odd three-wheeled thing that required me to push with one leg, sideways like a crab. There was a bicycle basket and in it I had all sorts of parcels. Boxes of various sizes sticking out in every direction. It seemed a ridiculous way to travel. Nonetheless, I made it to that familiar apartment, where Aunt Anne and Aunt Hattie were now entertaining, the guests milling around in golden light. It felt good to be reunited with them, and no explanations were necessary.
The message for me? The ancestors are here for us. The treasures of our tradition did not disappear. They have been here all along, waiting for us to notice them again.
For our more distant ancestors, personal Jewish practices were the stuff of their lives: mindfulness, awareness, gratitude to the Divine. Living a life in which every moment contains sparks of holiness, not as a matter of lofty theory, but as a practice and a lived experience.
You know that I am someone who embraces all sorts of change. I have made a Judaism that is my own, even if it sometimes looks like an awkward scooter full of un-aerodynamic baggage. I do not want to freeze time or roll it back. But I want to find what in our tradition can nourish and support us now.
This is what I want for you, for all of us. To be trees, firmly planted, bearing fruit that keeps on giving. I want Jewish lives that are not defined solely by today’s politics but also by our tender engagement with our lineage.
So that’s it. That’s what I’m asking. Everyone here. Jewish and Jewish-adjacent. To take on one Jewish practice for the new year. Try it for 40 days, which seems like a good biblical number. Come to our “Crafting a Jewish Life” workshops and our check-ins. We’ll provide you some mentorship if you need it. Some people take on a new Jewish practice every year on Rosh Hashanah. But we won’t get ahead of ourselves.
My prayer is that this will be part of how you do Jewish, as my teacher Reb Zalman would say. Part of the Jewish you are when you are not in this building. The Jewish that is just between you and you.
And who knows, maybe some of you here who are Jewish-adjacent might be interested in a path toward deepening and formalizing your connection with Judaism. If so, let me know over these next couple of weeks. (A cohort is starting up.)
The roots we are extending are not inanimate. They are alive. They drink of those deep, sweet groundwaters; they drink of an aliveness that then courses through our trunks, through our branches, to every leaf, to every flower and fruit.
I come back to Abraham and Sarah, sitting under the Teaching Trees, under grandmother oaks like the one out there. They are mythical of course, Abraham and Sarah. But they symbolize a moment of newness, of having let go of their past and cultivating from the seed something new that could last. They weren’t Jews as we think of ourselves in this modern era. Heck, they served the angels meat and milk together a couple sentences later. But they sat under the Teaching Trees and wondered how to be the root of something that would continue to blossom in unforeseen ways, even among divided waters. We are the branches of that tree. We will keep learning how to root, how to reach, and how to live in this grove together with enough light for everyone. The ripe fruit of the Teaching Tree is in our hands.