Rabbi Leora's Yom Kippur D'var Torah |
Wrestling with Holy Envy: On Sharing our Gifts, and Learning to be at Home
My colleagues who do interfaith work describe an experience called holy envy - when a teaching, practice, or symbol from a spiritual or religious tradition not your own is appealing to you and makes you kinda wish it was yours. Ideally, it sparks a curiosity that leads you to dig deeper within your own tradition and find new insight there. I had an experience of holy envy this year when reading a book called Braiding Sweetgrass. It was written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is a botanist, trained in both Western scientific knowledge and in indigenous wisdom. The book is an intimate story of her personal relationship with the lands of upstate New York and the Pacific Northwest, and the plants, trees, insects and fish, rivers and mountains that she considers her neighbors and kin. The book is also a giving over of generations of wisdom about how human beings can live in right relationship with the earth, wisdom that is encoded in the stories and jokes, rituals and languages of Kimmerer’s own people - the Citizen Potawatomi Nation - as well as other peoples indigenous to what is now the United States, known to its native peoples as Turtle Island.
I was compelled by the teachings she shares in her book, and I felt some envy at how easily they seemed to translate into practice. The stories, symbols, and ceremonies call forth a way of walking on this earth with reverence and joy. They cultivate a way of seeing the whole world as a gift, knowing that everything you need to be deeply nourished in body and in spirit; to be warm, and fed, and safe, and satisfied is right here, all around you. If you learn to take what you need and not more; to receive the gift with gratitude and joy; and to give back tender loving care, powerful respect, and the work of your own hands, the gift will not diminish, but grow.
As a read, I wondered: does Judaism call forth such a way of living?
The Jewish teachings about the environment that first come to mind are probably familiar to you: do not waste (Bavli Shabbat 67b); do not unnecessarily cut down trees (Deuteronomy 20:19); do not gain a livelihood at the expense of another’s health. What strikes me is that they are mostly negative. Mostly precautions. A midrash tells of God taking Adam on a tour of the Garden of Eden. God says to Adam, “See My beautiful works? All that I have created, I made for you. Be mindful then that you do not spoil and destroy My world - for if you spoil it, there is no one after you to repair it” (Kohelet Rabbah 7:13). The message is not an invitation to come into a loving relationship with the earth, but rather: don’t screw it up.
I think we’ve gotten really good at teaching our young people about social justice - to imagine a world where all human beings are treated according to their inherent worth and dignity. But I’m less confident that we are cultivating in them a feeling of kinship, a feeling of love, and a feeling of accountability with the rest of creation.
Kimmerer invites us all to learn to live in the world as if it is a gift, and she describes it by talking about strawberries. She writes,
“In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them… it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewey leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it… Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery - as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source. (Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 24)
Though a gift comes to you through no action of your own, she goes on, “in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.”
Much of Kimmerer’s book explores this notion of reciprocity: what, as human beings, can we possibly give back to the earth, which gives us everything? She explores ceremonies of gratitude; attitudes of humility; and also the real work of tending gardens, restoring landscapes, and picking sweetgrass. As she weaves a story of humble, loving engagement, what emerges is a sense of home, of belonging. A sense that we belong to each other, us and the earth - not in the sense of ownership, but in the sense of family.
I think that part of the reason Jews have struggled to articulate and to pass on our theology of relationship to the natural world is because we have not had that sense of belonging, that sense of home.
As Howard asked so poignantly last week on Rosh Hashanah, what is home to a Jew? The ideas of home, of place, of belonging are fraught in Jewish myth and in Jewish history. Scholar Arnold Eisen traces our origin narratives: Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden, that place where they were warm, and fed, and safe, and satisfied. Cain is condemned to be a wanderer. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all leave their homes, until the Israelites ultimately follow Joseph into exile in Egypt. The rest of the Torah anticipates the return to home only to threaten renewed exile. “Exile,” writes Eisen, “is the existential condition of human beings upon God’s earth… Home, for Jews… is… too good to be true… Exile proves to be the rule, not the exception. Genesis is not a mere prologue, but the main act of the human drama. Home remains an affair of the imagination.”
In addition to telling a narrative of exile, Biblical theology articulates this lack of belonging as a frame for living responsibly on the earth. The earth, and everything in it, belong to God. We are but sojourners here. Our task is to live with humility and gratitude, as transient guests. The rabbis would later draw on this idea to teach that the blessings we say before eating are our form of reciprocity; they are what we give back. Anytime we eat without saying a blessing, it is as if we are eating stolen food.
The Jewish experience of exile, of course, only begins with the Torah. Our history mirrors our sacred myth. We were exiled by the Babylonians, and then by the Romans. And then from England, and Spain, from Poland and Russia, from Iraq and Morocco. Land has never been a guarantee for us, and we carry this ancestral trauma within us, the fear that at any moment we might have to pick up and leave. So perhaps it is not surprising that we have struggled to feel at home with the earth.
Our legacy of diaspora is not only a burden. It is also a strength. Like us, the ancient rabbis lived in a time of incredible fracture, following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Amid extraordinary violence, they created a tradition that was flexible and adaptive, creative and responsive. A tradition that could be practiced anywhere, as the kitchen table replaced the Temple as the site of receiving gifts of the earth and giving gratitude and praise back to God.
The idea of exile shifted: rather than being geographic, exile became the condition of living in an imperfect world. A Jewish feeling of exile became synonymous with our commitment to repairing the world, as the tradition of exile, Eisen writes, became our “witness to the awareness of being somewhere else than where God is and humanity should be” (225). Exile means living in hazman hazeh, this time, when we long for - and work for - a vision of global redemption.
Our legacy of diaspora also gives us the stunning diversity of Jewish culture. Our languages, our musics, our cuisines, all of which have developed in response to and in relationship with the lands and people where they were. Haroset, the quintessential symbol of slavery, suffering, and exile, is made of the sweetest gifts our local place has to offer: In Yemen, dates. In Europe, apples and cinnamon. Today, my teacher Aurora Levins Morales makes mango haroset with coconut and rum. She is the daughter of “two New York born parents, one Puerto Rican Catholic and one Ashkenazi Jew with roots in the Ukraine, who,” as she writes, “blended two cuisines that were already the result of thousands of years of migrations, invasions, captivity, and commerce.”
We have so much to work with. And, I felt challenged by Kimmerer’s book to ask even more of our tradition. Our most powerful land-based Torah originated in the Middle East, in response to, and in order to connect more deeply to, the natural cycles of a mediterranean climate. And for those of us who do not live in a meditteranean climate, I don’t think they are able to do what we need them to do, which is to instill, deep within us, a sense of connection to, belonging with, and responsibility for the earth.
When I lived in Jerusalem during rabbinical school, I arrived just after Yom Kippur, and was able to join my aunt and uncle in their sukkah, along with my cousins and their children. Sukkot is our harvest holiday; a time, indeed, for giving thanks for the gifts of the natural world, and for honoring the work human beings do in relationship with the earth. Sukkot is also a festival of water; in the middle east, it comes at the beginning of the rainy season. The shaking of the lulav is meant to sound like the pitter patter of the first rain; and we begin to add prayers for rain back into our liturgy. That first Sukkot evening in Jerusalem, as I sat with my cousin’s small children in my aunt and uncle’s courtyard, it began to rain - the first rain of the season. It was only a light rain, the first fat drops disappearing immediately into the dry earth. But the children’s eyes opened wide, their faces turned to delight. Yored geshem! They cried. It’s raining! It’s raining! Bo bachutz u’margish et ha geshem! Come outside and feel the rain! They stripped off their clothes, opened their palms, and lifted their faces to the sky. A gesture of gratitude; a posture of prayer. Yored geshem, they whispered in awe. It’s raining.
That was the first time I truly understood what Sukkot is about. The first time I witnessed the profound vulnerability of living in a climate where food for the whole year depends on just a few months of abundant rain. The first time I understood the spiritual significance of our prayers for rain - they originated both in response to and in order to connect us more deeply to the natural cycles of the earth. The first time I really felt what it meant to understand rain as a blessing - as a gift.
I want our beautiful land-based rituals and theologies to do that for all of us. In New England, Sukkot does not fall at a time of year when we need to pray for rain. Is there another way it can make us feel the urgency of our relationship to water: the urgent vulnerability, and the urgent joy? Similarly, Tu b’shvat, the birthday of the trees, falls in January in New England. Kimmerer has a beautiful chapter on Maple trees, the “iconic beings who shape the landscape, influence our daily lives, and feed us - both materially and spiritually” (168). What if we celebrated Tu b’shvat at maple sugaring time, “when the earth starts to wake up from her well-deserved rest and renews her gifts to the people”?
This work, to reconstruct our teachings, is being done in exciting ways. Adamah is a program in the Berkshires that trains young people in the Jewish farming tradition, alongside cultivating their own spiritual practice. Alumni of that program started Linke Fligl, a queer Jewish chicken farm, whose long-term strategy is centered around the shmita cycle. Linke Fligl, they write, “envisions a deep, vibrant, de-assimilating, diasporist and songful Jewish culture that uplifts the multiplicity of Jewish identities. This culture seeks to find belonging through reclaiming intrinsic connection to land and ancestry while also being accountable to the reality that many of us are settlers on this land. Through growing food, participating in reparations, being in prayer, and connecting to land and tradition, we shift and reimagine diasporic Jewish life.”
Finding connection and belonging on the land where we are now is made especially complex because it is stolen land. This particular land, where Attleboro sits, is the home of the Wampanoag people.
When Robin Wall Kimmerer invites non-native people to begin to feel at home on Turtle Island, and to treat it with the respect a home deserves, she recognizes that “against the backdrop of [colonial] history, an invitation to settler society to become indigenous to place feels like a free ticket to a housebreaking party. It could be read as an open invitation to take what little is left” (213). She also recognizes that “immigrants cannot by definition be indigenous...No amount of time or caring changes history or substitutes for soul-deep fusion with the land…But” she asks, “if people do not feel “indigenous,” can they nevertheless enter into the deep reciprocity that renews the world? Is this something that can be learned?“
For a teacher, she turns, as she always does, to the plants, finding her lesson in the plantain. Plantain came to this land from Europe, as a foreigner, but rather than invading without regard to limits, it “became an honored member of the plant community,” offering every part of itself as food or medicine, fitting into small spaces, coexisting with others, and becoming “so well integrated that we think of it as native.” Plantain, she says, “is not indigenous but naturalized.”
And that is what she invites us, too, to do. “Being naturalized to place,” she writes, “means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if your lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.”
She is inviting us to find home here, to live as if both feet are firmly planted, as if we belong. It is, in many ways, a different orientation than the one expressed in Torah, that the earth is God’s, and we are but strangers and sojourners upon it. But it’s also not different: To choose life, ours and all that is around us. To love our neighbors - human and animal, plant and rock alike - as we love ourselves. To wake each morning with a word of thanksgiving on our lips, to end each day with a word of apology for any harm we might have done. To work in the time for work, to rest in the time for rest, to respect the cycles of the light and dark and to dance in the light of the moon. That, too, is our ancient wisdom. That wisdom has always helped us make a home wherever we are. It’s time to do it here.
My colleagues who do interfaith work describe an experience called holy envy - when a teaching, practice, or symbol from a spiritual or religious tradition not your own is appealing to you and makes you kinda wish it was yours. Ideally, it sparks a curiosity that leads you to dig deeper within your own tradition and find new insight there. I had an experience of holy envy this year when reading a book called Braiding Sweetgrass. It was written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is a botanist, trained in both Western scientific knowledge and in indigenous wisdom. The book is an intimate story of her personal relationship with the lands of upstate New York and the Pacific Northwest, and the plants, trees, insects and fish, rivers and mountains that she considers her neighbors and kin. The book is also a giving over of generations of wisdom about how human beings can live in right relationship with the earth, wisdom that is encoded in the stories and jokes, rituals and languages of Kimmerer’s own people - the Citizen Potawatomi Nation - as well as other peoples indigenous to what is now the United States, known to its native peoples as Turtle Island.
I was compelled by the teachings she shares in her book, and I felt some envy at how easily they seemed to translate into practice. The stories, symbols, and ceremonies call forth a way of walking on this earth with reverence and joy. They cultivate a way of seeing the whole world as a gift, knowing that everything you need to be deeply nourished in body and in spirit; to be warm, and fed, and safe, and satisfied is right here, all around you. If you learn to take what you need and not more; to receive the gift with gratitude and joy; and to give back tender loving care, powerful respect, and the work of your own hands, the gift will not diminish, but grow.
As a read, I wondered: does Judaism call forth such a way of living?
The Jewish teachings about the environment that first come to mind are probably familiar to you: do not waste (Bavli Shabbat 67b); do not unnecessarily cut down trees (Deuteronomy 20:19); do not gain a livelihood at the expense of another’s health. What strikes me is that they are mostly negative. Mostly precautions. A midrash tells of God taking Adam on a tour of the Garden of Eden. God says to Adam, “See My beautiful works? All that I have created, I made for you. Be mindful then that you do not spoil and destroy My world - for if you spoil it, there is no one after you to repair it” (Kohelet Rabbah 7:13). The message is not an invitation to come into a loving relationship with the earth, but rather: don’t screw it up.
I think we’ve gotten really good at teaching our young people about social justice - to imagine a world where all human beings are treated according to their inherent worth and dignity. But I’m less confident that we are cultivating in them a feeling of kinship, a feeling of love, and a feeling of accountability with the rest of creation.
Kimmerer invites us all to learn to live in the world as if it is a gift, and she describes it by talking about strawberries. She writes,
“In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them… it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewey leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it… Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery - as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source. (Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 24)
Though a gift comes to you through no action of your own, she goes on, “in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.”
Much of Kimmerer’s book explores this notion of reciprocity: what, as human beings, can we possibly give back to the earth, which gives us everything? She explores ceremonies of gratitude; attitudes of humility; and also the real work of tending gardens, restoring landscapes, and picking sweetgrass. As she weaves a story of humble, loving engagement, what emerges is a sense of home, of belonging. A sense that we belong to each other, us and the earth - not in the sense of ownership, but in the sense of family.
I think that part of the reason Jews have struggled to articulate and to pass on our theology of relationship to the natural world is because we have not had that sense of belonging, that sense of home.
As Howard asked so poignantly last week on Rosh Hashanah, what is home to a Jew? The ideas of home, of place, of belonging are fraught in Jewish myth and in Jewish history. Scholar Arnold Eisen traces our origin narratives: Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden, that place where they were warm, and fed, and safe, and satisfied. Cain is condemned to be a wanderer. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all leave their homes, until the Israelites ultimately follow Joseph into exile in Egypt. The rest of the Torah anticipates the return to home only to threaten renewed exile. “Exile,” writes Eisen, “is the existential condition of human beings upon God’s earth… Home, for Jews… is… too good to be true… Exile proves to be the rule, not the exception. Genesis is not a mere prologue, but the main act of the human drama. Home remains an affair of the imagination.”
In addition to telling a narrative of exile, Biblical theology articulates this lack of belonging as a frame for living responsibly on the earth. The earth, and everything in it, belong to God. We are but sojourners here. Our task is to live with humility and gratitude, as transient guests. The rabbis would later draw on this idea to teach that the blessings we say before eating are our form of reciprocity; they are what we give back. Anytime we eat without saying a blessing, it is as if we are eating stolen food.
The Jewish experience of exile, of course, only begins with the Torah. Our history mirrors our sacred myth. We were exiled by the Babylonians, and then by the Romans. And then from England, and Spain, from Poland and Russia, from Iraq and Morocco. Land has never been a guarantee for us, and we carry this ancestral trauma within us, the fear that at any moment we might have to pick up and leave. So perhaps it is not surprising that we have struggled to feel at home with the earth.
Our legacy of diaspora is not only a burden. It is also a strength. Like us, the ancient rabbis lived in a time of incredible fracture, following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Amid extraordinary violence, they created a tradition that was flexible and adaptive, creative and responsive. A tradition that could be practiced anywhere, as the kitchen table replaced the Temple as the site of receiving gifts of the earth and giving gratitude and praise back to God.
The idea of exile shifted: rather than being geographic, exile became the condition of living in an imperfect world. A Jewish feeling of exile became synonymous with our commitment to repairing the world, as the tradition of exile, Eisen writes, became our “witness to the awareness of being somewhere else than where God is and humanity should be” (225). Exile means living in hazman hazeh, this time, when we long for - and work for - a vision of global redemption.
Our legacy of diaspora also gives us the stunning diversity of Jewish culture. Our languages, our musics, our cuisines, all of which have developed in response to and in relationship with the lands and people where they were. Haroset, the quintessential symbol of slavery, suffering, and exile, is made of the sweetest gifts our local place has to offer: In Yemen, dates. In Europe, apples and cinnamon. Today, my teacher Aurora Levins Morales makes mango haroset with coconut and rum. She is the daughter of “two New York born parents, one Puerto Rican Catholic and one Ashkenazi Jew with roots in the Ukraine, who,” as she writes, “blended two cuisines that were already the result of thousands of years of migrations, invasions, captivity, and commerce.”
We have so much to work with. And, I felt challenged by Kimmerer’s book to ask even more of our tradition. Our most powerful land-based Torah originated in the Middle East, in response to, and in order to connect more deeply to, the natural cycles of a mediterranean climate. And for those of us who do not live in a meditteranean climate, I don’t think they are able to do what we need them to do, which is to instill, deep within us, a sense of connection to, belonging with, and responsibility for the earth.
When I lived in Jerusalem during rabbinical school, I arrived just after Yom Kippur, and was able to join my aunt and uncle in their sukkah, along with my cousins and their children. Sukkot is our harvest holiday; a time, indeed, for giving thanks for the gifts of the natural world, and for honoring the work human beings do in relationship with the earth. Sukkot is also a festival of water; in the middle east, it comes at the beginning of the rainy season. The shaking of the lulav is meant to sound like the pitter patter of the first rain; and we begin to add prayers for rain back into our liturgy. That first Sukkot evening in Jerusalem, as I sat with my cousin’s small children in my aunt and uncle’s courtyard, it began to rain - the first rain of the season. It was only a light rain, the first fat drops disappearing immediately into the dry earth. But the children’s eyes opened wide, their faces turned to delight. Yored geshem! They cried. It’s raining! It’s raining! Bo bachutz u’margish et ha geshem! Come outside and feel the rain! They stripped off their clothes, opened their palms, and lifted their faces to the sky. A gesture of gratitude; a posture of prayer. Yored geshem, they whispered in awe. It’s raining.
That was the first time I truly understood what Sukkot is about. The first time I witnessed the profound vulnerability of living in a climate where food for the whole year depends on just a few months of abundant rain. The first time I understood the spiritual significance of our prayers for rain - they originated both in response to and in order to connect us more deeply to the natural cycles of the earth. The first time I really felt what it meant to understand rain as a blessing - as a gift.
I want our beautiful land-based rituals and theologies to do that for all of us. In New England, Sukkot does not fall at a time of year when we need to pray for rain. Is there another way it can make us feel the urgency of our relationship to water: the urgent vulnerability, and the urgent joy? Similarly, Tu b’shvat, the birthday of the trees, falls in January in New England. Kimmerer has a beautiful chapter on Maple trees, the “iconic beings who shape the landscape, influence our daily lives, and feed us - both materially and spiritually” (168). What if we celebrated Tu b’shvat at maple sugaring time, “when the earth starts to wake up from her well-deserved rest and renews her gifts to the people”?
This work, to reconstruct our teachings, is being done in exciting ways. Adamah is a program in the Berkshires that trains young people in the Jewish farming tradition, alongside cultivating their own spiritual practice. Alumni of that program started Linke Fligl, a queer Jewish chicken farm, whose long-term strategy is centered around the shmita cycle. Linke Fligl, they write, “envisions a deep, vibrant, de-assimilating, diasporist and songful Jewish culture that uplifts the multiplicity of Jewish identities. This culture seeks to find belonging through reclaiming intrinsic connection to land and ancestry while also being accountable to the reality that many of us are settlers on this land. Through growing food, participating in reparations, being in prayer, and connecting to land and tradition, we shift and reimagine diasporic Jewish life.”
Finding connection and belonging on the land where we are now is made especially complex because it is stolen land. This particular land, where Attleboro sits, is the home of the Wampanoag people.
When Robin Wall Kimmerer invites non-native people to begin to feel at home on Turtle Island, and to treat it with the respect a home deserves, she recognizes that “against the backdrop of [colonial] history, an invitation to settler society to become indigenous to place feels like a free ticket to a housebreaking party. It could be read as an open invitation to take what little is left” (213). She also recognizes that “immigrants cannot by definition be indigenous...No amount of time or caring changes history or substitutes for soul-deep fusion with the land…But” she asks, “if people do not feel “indigenous,” can they nevertheless enter into the deep reciprocity that renews the world? Is this something that can be learned?“
For a teacher, she turns, as she always does, to the plants, finding her lesson in the plantain. Plantain came to this land from Europe, as a foreigner, but rather than invading without regard to limits, it “became an honored member of the plant community,” offering every part of itself as food or medicine, fitting into small spaces, coexisting with others, and becoming “so well integrated that we think of it as native.” Plantain, she says, “is not indigenous but naturalized.”
And that is what she invites us, too, to do. “Being naturalized to place,” she writes, “means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if your lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.”
She is inviting us to find home here, to live as if both feet are firmly planted, as if we belong. It is, in many ways, a different orientation than the one expressed in Torah, that the earth is God’s, and we are but strangers and sojourners upon it. But it’s also not different: To choose life, ours and all that is around us. To love our neighbors - human and animal, plant and rock alike - as we love ourselves. To wake each morning with a word of thanksgiving on our lips, to end each day with a word of apology for any harm we might have done. To work in the time for work, to rest in the time for rest, to respect the cycles of the light and dark and to dance in the light of the moon. That, too, is our ancient wisdom. That wisdom has always helped us make a home wherever we are. It’s time to do it here.
