Rabbi mónica: All Flourishing Is Mutual [1]
Yom Kippur 5782
September 16, 2021
View the video here.
Every season, I visit the West Laurel Hill cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, which is also a botanical garden devoted to trees. Up and down its pathways are shaggy outstretched Locust limbs, towering Red Maples, and squat, strong Linden trees. Black Oaks with orange tinted bark, Spruces that look like spiny chess pieces, Sweetgums and Boxwoods and Hollies. In the summer, the whole place is a vibrant tunnel of jade. In the winter, enormous dark branches reach across stillness, silhouetted against white skies and snow. And in autumn, the air glows with that special warmth reserved for just this season -– sun filtered through leaves that seem lit at their edges, radiant, shimmering.
When I visit, I take myself to a special corner of West Laurel Hill -- the Nature Sanctuary. In this part of the cemetery, the land is re-forested over and around the bodies buried there. A sign by the road explains that the site is in a state of re-wilding. Eventually, it will become a forest, shaded by a large canopy, and left mostly alone. You can see the baby Paw Paws and Hickories popping up like cowlicks from the ground, the Magnolia seedlings and Nutmeg sprouts already on their way. And surrounding them, the older trees holding court and keeping vigil –– tall, wise and slow.
I visit the nature sanctuary every season, and right before Yom Kippur I go there with my machzor, to say yizkor beside the grave of my former partner Jonah Meadows Adels, who died eight years ago when he was 29 years old. Burying Jonah at the nature sanctuary was one of the deepest acts of hesed I have ever been a part of. How gently we lowered him into the ground, how bright and warm that breezy October day in 2013. How as the sun went down we sat around his grave and sang nigunim for hours. Jonah, who was a beekeeper, is buried beside three apiaries, and when I visit, I see those round-bellied bumblebees everywhere –– buzzing among the butterflies. Tiny goldfinches with yellow bodies and black caps leap from one branch to the next. In the early years, before the land erupted with magenta flowers, I would often spot deer tracks between the unmarked graves.
It's no coincidence that Jonah was buried in such a paradise. He was a passionate environmental educator and permaculturist. He built orchards, mentored Teens Against Hydrofracking here in Philadelphia, and contributed to the planting of many public fruit trees in West Philly –– the figs, cherries, and pears that sweeten the streets of our local community. Jonah was a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry before the car accident that ultimately ended his life. He was researching carbon sequestration -- learning about the vital role that chestnut and hazelnut trees could play in storing carbon dioxide back into the soil to reduce CO2 pollution and mitigate climate change.
Jonah planted trees as a love letter to future generations. Together we would often go on long, sprawling Shabbat walks in the woods, where we would inevitably get lost. At which point I would get nervous, and he would get excited. We would surrender ourselves to tree time -- pressing our hands to their bark, surrounded by the thrumming pulse of cicadas. Jonah was learning to read the forest. He would show me how a snapped Sassafrass branch smells like root beer. How to recognize an Oak tree by its wiggly fingered leaves, or a Beech by its stippled gray bark. We would wander, learn, listen, spot foxes and coyote. We always somehow found our way back out. And when we emerged from the woods, we were changed. We had returned to ourselves.
When I think about Jonah and his work in the world, I think how much the climate and the environment have broken down in the eight years since he died. How the world looks different now than it did; but also how it is exactly the world he and his colleagues and teachers foresaw and worked tirelessly to mitigate. In my mind I write him letters -- Dear Jonah, the stakes are getting higher all around us. Things are moving quickly. With the hurricanes and floodwaters rising, the seasons fluctuating in unprecedented ways. The pandemics of white supremacy and global capitalism are crashing, unleashing earthquakes and fires across our planet, our families, our communities. We are in an unfolding of great and global change.
And when I think about Jonah, I also marvel at how much more we know about trees than we did even eight years ago. I've recently become enthralled with the work of Dr. Suzanne Simard, the forest ecologist who proved beyond doubt, in the world of Western science, that trees communicate with each other.
On the website of Simard's organization, The Mother Tree Project, you can find a chart of what circulates between the trees in a forest. Working together, individual trees exchange sugars, nutrients, and carbon. The tall, older trees with greater access to sunlight photosynthesize more than what they need, then send the excess into the network to be redistributed to shorter, younger trees in the understory. Weaker trees tap into the network as it swells with resource. Trees even share with each other across species -- a Douglas Fir can send nitrogen to a Birch.
Though for years her research was ridiculed, it's now well accepted within Simard's field [2] that trees talk to one another. They use a network of pollen and pheromones traveling the air between them; and they use intricate networks of underground fungi that lace them together.
And more than talk, they share. They feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, and pool their resources. [3] If one tree is under insect attack, it can send a distress call across the network, and downwind, the other trees produce chemicals that keep them safe. Together, they take on mutual defense and community safety. [4]
A forest is not a collection of individual species competing for resources, as we once thought. Rather, the trees share a unified immune system. As Simard describes, "a forest is a single organism, wired for wisdom and care." [5]
The work of Simard and other Western ecologists is catching up to what indigenous sciences have long known. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer, writes,
September 16, 2021
View the video here.
Every season, I visit the West Laurel Hill cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, which is also a botanical garden devoted to trees. Up and down its pathways are shaggy outstretched Locust limbs, towering Red Maples, and squat, strong Linden trees. Black Oaks with orange tinted bark, Spruces that look like spiny chess pieces, Sweetgums and Boxwoods and Hollies. In the summer, the whole place is a vibrant tunnel of jade. In the winter, enormous dark branches reach across stillness, silhouetted against white skies and snow. And in autumn, the air glows with that special warmth reserved for just this season -– sun filtered through leaves that seem lit at their edges, radiant, shimmering.
When I visit, I take myself to a special corner of West Laurel Hill -- the Nature Sanctuary. In this part of the cemetery, the land is re-forested over and around the bodies buried there. A sign by the road explains that the site is in a state of re-wilding. Eventually, it will become a forest, shaded by a large canopy, and left mostly alone. You can see the baby Paw Paws and Hickories popping up like cowlicks from the ground, the Magnolia seedlings and Nutmeg sprouts already on their way. And surrounding them, the older trees holding court and keeping vigil –– tall, wise and slow.
I visit the nature sanctuary every season, and right before Yom Kippur I go there with my machzor, to say yizkor beside the grave of my former partner Jonah Meadows Adels, who died eight years ago when he was 29 years old. Burying Jonah at the nature sanctuary was one of the deepest acts of hesed I have ever been a part of. How gently we lowered him into the ground, how bright and warm that breezy October day in 2013. How as the sun went down we sat around his grave and sang nigunim for hours. Jonah, who was a beekeeper, is buried beside three apiaries, and when I visit, I see those round-bellied bumblebees everywhere –– buzzing among the butterflies. Tiny goldfinches with yellow bodies and black caps leap from one branch to the next. In the early years, before the land erupted with magenta flowers, I would often spot deer tracks between the unmarked graves.
It's no coincidence that Jonah was buried in such a paradise. He was a passionate environmental educator and permaculturist. He built orchards, mentored Teens Against Hydrofracking here in Philadelphia, and contributed to the planting of many public fruit trees in West Philly –– the figs, cherries, and pears that sweeten the streets of our local community. Jonah was a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry before the car accident that ultimately ended his life. He was researching carbon sequestration -- learning about the vital role that chestnut and hazelnut trees could play in storing carbon dioxide back into the soil to reduce CO2 pollution and mitigate climate change.
Jonah planted trees as a love letter to future generations. Together we would often go on long, sprawling Shabbat walks in the woods, where we would inevitably get lost. At which point I would get nervous, and he would get excited. We would surrender ourselves to tree time -- pressing our hands to their bark, surrounded by the thrumming pulse of cicadas. Jonah was learning to read the forest. He would show me how a snapped Sassafrass branch smells like root beer. How to recognize an Oak tree by its wiggly fingered leaves, or a Beech by its stippled gray bark. We would wander, learn, listen, spot foxes and coyote. We always somehow found our way back out. And when we emerged from the woods, we were changed. We had returned to ourselves.
When I think about Jonah and his work in the world, I think how much the climate and the environment have broken down in the eight years since he died. How the world looks different now than it did; but also how it is exactly the world he and his colleagues and teachers foresaw and worked tirelessly to mitigate. In my mind I write him letters -- Dear Jonah, the stakes are getting higher all around us. Things are moving quickly. With the hurricanes and floodwaters rising, the seasons fluctuating in unprecedented ways. The pandemics of white supremacy and global capitalism are crashing, unleashing earthquakes and fires across our planet, our families, our communities. We are in an unfolding of great and global change.
And when I think about Jonah, I also marvel at how much more we know about trees than we did even eight years ago. I've recently become enthralled with the work of Dr. Suzanne Simard, the forest ecologist who proved beyond doubt, in the world of Western science, that trees communicate with each other.
On the website of Simard's organization, The Mother Tree Project, you can find a chart of what circulates between the trees in a forest. Working together, individual trees exchange sugars, nutrients, and carbon. The tall, older trees with greater access to sunlight photosynthesize more than what they need, then send the excess into the network to be redistributed to shorter, younger trees in the understory. Weaker trees tap into the network as it swells with resource. Trees even share with each other across species -- a Douglas Fir can send nitrogen to a Birch.
Though for years her research was ridiculed, it's now well accepted within Simard's field [2] that trees talk to one another. They use a network of pollen and pheromones traveling the air between them; and they use intricate networks of underground fungi that lace them together.
And more than talk, they share. They feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, and pool their resources. [3] If one tree is under insect attack, it can send a distress call across the network, and downwind, the other trees produce chemicals that keep them safe. Together, they take on mutual defense and community safety. [4]
A forest is not a collection of individual species competing for resources, as we once thought. Rather, the trees share a unified immune system. As Simard describes, "a forest is a single organism, wired for wisdom and care." [5]
The work of Simard and other Western ecologists is catching up to what indigenous sciences have long known. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer, writes,
|
"There are no soloists. The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective... What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual." [6]
|
The first poem in the book of Psalms teaches [7]:
אַ֥שְֽׁרֵי הָאִ֗ישׁ.. כְּעֵץ שָׁתוּל עַֽל־פַּלְגֵי־מָיִם
Happy is the person like a tree planted beside streams of water,
אֲשֶׁר פִּרְיוֹ יִתֵּן בְּעִתּוֹ
the one that generously gives what it has produced in its time.
Jewish tradition loves to liken human beings to trees. We should be firmly rooted like a tree; we should give generously like a tree. According to Torah law, we should leave a fruit tree alone for the first three years it is planted, and harvest its fruits only afterward. Similarly, a child's hair should be left alone for the first three years of life, and cut only afterward. The Torah urges that trees not be cut down in warfare, the reason given:
כי האדם עץ השדה
"Because a person is a tree of the field." [9]
In Simard's research, the Mother Tree is the name she gives to the oldest, largest tree in a community. Mother Trees connect to all the smaller trees, kin and stranger species alike, across what pop science has come to call "the wood wide web."
And in Jewish tradition, that Mother Tree is Torah.
עֵץ־חַיִּים הִיא לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ וְתֹמְכֶיהָ מְאֻשָּׁר
Torah is a Tree of Life to those who grasp on, who connect. And those who take root to Torah will be m'ushar –– happy, blessed, enlivened. [10]
We humans are saplings, new growth in the forest of life. And the Torah, by which we structure time and make sense of our world, is that oldest, wisest tree, the one who shares her bounty and enables broader life.
Our rabbis teach:
All of Torah is bookended between two acts of kindness. It opens with the Holy One clothing the first human beings, and it closes with the Holy One laying Moses into his grave. [11]
In fact, the Maharsha elaborates:
התורה כולה, מראשה ועד סופה, כולה חסד
With regards to Torah, everything in it, from beginning to end, everything is kindness. [12]
Above all, Torah is meant to teach us to be good to each other. To be interdependent. Our tradition calls it hesed, the root of which means kindness, generosity, and love. Hesed is a noun and a verb –– it is an active, embodied practice of connection.
In the opening blessing of the Amidah, we call upon the Holy One as Gomel Hasadim Tovim, one who imparts deeds of kindness. There are many fun ways to translate gomel or, as it's often written g'milut hasadim, "acts of lovingkindness." The meaning of the root gamal (ג–מ–ל) is to load, or pile on, to heap. G'milut –– an overflowing heap of kindness! Another meaning is to tie things together -- g'milut as that web of kindnesses that weaves between us, connecting us to one another. We can think of God then as gomel hasadim, the Great Cross-Stitcher of Kindness.
In our tradition, g'milut hasadim comprise the large category of acts that we do to take care of and support one another: visiting the sick, welcoming guests, comforting mourners, honoring our dead, providing food, clothing, and other material support to those in need.
Most simply, gamal means to perform an act, but it also means to repay, or take turns. The word G'milut signals that these acts are done in the context of a relationship, and that they are a give and take. [13] G'milut hasadim are Judaism's ancient version of mutual aid.
Defined by disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in the following way, Mutual aid is "...a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit. Mutual aid, as opposed to charity, does not connote moral superiority of the giver over the receiver." [14]
When we support others, we too are nourished and fulfilled. And when we open our lives to the support of others, we sustain a culture between us that is vulnerable, interdependent, and kind.
There are times in our lives when we are more able to give. And there are times when we need to ask for, and receive. The whole enterprise of g'milut hasadim depends on these changing seasons in the life of an individual and in the life of a community. The excess photosynthesis can be redistributed into the forest, and we take turns being the tree who offers up the nutrient and the tree who absorbs it.
"We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual."
In my own life, hesed has felt at times possible and impossible.
My parents are immigrants who are the children of Holocaust survivors. Intergenerational trauma, the need to flee from country to country, the myth of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps –– all of this can make it hard to practice hesed. It can feel mortally threatening to believe that other people are generous, that our safety lies with each other, or that there is enough abundance, resource, and kindness to go around.
Assimilating into whiteness, both Latin American and North American, has further isolated me from a culture of give and take. As a set of cultural practices, whiteness has taught me to be closed off and separate from other people. It has taught me that the world is built on systems of separation, to look at a forest and think, survival of the fittest, and then to replicate that philosophy. It is a regular part of my practice on Yom Kippur, when reciting the Viddui, to name these learned qualities of my own individualism, to try and hold them up to the light of holiness, and forgive myself for them as I recommit to a different way.
Being part of the Kol Tzedek community has softened me, and opened my heart to more hesed than I knew was possible. If I were writing my own scroll, telling the story of the past 18 months, I would say:
המגפה כולה, מראשה ועד עכשיו, כולה חסד
With regards to the pandemic, everything in it, from beginning to now, has opened us to kindness.
If you scroll through the KTdiscuss email listserv, our own version of the wood wide web, you'll find that we have offered nearly everything to each other. In the first three weeks of quarantine alone, you can find in this archive public offerings for the following:
The list goes on and on.
I remember when the stores ran out of yeast, and the local bakers in our community circulated what little they had. The volunteer phone tree in which every single Kol Tzedek member received a weekly check-in call. And who can forget, with the delayed supply chains just before Pesach, when our listserv became a matzah trading floor, ensuring that come seder, everyone had a box.
As the pandemic grew longer, the ways we showed up for one another continually varied.
If we didn’t already know it before COVID-19, I'm pretty sure we know now that we cannot exist without one another. And I'd be willing to wager that every one of us here today has helped someone get through the past year, and has also relied upon others to make it through.
There's a strong precedent for this.
The concept of mutual aid has always been integral to Jewish community. At the turn of the 20th century we called it the Gemach, a lending library common to Jewish immigrant communities. Gemach is an acronym for g'milut hasadim, and from a Gemach one could borrow: plates, baby clothing, ritual objects, wedding attire, garden tools, all of it shared and communal. Hesed is emotional and material, energetic and physical. It has always been both.
"Mutual Aid has played an essential role in nearly every social movement," writes abolitionist law professor Dean Spade, "whether it's people raising money for workers on strike, setting up a rideshare system during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border." [15] And some of the most important wisdom on mutual aid has come from networks of disability justice activists, organizing webs of care. As we work to transform systems of power and structures of injustice, the need to offer each other support on the scale of our daily lives is an inextricable part of building olam haba.
זִרְעוּ לָכֶם לִצְדָקָה, קִצְרוּ לְפִי־חֶסֶד
Says the Prophet Hosea: Plant seeds of justice, and harvest the fruits of kindness. The interplay between the two is what will feed us. [16]
A few years ago, Kol Tzedek board members Sam Shain and Rowan Machalow found themselves on the phone with a database salesman, who they have described as somewhat...smarmy. As they explained how at Kol Tzedek we don't reserve seats for the highest paying members, or address letters only to the male heads of households, the salesman interrupted them and exclaimed, "What are you, a decentralized blob of Jews?!" The joke has held for years, and some time ago we even printed mugs with the Kol Tzedek logo and the tagline beneath it: a decentralized blob of Jews.
If the difference between a synagogue and a decentralized blob of Jews isn't patriarchy or classism, what is it? In 1948, Mordechai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism, wrote, "A community is a form of social organization in which the welfare of each is the concern of all, and the life of the whole is the concern of each."
In other words, a synagogue, at its best, is a forest.
5782 is a Shmita year, and one of the core things I've learned is that Shmita, as a practice, redefines our relationship to what is "ours" and what is "everyone's." In a Shmita year, we receive freely from others. We give freely to others. Every resource we have becomes hefker; ownerless; communal.
Come back with me for a moment to the Nature Sanctuary at West Laurel Hill cemetery, where the land is being re-wilded around the grave of someone I love, and other loved ones in our community. We might think of the wild as chaotic and random. But the trees have taught us that the wild is actually a highly organized system serving life and mutuality. So too with the Shmita year, whose purpose is to rewild us and the land. Shmita is not chaos, but rather a carefully crafted set of laws and practices that sustain a community to thrive, together.
In this spirit, it's our intention to spend this year beginning a process of expanding and deepening our systems of hesed at Kol Tzedek. Taking with us all that we've learned during COVID-19, and building on the incredible work that came before it. Identifying what the folks in our community need, what needs are being met, and what needs could be better met.
At Kol Tzedek we’re blessed with an abundant culture of reciprocity and support. What we need now is to be organized –– to build our power through structures and systems, roles and rituals. We've been very lucky to have several deeply committed volunteers take the lead on these initiatives. In the Shmita year, we want to make this work more sustainable, and wide-reaching. We need more people to engage regularly with the work of community care. To envision together what the next chapter of our hesed work could be. Whether you're new to Kol Tzedek or a longtime member, there is a place for you in the weaving of this web.
Ride-shares, meal trains, phone trees. Bereavement buddies. Learning to lead shiva minyanim. House calls and hospital visits. Taking stock of what we can each offer –– whether it's deep listening, checking in on someone, or spending a free hour setting up chairs. Expanding our capacity for hesed deepens access and relationships within our community. It's how the trees survive. It is how we survive.
Because as the stakes get higher, as our world continues to change, we will need each other's kindness, again and again.
On Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Ari Lev told us that "What we need is here."
Today, on Yom Kippur, I want to remind us that what we need is US.
With the gates open before us, let us commit to lace our roots together, beneath the pavement and across our neighborhoods. To link hands, hearts, and mycelia, to embody the Tree of Life and the Torah of hesed.
A final, quick story from the rabbis. [17] Once, as Rabbi Yochanan was walking out of Jerusalem, Rabbi Yehoshua followed him, and upon seeing the Temple in ruins, he said: "Woe unto us that this place is in ruins, the place where the Israelites go to make teshuvah for our transgressions!" Rabbi Yochanan calmly responded, "My son, do not grieve. We have another way to make teshuvah, which is just as effective. What is it? It is g'milut hasadim, acts of loving-kindness. As the Holy One once said to the prophet Hosea,
חֶסֶד חָפַצְתִּי וְלֹא־זָבַח
'It is not sacrifice that I delight in. It is kindness that I delight in, kindness that I desire.'" [18]
Our hesed leads us to teshuvah. It leads us back to ourselves, and back to each other.
We begin again, each year, by admitting what we don't know. Avinu Malkeinu, eyn banu maasim, we are utterly unprepared. What can we do? What happens next?
And then our liturgy offers us a roadmap.
עשה עמנו צדקה וחסד
Teach us to embody justice and kindness, so that we can find a way.
Avinu Malkeinu,
Our source, our sovereign,
choneinu va'aneinu,
be gracious and answer us,
ki eyn banu maasim.
because alone, we have nothing left to offer.
Aseh imanu
Make of us
tzedakah va'chesed,
justice and kindness
Aseh imanu tzedakah va'chesed,
Make us into a living, breathing, thriving forest of justice and kindness,
v'hoshieinu
And deliver us beyond the shores of what we yet know.
Gmar chatima tovah.
May 5782 be the year.
[1] The title of this sermon comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer's incredible book Braiding Sweetgrass. Much gratitude to my editors and hevrutas in this exploration: Rabbis Myriam Klotz, Dev Noily, Joseph Berman, Ari Lev Fornari, Jordan Braunig, Alana Alpert, Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, and Gray Myrseth. Thank you also to Bobbie Breitman, and to everyone who has led hesed work at Kol Tzedek, with special thanks to Gili Ronen, Nellie Lazar, Rilka Spieler, Naomi Segal, Rie Brosco, Rachel Winsberg, Sara Freeman, Abby Lowe, Eli DeWitt, and others who preceded me.
[2] New York Times, "The Social Life of Forests," 2020.
[3] Richard Powers, The Overstory (142).
[4] Robin Wall Kimmerer, "The Council of Pecans," from Braiding Sweetgrass (15).
[5] Suzanne Simard, interviewed on the On Being podcast, 2021.
[6] Robin Wall Kimmerer, "The Council of Pecans," from Braiding Sweetgrass (15).
[7] Psalm 1:1-4.
[8] Vayikra 19:23.
[9] Devarim 20:19.
[10] Proverbs 3:18.
[11] Talmud Bavli, Sotah 14a.
[12] Maharsha on Sotah 14a.
[13] See Rabbi Sara Paasche-Orlow, "Acts of Loving Kindness" in My Jewish Learning: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/acts-of-loving-kindness/.
[14] Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work (41).
[15] Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next), (8).
[16] Hosea 10:12.
[17] Avot de'Rabbi Natan, 4.
[18] Hosea 6:6.
אַ֥שְֽׁרֵי הָאִ֗ישׁ.. כְּעֵץ שָׁתוּל עַֽל־פַּלְגֵי־מָיִם
Happy is the person like a tree planted beside streams of water,
אֲשֶׁר פִּרְיוֹ יִתֵּן בְּעִתּוֹ
the one that generously gives what it has produced in its time.
Jewish tradition loves to liken human beings to trees. We should be firmly rooted like a tree; we should give generously like a tree. According to Torah law, we should leave a fruit tree alone for the first three years it is planted, and harvest its fruits only afterward. Similarly, a child's hair should be left alone for the first three years of life, and cut only afterward. The Torah urges that trees not be cut down in warfare, the reason given:
כי האדם עץ השדה
"Because a person is a tree of the field." [9]
In Simard's research, the Mother Tree is the name she gives to the oldest, largest tree in a community. Mother Trees connect to all the smaller trees, kin and stranger species alike, across what pop science has come to call "the wood wide web."
And in Jewish tradition, that Mother Tree is Torah.
עֵץ־חַיִּים הִיא לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ וְתֹמְכֶיהָ מְאֻשָּׁר
Torah is a Tree of Life to those who grasp on, who connect. And those who take root to Torah will be m'ushar –– happy, blessed, enlivened. [10]
We humans are saplings, new growth in the forest of life. And the Torah, by which we structure time and make sense of our world, is that oldest, wisest tree, the one who shares her bounty and enables broader life.
Our rabbis teach:
All of Torah is bookended between two acts of kindness. It opens with the Holy One clothing the first human beings, and it closes with the Holy One laying Moses into his grave. [11]
In fact, the Maharsha elaborates:
התורה כולה, מראשה ועד סופה, כולה חסד
With regards to Torah, everything in it, from beginning to end, everything is kindness. [12]
Above all, Torah is meant to teach us to be good to each other. To be interdependent. Our tradition calls it hesed, the root of which means kindness, generosity, and love. Hesed is a noun and a verb –– it is an active, embodied practice of connection.
In the opening blessing of the Amidah, we call upon the Holy One as Gomel Hasadim Tovim, one who imparts deeds of kindness. There are many fun ways to translate gomel or, as it's often written g'milut hasadim, "acts of lovingkindness." The meaning of the root gamal (ג–מ–ל) is to load, or pile on, to heap. G'milut –– an overflowing heap of kindness! Another meaning is to tie things together -- g'milut as that web of kindnesses that weaves between us, connecting us to one another. We can think of God then as gomel hasadim, the Great Cross-Stitcher of Kindness.
In our tradition, g'milut hasadim comprise the large category of acts that we do to take care of and support one another: visiting the sick, welcoming guests, comforting mourners, honoring our dead, providing food, clothing, and other material support to those in need.
Most simply, gamal means to perform an act, but it also means to repay, or take turns. The word G'milut signals that these acts are done in the context of a relationship, and that they are a give and take. [13] G'milut hasadim are Judaism's ancient version of mutual aid.
Defined by disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in the following way, Mutual aid is "...a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit. Mutual aid, as opposed to charity, does not connote moral superiority of the giver over the receiver." [14]
When we support others, we too are nourished and fulfilled. And when we open our lives to the support of others, we sustain a culture between us that is vulnerable, interdependent, and kind.
There are times in our lives when we are more able to give. And there are times when we need to ask for, and receive. The whole enterprise of g'milut hasadim depends on these changing seasons in the life of an individual and in the life of a community. The excess photosynthesis can be redistributed into the forest, and we take turns being the tree who offers up the nutrient and the tree who absorbs it.
"We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual."
In my own life, hesed has felt at times possible and impossible.
My parents are immigrants who are the children of Holocaust survivors. Intergenerational trauma, the need to flee from country to country, the myth of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps –– all of this can make it hard to practice hesed. It can feel mortally threatening to believe that other people are generous, that our safety lies with each other, or that there is enough abundance, resource, and kindness to go around.
Assimilating into whiteness, both Latin American and North American, has further isolated me from a culture of give and take. As a set of cultural practices, whiteness has taught me to be closed off and separate from other people. It has taught me that the world is built on systems of separation, to look at a forest and think, survival of the fittest, and then to replicate that philosophy. It is a regular part of my practice on Yom Kippur, when reciting the Viddui, to name these learned qualities of my own individualism, to try and hold them up to the light of holiness, and forgive myself for them as I recommit to a different way.
Being part of the Kol Tzedek community has softened me, and opened my heart to more hesed than I knew was possible. If I were writing my own scroll, telling the story of the past 18 months, I would say:
המגפה כולה, מראשה ועד עכשיו, כולה חסד
With regards to the pandemic, everything in it, from beginning to now, has opened us to kindness.
If you scroll through the KTdiscuss email listserv, our own version of the wood wide web, you'll find that we have offered nearly everything to each other. In the first three weeks of quarantine alone, you can find in this archive public offerings for the following:
- Medication pick ups
- A running mi shebeirach list
- Plant swaps
- Power tools
- Legal advice
- Help bringing trash bins to the curb
- An email thread connecting members who live alone
- Another thread connecting members who don't use electricity on Shabbat
- Housing accommodations for students as universities closed
- Meditation sits
- Music concerts for children
- And the dissemination of so much information regarding mutual aid organizing: driving for meal delivery programs, raising money for jail bond funds, collecting signatures for a rent freeze...
The list goes on and on.
I remember when the stores ran out of yeast, and the local bakers in our community circulated what little they had. The volunteer phone tree in which every single Kol Tzedek member received a weekly check-in call. And who can forget, with the delayed supply chains just before Pesach, when our listserv became a matzah trading floor, ensuring that come seder, everyone had a box.
As the pandemic grew longer, the ways we showed up for one another continually varied.
If we didn’t already know it before COVID-19, I'm pretty sure we know now that we cannot exist without one another. And I'd be willing to wager that every one of us here today has helped someone get through the past year, and has also relied upon others to make it through.
There's a strong precedent for this.
The concept of mutual aid has always been integral to Jewish community. At the turn of the 20th century we called it the Gemach, a lending library common to Jewish immigrant communities. Gemach is an acronym for g'milut hasadim, and from a Gemach one could borrow: plates, baby clothing, ritual objects, wedding attire, garden tools, all of it shared and communal. Hesed is emotional and material, energetic and physical. It has always been both.
"Mutual Aid has played an essential role in nearly every social movement," writes abolitionist law professor Dean Spade, "whether it's people raising money for workers on strike, setting up a rideshare system during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border." [15] And some of the most important wisdom on mutual aid has come from networks of disability justice activists, organizing webs of care. As we work to transform systems of power and structures of injustice, the need to offer each other support on the scale of our daily lives is an inextricable part of building olam haba.
זִרְעוּ לָכֶם לִצְדָקָה, קִצְרוּ לְפִי־חֶסֶד
Says the Prophet Hosea: Plant seeds of justice, and harvest the fruits of kindness. The interplay between the two is what will feed us. [16]
A few years ago, Kol Tzedek board members Sam Shain and Rowan Machalow found themselves on the phone with a database salesman, who they have described as somewhat...smarmy. As they explained how at Kol Tzedek we don't reserve seats for the highest paying members, or address letters only to the male heads of households, the salesman interrupted them and exclaimed, "What are you, a decentralized blob of Jews?!" The joke has held for years, and some time ago we even printed mugs with the Kol Tzedek logo and the tagline beneath it: a decentralized blob of Jews.
If the difference between a synagogue and a decentralized blob of Jews isn't patriarchy or classism, what is it? In 1948, Mordechai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism, wrote, "A community is a form of social organization in which the welfare of each is the concern of all, and the life of the whole is the concern of each."
In other words, a synagogue, at its best, is a forest.
5782 is a Shmita year, and one of the core things I've learned is that Shmita, as a practice, redefines our relationship to what is "ours" and what is "everyone's." In a Shmita year, we receive freely from others. We give freely to others. Every resource we have becomes hefker; ownerless; communal.
Come back with me for a moment to the Nature Sanctuary at West Laurel Hill cemetery, where the land is being re-wilded around the grave of someone I love, and other loved ones in our community. We might think of the wild as chaotic and random. But the trees have taught us that the wild is actually a highly organized system serving life and mutuality. So too with the Shmita year, whose purpose is to rewild us and the land. Shmita is not chaos, but rather a carefully crafted set of laws and practices that sustain a community to thrive, together.
In this spirit, it's our intention to spend this year beginning a process of expanding and deepening our systems of hesed at Kol Tzedek. Taking with us all that we've learned during COVID-19, and building on the incredible work that came before it. Identifying what the folks in our community need, what needs are being met, and what needs could be better met.
At Kol Tzedek we’re blessed with an abundant culture of reciprocity and support. What we need now is to be organized –– to build our power through structures and systems, roles and rituals. We've been very lucky to have several deeply committed volunteers take the lead on these initiatives. In the Shmita year, we want to make this work more sustainable, and wide-reaching. We need more people to engage regularly with the work of community care. To envision together what the next chapter of our hesed work could be. Whether you're new to Kol Tzedek or a longtime member, there is a place for you in the weaving of this web.
Ride-shares, meal trains, phone trees. Bereavement buddies. Learning to lead shiva minyanim. House calls and hospital visits. Taking stock of what we can each offer –– whether it's deep listening, checking in on someone, or spending a free hour setting up chairs. Expanding our capacity for hesed deepens access and relationships within our community. It's how the trees survive. It is how we survive.
Because as the stakes get higher, as our world continues to change, we will need each other's kindness, again and again.
On Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Ari Lev told us that "What we need is here."
Today, on Yom Kippur, I want to remind us that what we need is US.
With the gates open before us, let us commit to lace our roots together, beneath the pavement and across our neighborhoods. To link hands, hearts, and mycelia, to embody the Tree of Life and the Torah of hesed.
A final, quick story from the rabbis. [17] Once, as Rabbi Yochanan was walking out of Jerusalem, Rabbi Yehoshua followed him, and upon seeing the Temple in ruins, he said: "Woe unto us that this place is in ruins, the place where the Israelites go to make teshuvah for our transgressions!" Rabbi Yochanan calmly responded, "My son, do not grieve. We have another way to make teshuvah, which is just as effective. What is it? It is g'milut hasadim, acts of loving-kindness. As the Holy One once said to the prophet Hosea,
חֶסֶד חָפַצְתִּי וְלֹא־זָבַח
'It is not sacrifice that I delight in. It is kindness that I delight in, kindness that I desire.'" [18]
Our hesed leads us to teshuvah. It leads us back to ourselves, and back to each other.
We begin again, each year, by admitting what we don't know. Avinu Malkeinu, eyn banu maasim, we are utterly unprepared. What can we do? What happens next?
And then our liturgy offers us a roadmap.
עשה עמנו צדקה וחסד
Teach us to embody justice and kindness, so that we can find a way.
Avinu Malkeinu,
Our source, our sovereign,
choneinu va'aneinu,
be gracious and answer us,
ki eyn banu maasim.
because alone, we have nothing left to offer.
Aseh imanu
Make of us
tzedakah va'chesed,
justice and kindness
Aseh imanu tzedakah va'chesed,
Make us into a living, breathing, thriving forest of justice and kindness,
v'hoshieinu
And deliver us beyond the shores of what we yet know.
Gmar chatima tovah.
May 5782 be the year.
[1] The title of this sermon comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer's incredible book Braiding Sweetgrass. Much gratitude to my editors and hevrutas in this exploration: Rabbis Myriam Klotz, Dev Noily, Joseph Berman, Ari Lev Fornari, Jordan Braunig, Alana Alpert, Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, and Gray Myrseth. Thank you also to Bobbie Breitman, and to everyone who has led hesed work at Kol Tzedek, with special thanks to Gili Ronen, Nellie Lazar, Rilka Spieler, Naomi Segal, Rie Brosco, Rachel Winsberg, Sara Freeman, Abby Lowe, Eli DeWitt, and others who preceded me.
[2] New York Times, "The Social Life of Forests," 2020.
[3] Richard Powers, The Overstory (142).
[4] Robin Wall Kimmerer, "The Council of Pecans," from Braiding Sweetgrass (15).
[5] Suzanne Simard, interviewed on the On Being podcast, 2021.
[6] Robin Wall Kimmerer, "The Council of Pecans," from Braiding Sweetgrass (15).
[7] Psalm 1:1-4.
[8] Vayikra 19:23.
[9] Devarim 20:19.
[10] Proverbs 3:18.
[11] Talmud Bavli, Sotah 14a.
[12] Maharsha on Sotah 14a.
[13] See Rabbi Sara Paasche-Orlow, "Acts of Loving Kindness" in My Jewish Learning: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/acts-of-loving-kindness/.
[14] Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work (41).
[15] Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next), (8).
[16] Hosea 10:12.
[17] Avot de'Rabbi Natan, 4.
[18] Hosea 6:6.