Where is the center of your map?
Rabbi Michelle Greenfield
Erev Rosh Hashanah
Sept 11, 2026
Watch
My nephew Eitan is five years old, and he has an amazing sense of direction. I know that I am biased, but for a kindergartener, he has an uncanny ability to know where he is. At a red light, he will tell you how to get to all of his landmarks from where you are–His sister’s gymnastics classes are this way, his house is that way, we would go straight to get to his old school… He often tells us that he has a map in his mind. If he closes his eyes, he always just knows which way his home is. His house with the yellow door is the center of this map. He says that other people have books and libraries in their brains, and he has a map in his.
Our theme for the high holidays this year is Our diaspora stories: from the four corners of the earth. Over the next days, you’ll hear KT members share their stories of diaspora. I want to invite you into this theme as an exploration of the map in your mind. How do you relate to place and space. What’s at the center of your map? And what what corners of your map hold stories and memories? Where do our maps overlap, and where have we drawn lines differently, where have we mapped out the same space with different perspectives.
The idea of a Jewish diaspora started with a map with Zion/Israel/The Promised Land in the center and the rest of the world dispersed around that center. That map was spiritual, internal, and also literal. Maps made by Christians in the 8th-15th centuries often showed Jerusalem at the center, with three continents (Africa, Europe, and Asia) meeting in that holy place.
But over time, the potential for different understandings of Jewish diaspora opened up. Maps were redrawn as we move and as our desires change. Some change what’s at the center, while others move around or in and out of that same center. A place that once seemed huge may grow smaller as we grow. A place we miss might be giant and distant.
Sometimes, in a world of movement and change, it’s hard to imagine a map. Sometimes connection to physical place feels tenuous. Sometimes we try to erase the map and start again. In moments when we feel unmoored, as individuals or as a people, we look for connections that don’t fit on a map.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously described Shabbat as a palace in time. The holy weekly celebration doesn’t need to be connected to specific place. The holiness doesn’t depend on a Temple or a holy city. When we are unmoored and have no place, we create a temporal home. Maybe Heschel is suggesting that instead of making a map to find holiness, you can create a timeline. If you feel like you have no place, you are never more than six days away from the next Shabbat, the next opportunity put a whole palace on your timeline!
Sometimes, we look for something beyond space or time. We search for a divine replacement for this type of connection. One of the many names for God that emerges in ancient rabbinic texts is HaMakom, the place. Who needs connection to a physical place when we have God, the place that transcends all time and space. We often use this name now when we offer condolences with the phrase hamakom yinachem etchem–may The Place, The one of who is Everywhere, comfort you. When you have lost somebody and it feels unreal, like you cannot hold on to time or place, our tradition invites you to hold onto something divine that goes beyond that.
Early rabbis read this divine name into Torah texts. In Genesis, Jacob has recently left his parents’ home to go find a wife. He happens upon a makom, a place, where he decides to stop for the night. Once asleep, he has a famous dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder. He wakes up and says “wow! God is in this Makom, this place, and I just didn’t know!” How amazing is this makom, this place!” Rabbinic midrash tells us that Jacob didn’t happen to find a nice place to stop for the night. Instead he unknowingly found God. And the next morning, after a dream, he was able to clearly see the God/place.
Rabbi Yitzchak ben Moshe Arama, in the 1400s, read this as the beginning of an understanding that God could be in more than one place. Yitzchak had no sense before this that God was with him as he traveled. He needed God to show him the divine in this place, to show him that God goes beyond any physical place and is in face the makom, the place that is every place and no place.
Rabbi Toba Spitzer, in a conversation about the metaphors we use for God, says, “Makom invites us to associate Godliness with all those places where we've experienced a hint of Something beyond ourselves. It invites us to find the divine right here, wherever we happen to be-in this Place.” For me, what Rabbi Spitzer describes as “wherever we happen to be” is part of the essence of diaspora. We don’t need to be tied to one place to find the divine because the divine is every place.
But for me, understanding God as hamakom doesn’t replace a connection to place. The ability to see God everywhere only increases our connection to wherever we happen to be. We are, after all, physical beings who exist in physical space.
Bundist writers, socialists in Germany at the turn of the 20th century, used the term doykayt, or here-being. This word came about with a desire to own the political and cultural landscapes in which Ashkenazi Jews found themselves. Doykait was in contrast to dortkayt ("thereness"), a longing for Zion. But doykait was about claiming something as much as it was about a rejection of Zionism. If we see our current place as our home, we must participate in the culture, the politics, the reality of this place instead of focusing on a longing to be elsewhere.
Early Reform Jewish philosophy and liturgy didn’t share the socialist or secular beliefs of the Bund. But at almost the same time, Reform leaders were removing the desire for a return to Zion from their prayers. In his book Embracing Exile, David Kramer writes about early Reform liturgy for Tisha B’av. In these liturgies he finds a belief that The Temples weren’t destroyed because of the sings of Israel, and the destruction wasn’t a punishment. Rather, part of being a chosen people is being scattered everywhere. He says “Israel is meant to bear witness to God’s truth, which can be accomplished only if they are scattered throughout the world. Exile, therefore, is an elevation, not a punishment.”
So we find ourselves, either by punishment or by privelege, part of the Jewish diaspora. We are still in places where safety and continuity are not always ours. But we are connected to those places and of those places.
Here in Philadelphia, we are part of a culture that is rotten in stolen Lenape land. We acknowledge that, and add that label to our map.
I hold that choosing to put Philadelphia at the center of my map is a privilege. We have a government that actively and violently removes immigrants, sometimes from the only place they remember living. This Summer, Temporary Protective Status was taken away from over 300,000 Haitians. Some of these immigrants have been here since 2010, given this status after fleeing political violence and the aftermath of an earthquake. People create connections with place and people despite hostility, racism, zenophobia, and despite having a status that was called Temporary while they have lived here for 16 years. Sometimes maps are redrawn by force.
And, those of us with the privilege to stay find a place to center our maps. Here in Philly, that means choosing a city that in some way will never own me, even though I grew up only two hours away. A year ago, the Inquirer published a conversation with two Philly natives asking them when a transplant can claim that they are from Philly. The conclusion they come to, not surprisingly for us transplants, is never. They decide that if you came here after middle school, you will never be from here.
And yet, we create connections to place and culture. Sometimes, like Jacob waking up from his dream, our map changes unintentionally.
A few years ago, I was at a retreat for Reconstructionist Rabbis in the Delaware Water Gap. I found myself not far the Summer camp that was my favorite place as a child, and on the same trails that I hiked as teen on backpacking trips with scouts. I was happy to be in a familiar place, but I didn’t understand my own connection until I was on a long hike, catching up with a colleague. Without thinking, I reached out to touch a branch, to rub my fingers on its short flat needles and then to smell it on my hands. I reached out before I could think of the name of the plant, buried somewhere deep in my memory. The touch and the scent transcended any factual knowledge, and for a moment that was all I had. Then all the facts came back quickly. This was a Hemlock tree. I could confirm this by looking at the white lines under each needle, and a hemlock tree is not the same as a hemlock plant, which is famous as a poison. I have always felt most connected to God, to HaMakom, in places full of trees and nature.
So, on a trail I might have hiked 20 years earlier, I redrew my map. I added an image of a hemlock tree on a ridge in the Kittatinny mountains. I don’t go back to that tree, but I have made space for the place and that landscape on my map, probably larger than it is on most maps. I learned the history of the National Recreation Area there, stories of displacement not only of indigenous people, but also of farmers to make space for resorts. I return often with friends and add more birds and trees to my map. “That’s the spot where we once saw a rattlesnake.” “Remember when there was a nest of pileated woodpeckers in that tree there?”
Our maps are all, I’m sure, more complex than my little nephew can imagine. Like all of yours, my map has hills and valleys. Some painful places I hope never to revisit. And some places I could never find my way to again, even if I tried. Living in diaspora doesn’t mean that we get to draw our own perfect maps with only the connections we desire. It means we get to redraw our maps over and over.
If you are here because you want to redraw your map from scratch this year, may this be the fresh start you are looking for. If you are here looking to reconnect to a past, to hold onto a part of your map, may you feel those connections grow ove this holiday and this new year. And as we listen to the diaspora stories that are shared over the holidays, as we come together in this place and time, may we all find ways to see the ways our maps overlap and share the ways that they are different from each other.
L’shanah tovah, to a year of good and sweet travels, near and far.
Erev Rosh Hashanah
Sept 11, 2026
Watch
My nephew Eitan is five years old, and he has an amazing sense of direction. I know that I am biased, but for a kindergartener, he has an uncanny ability to know where he is. At a red light, he will tell you how to get to all of his landmarks from where you are–His sister’s gymnastics classes are this way, his house is that way, we would go straight to get to his old school… He often tells us that he has a map in his mind. If he closes his eyes, he always just knows which way his home is. His house with the yellow door is the center of this map. He says that other people have books and libraries in their brains, and he has a map in his.
Our theme for the high holidays this year is Our diaspora stories: from the four corners of the earth. Over the next days, you’ll hear KT members share their stories of diaspora. I want to invite you into this theme as an exploration of the map in your mind. How do you relate to place and space. What’s at the center of your map? And what what corners of your map hold stories and memories? Where do our maps overlap, and where have we drawn lines differently, where have we mapped out the same space with different perspectives.
The idea of a Jewish diaspora started with a map with Zion/Israel/The Promised Land in the center and the rest of the world dispersed around that center. That map was spiritual, internal, and also literal. Maps made by Christians in the 8th-15th centuries often showed Jerusalem at the center, with three continents (Africa, Europe, and Asia) meeting in that holy place.
But over time, the potential for different understandings of Jewish diaspora opened up. Maps were redrawn as we move and as our desires change. Some change what’s at the center, while others move around or in and out of that same center. A place that once seemed huge may grow smaller as we grow. A place we miss might be giant and distant.
Sometimes, in a world of movement and change, it’s hard to imagine a map. Sometimes connection to physical place feels tenuous. Sometimes we try to erase the map and start again. In moments when we feel unmoored, as individuals or as a people, we look for connections that don’t fit on a map.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously described Shabbat as a palace in time. The holy weekly celebration doesn’t need to be connected to specific place. The holiness doesn’t depend on a Temple or a holy city. When we are unmoored and have no place, we create a temporal home. Maybe Heschel is suggesting that instead of making a map to find holiness, you can create a timeline. If you feel like you have no place, you are never more than six days away from the next Shabbat, the next opportunity put a whole palace on your timeline!
Sometimes, we look for something beyond space or time. We search for a divine replacement for this type of connection. One of the many names for God that emerges in ancient rabbinic texts is HaMakom, the place. Who needs connection to a physical place when we have God, the place that transcends all time and space. We often use this name now when we offer condolences with the phrase hamakom yinachem etchem–may The Place, The one of who is Everywhere, comfort you. When you have lost somebody and it feels unreal, like you cannot hold on to time or place, our tradition invites you to hold onto something divine that goes beyond that.
Early rabbis read this divine name into Torah texts. In Genesis, Jacob has recently left his parents’ home to go find a wife. He happens upon a makom, a place, where he decides to stop for the night. Once asleep, he has a famous dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder. He wakes up and says “wow! God is in this Makom, this place, and I just didn’t know!” How amazing is this makom, this place!” Rabbinic midrash tells us that Jacob didn’t happen to find a nice place to stop for the night. Instead he unknowingly found God. And the next morning, after a dream, he was able to clearly see the God/place.
Rabbi Yitzchak ben Moshe Arama, in the 1400s, read this as the beginning of an understanding that God could be in more than one place. Yitzchak had no sense before this that God was with him as he traveled. He needed God to show him the divine in this place, to show him that God goes beyond any physical place and is in face the makom, the place that is every place and no place.
Rabbi Toba Spitzer, in a conversation about the metaphors we use for God, says, “Makom invites us to associate Godliness with all those places where we've experienced a hint of Something beyond ourselves. It invites us to find the divine right here, wherever we happen to be-in this Place.” For me, what Rabbi Spitzer describes as “wherever we happen to be” is part of the essence of diaspora. We don’t need to be tied to one place to find the divine because the divine is every place.
But for me, understanding God as hamakom doesn’t replace a connection to place. The ability to see God everywhere only increases our connection to wherever we happen to be. We are, after all, physical beings who exist in physical space.
Bundist writers, socialists in Germany at the turn of the 20th century, used the term doykayt, or here-being. This word came about with a desire to own the political and cultural landscapes in which Ashkenazi Jews found themselves. Doykait was in contrast to dortkayt ("thereness"), a longing for Zion. But doykait was about claiming something as much as it was about a rejection of Zionism. If we see our current place as our home, we must participate in the culture, the politics, the reality of this place instead of focusing on a longing to be elsewhere.
Early Reform Jewish philosophy and liturgy didn’t share the socialist or secular beliefs of the Bund. But at almost the same time, Reform leaders were removing the desire for a return to Zion from their prayers. In his book Embracing Exile, David Kramer writes about early Reform liturgy for Tisha B’av. In these liturgies he finds a belief that The Temples weren’t destroyed because of the sings of Israel, and the destruction wasn’t a punishment. Rather, part of being a chosen people is being scattered everywhere. He says “Israel is meant to bear witness to God’s truth, which can be accomplished only if they are scattered throughout the world. Exile, therefore, is an elevation, not a punishment.”
So we find ourselves, either by punishment or by privelege, part of the Jewish diaspora. We are still in places where safety and continuity are not always ours. But we are connected to those places and of those places.
Here in Philadelphia, we are part of a culture that is rotten in stolen Lenape land. We acknowledge that, and add that label to our map.
I hold that choosing to put Philadelphia at the center of my map is a privilege. We have a government that actively and violently removes immigrants, sometimes from the only place they remember living. This Summer, Temporary Protective Status was taken away from over 300,000 Haitians. Some of these immigrants have been here since 2010, given this status after fleeing political violence and the aftermath of an earthquake. People create connections with place and people despite hostility, racism, zenophobia, and despite having a status that was called Temporary while they have lived here for 16 years. Sometimes maps are redrawn by force.
And, those of us with the privilege to stay find a place to center our maps. Here in Philly, that means choosing a city that in some way will never own me, even though I grew up only two hours away. A year ago, the Inquirer published a conversation with two Philly natives asking them when a transplant can claim that they are from Philly. The conclusion they come to, not surprisingly for us transplants, is never. They decide that if you came here after middle school, you will never be from here.
And yet, we create connections to place and culture. Sometimes, like Jacob waking up from his dream, our map changes unintentionally.
A few years ago, I was at a retreat for Reconstructionist Rabbis in the Delaware Water Gap. I found myself not far the Summer camp that was my favorite place as a child, and on the same trails that I hiked as teen on backpacking trips with scouts. I was happy to be in a familiar place, but I didn’t understand my own connection until I was on a long hike, catching up with a colleague. Without thinking, I reached out to touch a branch, to rub my fingers on its short flat needles and then to smell it on my hands. I reached out before I could think of the name of the plant, buried somewhere deep in my memory. The touch and the scent transcended any factual knowledge, and for a moment that was all I had. Then all the facts came back quickly. This was a Hemlock tree. I could confirm this by looking at the white lines under each needle, and a hemlock tree is not the same as a hemlock plant, which is famous as a poison. I have always felt most connected to God, to HaMakom, in places full of trees and nature.
So, on a trail I might have hiked 20 years earlier, I redrew my map. I added an image of a hemlock tree on a ridge in the Kittatinny mountains. I don’t go back to that tree, but I have made space for the place and that landscape on my map, probably larger than it is on most maps. I learned the history of the National Recreation Area there, stories of displacement not only of indigenous people, but also of farmers to make space for resorts. I return often with friends and add more birds and trees to my map. “That’s the spot where we once saw a rattlesnake.” “Remember when there was a nest of pileated woodpeckers in that tree there?”
Our maps are all, I’m sure, more complex than my little nephew can imagine. Like all of yours, my map has hills and valleys. Some painful places I hope never to revisit. And some places I could never find my way to again, even if I tried. Living in diaspora doesn’t mean that we get to draw our own perfect maps with only the connections we desire. It means we get to redraw our maps over and over.
If you are here because you want to redraw your map from scratch this year, may this be the fresh start you are looking for. If you are here looking to reconnect to a past, to hold onto a part of your map, may you feel those connections grow ove this holiday and this new year. And as we listen to the diaspora stories that are shared over the holidays, as we come together in this place and time, may we all find ways to see the ways our maps overlap and share the ways that they are different from each other.
L’shanah tovah, to a year of good and sweet travels, near and far.