Back to the Garden. Or, how to be more human. Rosh Hashanah 5787 Day 1

On August 18, 1969, the final day of the Woodstock Music Festival, Joni Mitchell made her national television debut on the Dick Cavett show. She was interviewed in a circle with the members of Jefferson Airplane, and Steven Stills and David Crosby, who had come to the studio straight from their set at Woodstock. Steven Stills proudly holds his leg up to the camera and shows us his ankles, his jeans still covered in the sacred mud from Bethel. 

Cavett asks the group how it was, if they would consider Woodstock a success. David Crosby jumps in: “It was incredible. It was probably the strangest thing that’s ever happened in the world.” The audience breaks into applause. Cavett then asks the group to regale him and his audience with tales from the festival. Grace Slick talked about the “religious” sunrise set Jefferson Airplane played the day before. 

And Crosby responds: “Can I describe to you what it looked like flying in on a helicopter, man? “It looked like an encampment of the Macedonian Army on the Greek hills, crossed with the biggest batch of hippies you ever saw.”

There it was. The music, the politics, the people. The scale and scope and significance of this moment. The music festival that defined a generation, and changed music forever. And all the while, Joni Mitchell sits, just to Cavett’s right, waiting her turn. Wondering when she’ll have a chance to join the conversation, wondering when the topic might shift. Because she wasn’t there. Joni Mitchell wasn’t at Woodstock. 

Mitchell was initially slated to perform at the festival, but her agent made a last minute decision to cancel her appearance so she could appear instead, on the Dick Cavett show. 

And it’s in the shadow of this moment that she writes “Woodstock.” The iconic song that would later be covered and made popular by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The song that to so many describes three days of transcendent music, human connection, and peace. But for Mitchell, this song, inspired by what she saw on TV, is a lament, a love letter to her generation, but also a quiet and devastating reminder of what she missed. It’s a celebration of humanity and divinity– we are stardust, we are golden. But it is also a polemic against a shifting priorities: TV over live music. A safe, clean, orchestrated TV set, over the mud sliding and dancing. Edits and commercials and producers and cue cards over the messy, unpredictable, humor, tragedy, triumph, joy, and muck of life. 

And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

In hindsight, it’s easy to judge Mitchell’s agent. But I think we can understand the calculus– at the time, nobody knew how significant Woodstock would be. Nobody really believed that so many people would show up. That the roads to Yasgur’s farm would be blocked for miles. That people trying to get to the festival would abandon their cars on the streets to get out of the gridlock. Surely, Mitchell’s agent thought, the gamble of a Woodstock failure wasn’t worth the likely boon that a TV spot could secure for Mitchell and her career. 

But Joni Mitchell had a different take on the moment: While a performance and interview on the Dick Cavett show could potentially reach more people, Woodstock– the messy, live, in-person, mud-slinging, playing in the pouring rain, fiasco, potential flop, music, and humanity, would have been transformative in a different and more important way. It may have been more narrow, more local, but it would have been more real. And so she writes “Woodstock” as much for herself, as she does for us, even all these years later.

We live in a moment and in a culture that seems keen on pulling us out of time. The big wide web of the internet has caused us to carry and internalize the pain of the whole world– a worthy moral endeavor, to be sure, but one that is so devastating, and exhausting. It’s crushing, and I know we are all there in some way. 

Feeling depleted and helpless by the weight of it all. And that sorrow, that magnitude of sorrow follows us everywhere and pulls us out of our lives and away from the communities in which we live, and work, and love. It pulls us away from the people who are standing right in front of us. It tears us apart from the earth. It takes us out of our own reality, and drops us into many different concurrent timelines, so few of them our own. 

We are more connected than ever, and somehow more alone than ever. In 2023, the office of the Surgeon General published a report titled: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, in which Dr. Vivek Murthy outlined in great detail, how social disconnection and alienation were wreaking havoc on individual and collective health outcomes. Three years later, and we are even more entrenched, even more isolated, even more alone. And of course we are. Every year, the news seems to get worse. We’re losing our grasp on the truth. And sometimes, finding a place to hide in the recesses of the internet, or even at home under the covers is safer. There is no risk when we are alone. 

And it feels like the basic cost to participate in our society and in our culture, to be known at all in some ways right now, is to be online. In this abstract, amorphous, improbable place. The world has gotten so big– how can we possibly carry the weight of the world, how can we repair the world, engage in Tikkun Olam, when the Olam feels so vast and overwhelming. I think we sometimes feel stuck– I know, because I often do–because we don’t know where to begin. There is so much work to do– so much to fix and so much to heal. So maybe, we have to redefine, and shrink the Olam; shrink the world so that we can get back to the work of tending the garden that we stand in. Not to slough off our moral obligations, but to get ourselves unstuck from this cosmic and existential rut. Can we embody what G-d modeled for us in this morning’s Torah reading, when G-d shows up for Yishmael, באשר הוא שם, in that specific, and hyper-local place where Yishmael is? Do we have the courage to take control over what we can fix? To not hide behind the enormity of all that we cannot? To embrace the god-given agency we all have to transform this wild, untamed garden? Do we have the courage to face each other? To be in the work together? To stumble and make mistakes, to forgive one another?

We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. 

At its core, Rosh Hashanah is a holiday all about helping us find our way back to the garden. Back to that place where everything is possible. Where truth and G-d feel close at hand. And most importantly, it’s that place where our humanity lives and breathes without constraint. In the garden, we can see ourselves and each other in the beautiful and clear light of day. 

And teshuvah, that essential act of self-reflection and atonement, of making ourselves small so that we can soar, is a fundamental act of return. When we do teshuvah, we return back to our truest selves. To the version of ourselves that’s always tugging at our heart, that is always trying to break free. It’s the version of us that’s been dampened and shuttered by this brutal world. But it’s also the inner self that knows the truth about this place: that it is beautiful and so very good.

Rabbi Jonah of Gerondi, a medieval Jewish ethicist, refers to teshuvah as a sanctuary. Teshuvah is a place where we can go to escape sin, to feel liberated in the presence of our own potential. And I think teshuvah is the garden, too. Because teshuvah is work, it is toil, it is labor. It is the grittiest kind of humanity on display. When we do teshuvah right, there’s dirt under our fingernails, there are weeds to pull, but there are also so many seeds just waiting to take root. 

Our sages teach that teshuvah, the very idea that we can mend, that we can repair, and transform, and do better, is an act of Divine chesed, divine lovingkindness. That chesed, these human-facing acts of service and kindness and care, are the engines of teshuvah, of true transformation. Chesed, my teacher Rabbi Shai Held, teaches, is the beating heart of Torah. 

In the Midrash Tanchuma, we learn that the Torah is bookended by acts of Chesed– the first of which takes place in the Garden of Eden, after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge and become aware of their nakedness: 

וַיַּעַשׂ ה׳ אֱלֹקִים לְאָדָם וּלְאִשְׁתּוֹ כׇּתְנוֹת עוֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵׁם׃

And the ETERNAL God made garments of skins for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.

And in the final chapter of the Torah, when Moshe dies. And we read:

וַיָּמׇת שָׁם מֹשֶׁה עֶבֶד־ה׳ בְּאֶרֶץ מוֹאָב עַל־פִּי ה׳׃ וַיִּקְבֹּר אֹתוֹ בַגַּי בְּאֶרֶץ מוֹאָב מוּל בֵּית פְּעוֹר

So Moses the servant of GOD died there, in the land of Moab, at the command of GOD,

who buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, near Beth-peor.

Clothing the naked and burying the dead. Two of the most sacred, vulnerable, human kinds of care that it is possible for us to give. In the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sotah, Rabbi Simlai teaches:

The Torah begins with an act of lovingkindness (gemilut hasadim) and ends with an act of lovingkindness. As support he brings these two divine actions—burying Moses and clothing Adam and Eve.

The Midrash goes on to identify yet another example of Divine Chesed:

The beginning of the Torah is chesed, the middle of the Torah is chesed, and the end of the Torah is chesed.” At the beginning, as we have seen, God clothes Adam and Eve; at the end God buries Moses. In the “middle” God visits Abraham while he is in need of healing. 

It’s these three moments, the beginning, middle, and end of Torah that reveal what the heart or core of Torah is– The very essence of Torah, the Sages thus insist, is a God of love and kindness who calls Israel to love and kindness, teaches Held. We cannot truly know G-d, cannot truly internalize and embody the lessons and values of this great gift without becoming kinder, more present, and more human in the process.

On Rosh Hashanah we implore G-d to remember us, Zochreinu L’Chayim, remember us for life. We try to jog G-d’s memory, and we insist that G-d pay extra close attention to the good that we’ve done this year. In asking G-d to remember us, we are hoping that G-d will do a chesed for us– to grant us more time, to give us another chance to grow into our best selves. 

In his 1962 monograph, Prayer, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz argues that:

The only people who may truly pray for G-d’s chesed are those who are themselves known for chesed. Only someone who embodies generosity has the right to ask the same from G-d. In order to receive chesed from G-d, we have to first embody it. 

To which Rabbi Shai Held adds:

Or perhaps we can say this: we must be the chesed we pray for. I can’t think of a better way to express the inextricable link in Judaism between our relationship with G-d and our relationship with other people: we have to give to others the very things we request for ourselves. 

We cannot make a claim on G-d that we ourselves are not willing to accept. 

This kind of chesed, and in particular, this kind of authentic, embodied chesed is something that I see here at OZS every single day. I see it when the Caring Committee coordinates food for a Shiva or helps a family transition into parenthood without a second thought. I see it when the members of our Chevra Kadisha drop everything to ensure that a body can be ritually prepared for burial with dignity and love. I see it when community members spend hours cleaning up the garden or tending to vegetables out back. I see it when you tell me that you came to that Simcha precisely because you didn’t know the family who was celebrating– and you knew it was your responsibility to show up for them. I see it when you come to the funeral, when you shovel dirt, when you come to the shiva minyan. I see it when you cook a meal, or make a hospital visit, and when you gently share that someone in our community is in need. I see it when you welcome new folks to town and invite them to Shabbos dinner. I see it when our community packs hundreds of bags of food every month for food-insecure kids in Lexington. I see it when you help build houses so our neighbors can live in a safe, affordable, and beautiful home. And I see it in all the quiet, unsuspecting, and humble ways that each of you makes this place feel like a sanctuary of teshuvah, a garden of chesed with deep roots and sturdy, life-giving trees. 

And so this year, as we continue to figure out together how to make our way in this world, we are going to lean on each other even more. 5787 is our Year of Chesed. Our year of service, our year of kindness, our year of love, our year of care, our year of support, and our year of responsibility. This year, we will commit to seeing each other more clearly, to caring for one another more intentionally, and to doing what now feels so countercultural: we will be more human. We will remind each other that the antidote to that weighty sorrow and despair is right here in this room, in this sacred little universe that is bursting with life. 

As Yotam Marom writes in his new book, For Louder Days:

…And the belonging…is made from a commitment to struggling with and for one another, built on duty, and care, and work alongside the pleasures and transformations they make possible. We take responsibility for the things and the people we love, and become theirs, as they become ours.

So this year, let’s all follow that tug that I know we all feel on our hearts. To be more present with each other, to care for one another, to model for G-d the chesed that we so desperately need in our world. You don’t need to know someone deeply or at all to care about them. We don’t need to have the right words, or a sophisticated theological treatise prepared as we jump down into the pit with someone who is struggling. Come to the funeral. Come to the Shiva. Sign up for the Meal Train. Fill a backpack. Hammer a nail. 

At our core, what we need is actually quite simple: another human being, looking us in the eyes, standing right next to us, affirming, even in silence, that we are not alone. 

The very last section of Tractate Taanit in the Babylonian Talmud ends with the following story:

Ulla of the city of Bira’a said that Rabbi Elazar said: In the future the Holy One will arrange a dance of the righteous, and G-d will be sitting among them in the Garden of Eden. 

Shanah Tovah!