Yom Kippur 2023 : The Wandering Jews
Rabbi Margaret
I wasn’t born in the state that I grew up in. Neither of my parents was born in the state where I was born, nor the different state where my siblings and I grew up. Two of my grandparents weren’t born in the country where my parents and sibs and I live. I have no idea where anyone came from a generation or two before them.
I remember visiting the villages on the western edge of the Carpathian mountains, where my mother’s parents spent the first years of their lives. The village of Verece, or Veryatz, as I think my grandmother said it, was remarkably unremarkable: a couple dirt roads, a church, a cemetery, small brick houses with tin roofs, some with outhouses and little pigstys in the yard. There were low hills in the distance, I think a river nearby — though I remember the river more from maps than from actually seeing it.
It was a simple place. But it was a place. I remember thinking afterwards that it had never really occurred to me that I came from a place on earth. If anything I pictured the villages where my grandparents were born to be like the villages in Chagall paintings, floating in the upper quadrants somewhere — mythic and ungrounded. But yes, my maternal grandparents came from this unprepossessing patch of ground in what is now western Ukraine — though they came one on a Czech passport and one on a Hungarian one, within a couple years and ten miles of each other.
But I don’t really come from Veryatz, or from Rokoshin where my mom’s father came from, or from wherever my paternal grandparents were born (Ilyria Ohio and Chicago, I believe.) Or from Lafayette, Indiana, where I was born and lived until I was 2-1/2 years old, or from Tustin, where I grew up. I don’t come from the Mendocino Coast, though I have lived here twice as long as I ever lived anywhere else in my life. I know some of the plants and animals here, have a little familiarity with the night sky. I know the rare places where you can buy underwear or pick up a Sunday Times. But I am not native to this place or to anyplace. I don’t come from anywhere.
Some of us here in the shul may have been born here on the Coast — but I bet only a very few of our parents were. We come from other places, and our ancestors before us from yet other places. It seems to be the nature of Jewish history that we are highly mobile — sometimes responding to stress and persecution, other times to opportunity, curiosity and possibility, maybe even to spiritual calling.
Because of this we are a people of many languages, many foodways, many costumes and cultures, many physical appearances. We have diverse families and circles of friends and associates. We have a certain amount of class mobility. We are resourceful and adaptable. We have soaked up the best (and sometimes not the best) of cultures wherever we have landed up.
We also have, I think, a kind of collective loneliness, an interior homelessness that comes not from being unhoused but from being unrooted to any particular place on the earth.
There was a houseplant that a lot of us once had in our dorm rooms called a Wandering Jew. It was so called because it would grow almost anywhere, under almost any circumstances. You could neglect it and it would get scruffy.
But it wouldn’t die. A bit of that blue fertilizer that you put in with an eyedropper, and it would green right up again. You could nip off a sprig and stick it in a glass of water, and the sprig would root. You could put the little rootlet in a new pot, and that little rootlet would grow a new plant. Even I could cultivate Wandering Jews.
Apparently there is a well-meaning effort these days to change the name of this plant, as though it is some kind of pejorative. But I quite like these attributes associated with the Wandering Jew. We can grow almost anywhere. We transplant easily and propagate anew.
I am thinking about this in part because of an ongoing conversation I am in the midst of with Adina Merenlender, who thinks so deeply about place, about connection to land, about indigenaiety. Adina and so many others are exploring the wisdom of deeply rooted cultures. The Aboriginal Australian writer Tyson Yunkaporta writes:
All humans evolved within complex, land-based cultures over deep time to develop a brain with the capacity for over one hundred trillion neural connections, of which we now use only a tiny fraction. Most of us have been displaced from those cultures of origin, a global diaspora of refugees severed not only from land but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relation to it.” (Sand Talk p. 2)
All humans may well have evolved within complex, land-based cultures over deep time. But Jewish evolution — which reckons itself to have taken place over most of the past 5784 years — is almost entirely a pre-history and a history of wandering. It has long interested me that the origin story told in Torah does not locate the people in a fixed place. The story begins with Abraham and his family in Haran, in what is now Syria. They spend a relatively short time in Canaan, are displaced to Egypt, enslaved there for 430 years, then miraculously released into the Sinai desert. The rest of the Torah narrative takes place as the people wander for the next forty years, and it stops right before they re-enter Canaan.
Immediately after the Torah concludes the people enter that Promised Land. And they dwell there until they are brutally deported in 486 BCE to Babylon in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Jews migrated from Babylonia back to Palestine, to Egypt, further west to Germany and southern France, to Spain. The Jews remaining in Canaan were again brutally displaced, this time by Rome, in 70 CE. Those who survived dispersed around the world — some to North Africa, to Russia, to the Americas, to China and India, to every continent and just about every country and a lot of cities and rural places. There are even Jews in Caspar!
We are a diasporic culture. Even today, when there is a Jewish government in Israel and an automatic right of return for Jews, about six million Jews live there, and over eight million Jews live scattered around the world. I say this not to dispute the importance of Israel for some Jewish people as a promised land but instead to reflect with you on the gifts and losses of being wandering Jews, diasporic people, “severed,” as Tyson Yunkaporta puts it, “not only from land but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relationship to it.”
There is such deep knowing that comes from being indigenous, from being rooted from deep-time in a particular landscape, under a particular patch of sky, with relationship to weather, animals, plants, seasons, threats and pleasures that come from the depth of relationship with this place. I will never know this in my own soul or in my own tribe. I know this only second-hand, from the testimony of those indigenous people who speak and dance and sing and write from that sense of rootedness. Our whole rootless, uprooted, wrecked-up world needs this deep wisdom to come forward, to help us all to move differently in this time in which we find ourselves. I greatly honor those wise, brave people indigenous to places in our world who are making themselves and their understandings known beyond their own communities. And I also greatly honor those from less rooted communities, including from our own Justice Group, who are humbly reaching out to Native people, trying to learn, build relationships and to quiet ourselves so that we can hear the voices of people who are indigenous to the places where we dwell.
We all need to be rooted. Rootlessness hurts, and it cuts us off from some necessary wisdom about life. The last book by the great and challenging philosopher Simone Weil, before she died of starvation and tuberculosis while in the French Resistance, is called The Need for Roots.
Weil writes:
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future …
But rootedness, according to Weil, can take many forms. One can be rooted in community, in memory, in values, in expectations. Many of us in the Jewish community are not deeply rooted in place. But we may have other kinds of rootedness to draw from for the good of our souls and the world.
Many of us love the image of the inverted etz chayim, the Tree of Life, with its roots in the heavens and the fruit of its outermost branches touching the ground. This is another kind of rootedness.
In parashat Vayetze, in Genesis, we meet up with Jacob, alone, in flight from his family. He has stolen the blessing and the birthright due to his elder brother Esau. He is en route from Beersheva towards the ancestral home of his grandfather Avraham. Along the way, vayifga ba-makom and spent the night there… Vayifga baMakom — he encountered Ha-Makom, the Place.
While sleeping he dreamt, and behold! a ladder was set earthward and its top reached heavenward; and behold! angels of God were ascending and descending upon it.
And behold! HASHEM was standing over him. And HASHEM said, Behold! I am HASHEM the God of Abraham your father and God of Isaac; the ground upon which you are lying, to you I will give it and to your descendants. Your offspring shall be as the dust of the earth, and you shall spread out powerfully westward, eastward, northward and southward, and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and by your offspring…. (Genesis 28 10-14)
You could think about this amazing passage forever! One tiny point of interest, a little embedded joke, if you like: that place that God is going to give Jacob and his descendants forever — it is never made clear where that is. While rabbinic tradition connects the place with the later location of the Beit Ha-Mikdash, the Holy Temple, we don’t know from the text itself where Jacob spent the night. What we know is that Jacob lit upon HAMAKOM — the Place — and that God was present there. From that Makom Jacob’s descendants would spread out like the dust of the earth in every direction, bringing blessing as they alight.
A famous midrash (Bereshit Rabbah 68:9) makes a pun of this verse. Jacob happens upon HAMAKOM — Jacob happens upon The Place — a proper Name, a name for the Divine. God as Ha-Makom, the Place. The midrash elaborates:
And he came upon (vayifga') the place (Genesis 28:11) - Rav Huna says, in the name of Rabbi Ami: why do we substitute the name of the Holy Blessed One and use Place? Because God is the Place of the world, and the world is not the place of God.
Let’s sit for a moment with these possibilities: that Place is a name for God, that God is a Place, that the Place holds the entire world, that the Place is somehow connected with the Holy Temple and particularly with the K’dosh K’doshim, the Holy of Holies, that mystical Makom where the human and the Divine meet.
In this sense we Jewish people are not homeless or rootless. But our home and our root are in the Mystery, in the Beyond, in the not-entirely-knowable. What if we took seriously our Jewish sense of Place, of Makom — our residence, with all life, in the Awesome nature of the Universe. What if we embraced our dust-like diaspora-ness, our calling and capacity to bring blessing wherever we are, our hunger to connect with the Infinite and the map for doing so that we are given on Yom Kippur — in which we do not go to a certain place on earth and open a certain material door but enter the gate of imagination, follow the steps of a sacred story to a Place that exists on our own sacred songline, which is available to open wherever on the globe we happen to alight for a night or a generation? What if our everywhere-ness and our no place-in-particular-ness is itself a gift to the world, a partner and counterpoint to the deep rootedness-in-place of our Indigenous neighbors? What if, being Wandering Jews, we know something about being able to sprout anywhere, to revive, to root where we land, to propagate, to survive, to thrive?
What if we were placed in the world in part to answer the query of the Dalai Lama after the expulsion of Tibetans from their ancestral home: how do we survive when we are displaced from our sacred place on the earth? When His Holiness invited a delegation of Jewish leaders to advise him, they brought with them a cornucopiea of the wisdom of the Wandering Jew: the Passover seder, the Talmud, the mystical tradition, prayer — all tools we generated because we wander in the world, rooting wherever we are. (You can read about this conversation in the wonderful book The Jew in the Lotus.)
When the Kohen Gadol entered the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur — and remember, we know this not because we have a High Priest and a Holy of Holies in a particular place on the globe today but because we tell the story and reenact the ritual wherever we are on earth — she entered three times: to atone for herself and her family, for the Israelite tribe and then for the whole world. The mystery of the Makom, the Place, exists to nourish not only our own souls and not only our own people but all of the world, all its tribes, all its creatures, all its landscapes.
We can’t sustain the world by mystery and imagination alone. We need to be in partnership with people who are indigenous to a place, who know creature and landscape intimately and longitudinally, as we for the most part do not. But our wisdom as wandering Jews brings something as well to this hurting world. We are the people to whom it was said: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex.23:9). Because we have been blown about like dust throughout the generations, we carry with us the memory of what it feels like to stand at a border, to be at the boundary, at the barrel of a gun, to be lonely and unknown and unhoused. We know what it is like not to speak the language, to be friendless. We know depression. We know barely being able to make it. We have something to offer from these places, from the edge, from the border, from the closed gate. We know how to carry with us what we need to survive and to let go of what we don’t need. We know how to learn and to change. We don’t do it perfectly, but we know how to live with other people, to understand, to befriend, to be in solidarity.
Tonight and tomorrow we will use our gifts that we have accrued through generations of wandering: we will imagine, we will visualize, we will hope, we will carry in our hearts our love for each other, for our tribe and for our world. May it come to us and to all the earth for good.