Planting a Seed

Tonight I am going to depart from my usual practice of speaking about the Torah portion for the week. Nor am I going to tie my sermon into a holiday or events on the world stage. Instead, this week I was inspired by our Bar Mitzvah,  Q.   Q’s project consisted of selling seeds in order to raise money for the Humane Society and for animal shelters. In selling the seeds he wants to encourage us all to eat healthy, save the planet and be kind to animals.  

I am not going to talk about eating healthy, saving the planet, or being kind to animals, worthy as those subjects may be!  But before I talk to you about a subject that touches on Q's project, I need to tell you about Masada. I am sure some of us have visited Masada, the ancient stone fortress in Israel, sitting on a tall, rocky mesa, high above the Dead Sea. It is a must-see sight on anybody’s first visit to Israel. Masada was built as a palace, and a fortress, for King Herod, in the latter part of the first century BCE.  It overlooks the Judean desert on one side and the Dead Sea on the other side. When you gaze over the desert from the heights of Masada, you might wonder how Herod could ever maintain a palace there. Nothing grows in the area as the terrain is arid, rocky and it barely rains. According to the historian Josephus, Herod had to import food and water -- peaches, figs, olives, almonds, wine, and birds for meat, to feed his court. In 70 CE a group of Jews who were part of a rebellion against Rome made their final stand at Masada. Rather than being taken captive and enslaved by the Roman army, they committed mass suicide. Masada remained uninhabited since that time – a forgotten, desolate, barren and isolated site.

When archeologists excavated the site in 1963, they discovered something that touches on Jonathan’s project. They discovered a jar buried in the ground containing the seeds of a date palm. Who knows why someone would bury the pits of a date palm in a jar in the ground, but there it was. The scientists examined the seeds with carbon 14. The palm seeds dated from between 155 BCE. And 64 CE. The archeologists took the 2000 year old seeds to Bar Ilan University in Haifa and stuck them in a researcher’s drawer, where they remained for 40 years.

Now the date palm was a very important crop in ancient Israel. When the Torah describes the Land of Israel as “a land flowing with milk and honey” the “honey” that it refers to is not bee honey, but the sweet taste of the fruit of the date palm. Roman emperors and noblemen demanded the Judean date for their tables. This ancient fruit was used as a laxative and aphrodisiac, for treating heart disease, lung problems, weakened memory, and possibly symptoms of cancer and depression.

The fruit was praised in song and poetry – Tsadik Katamar Yifrach – the righteous shall flourish like a date palm, say the psalms. The Judean date palm became a symbol of the Jewish nation. Ancient Jewish coins have been found that are engraved with images of the date palm. When the Roman emperor Vespasian wanted to commemorate his conquest of Judea, he minted a coin depicting a weeping woman beneath a date palm. But this species of date palm, so coveted by the Romans and so praised by the poets, a symbol of the Jewish state, became extinct by the time of the crusades.

Along comes, Dr. Elaine Solowey, an agricultural expert at the Arava Institute in the Negev, whose job includes finding new, useful crops that can survive the harsh, dry Middle East climate. In 2005, on Tu Bishvat, the New Year of the Trees, she planted the three date palm seeds that had languished for so many years in the researcher’s drawer at Bar Ilan. I imagine that she must have felt utterly surprised, and delighted when one of those seeds sprouted!  She nurtured the seedling and by 2015 it was 10 feet tall. Along the way she discovered that it was a BOY! 

Yes, date palms come in both male and female genders, and it takes a male and a female to reproduce. Dr. Solowey named the palm Methuselah, after the person who lived the longest life in the Bible. Methusalah – the palm, not the person -- was able to pollinate a wild female of a different species. The female palm produced dates! But Dr. Solowey would need a female of the same ancient species to be pollinated by Methuselah in order to re-produce the exact kind of dates that were eaten by Herod in his palace in Masada. She has planted other ancient seeds of the Judean Palm and two of them that have sprouted are female. She hopes that someday she will know exactly what kind of dates they ate in ancient times in the Land of Israel and what they tasted like. Her long term goal is to have a grove of ancient Judean date palms --A veritable Jurassic Park of the Palm!

One could say that the sprouting of this ancient seed is a metaphor for the rebirth of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Just as this ancient seed, long dormant, was brought to life in our own time, so, our ancient people, long exiled from our land, has become young again through the birth of the modern State of Israel. The seed of that rebirth lay waiting for centuries in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people. Once the energy trapped in those seeds was able to be released, it transformed the land, and its inhabitants, and indeed all world Jewry, in a stunningly brief period of time.

Or, we could say that the sprouting of that seed is a metaphor for the seeds we try to plant in every boy and girl who is educated at Congregation Beth Shalom, and who stands before us for their bar and bat mitzvah. Sometimes those seeds too lie dormant for a long time and are brought to life again in unexpected ways at unexpected times. We hope that as they journey through life, our students will tend to those seeds and cause them to grow and flourish.

Shabbat Shalom

For Mother's Day and Yom Yerushalayim

This coming Sunday we have two special days on the calendar. This Sunday, of course, we celebrate Mother’s Day. That, everyone knows. But this Sunday also marks the newest of Jewish holidays, Jerusalem Day. Jerusalem Day celebrates the re-unification of the City of Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty after the Six Day War in 1967. So, of course, the topic of this sermon is going to be Mother’s Day – in Jerusalem!

The first Mother’s Day in Jerusalem was proclaimed in 1947 to be celebrated in April. It was proposed by Sara Herzog, wife of then chief rabbi Isaac Herzog, who was president of an organization that helped women after childbirth. In 1951, the City of Haifa proclaimed their own Mother’s Day. This Mother’s Day was to be celebrated during Chanukah. This date was chosen because of its link to the story of Hannah. As told in the Book of the Maccabees, Antiochus arrested Hannah’s and her seven sons and tried to force the sons to eat pork to prove their obedience to the King. They defiantly refused to do so and each was put to death. The King then appealed to Hannah to convince her youngest son to comply with the King’s command, yet she refused to do so, urging him instead to follow the path of his brothers. Thus all her sons were put to death in a single day, yet Hannah bore it bravely, trusting in G-d.

Later that year, there was another proposal for Mother’s Day. This was to be held on the first of Adar, the anniversary of the death of Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah.  Already in her 70’s, she had run the Israel part of Youth Aliyah, which rescued 30,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. Henrietta Szold would personally meet the ships of the children who came to Israel without their parents. Of course, many of them would never see their parents again. These children referred to her as “imah”, or “mama”.

So for a period of time, Israel had three Mother’s Days. One was a traditional Mother’s Day connected to the experience of giving birth, celebrated in April. One was celebrated during Chanukah and connected to Hannah, who lost seven children. The other was celebrated in March in honor of Henrietta Szold, who never married and had no biological children.

I can understand the symbolism for evoking Hannah on Mother’s Day. After all, 1951 was only three years after the War for Independence, in which one percent of the Israeli population at the time was killed – over 6000 soldiers. There were a lot of grieving mothers in Israel at the time, and identifying Mother’s Day with the courageous Hannah, who sacrificed so much, made a great deal of sense. On the other hand, in celebrating Mother’s Day on Henrietta Szold’s yahrzeit, Israelis were implicitly rejecting a purely biological definition of motherhood and honoring all women who have contributed to building the future.

In the early 1990s, responding to the changing nature of the nuclear family, Israel changed the name of the holiday from “Mother’s Day” to “Family Day”. As a 2011 news report put it, Family Day recognizes that “all combinations of families are welcomed with love: children with two mothers, or two fathers, or single-parent families — all are part of the celebration…” But “Family Day” has never really caught on in Israel, and there is a budding movement to return to the celebration of a Mother’s Day of some kind.

 Chaim Weitzman, who was to become the first President of the State of Israel, even used Mother’s Day to advance the argument for a Jewish State in what was then Palestine.  The story goes that a British gentleman said to him: “Dr. Weitzman, what do you need to start a Jewish country for in that God-forsaken corner of the Middle East?  Why don’t you take your Jews - who evidently need some refuge from persecution - and take them to Argentina or Uganda or the Canary Islands or someplace else?  What do you need Palestine for?”  And Weitzman said to the man: “You may be right, but before I answer you, let me ask you a question.  I understand that every year on Mother’s Day and on a good many other occasions during the year, you drive all the way across the city of London in order to visit your mother at the nursing home where she lives.  There are lots of other old ladies in London.  Why don’t you visit some other woman who lives closer instead of visiting your mother?”

Just as we can never find a substitute for or forget our own mothers, so, we can never find a substitute for or forget that this small slice of land in the Middle East is our Jewish ancestral land. “If I forget Thee, O Jerusalem, May my right hand lose its power” goes the Psalm. Let us remember our mothers on Mother’s Day this Sunday, and let us remember Jerusalem as well.  To that let us say, AMEN.