Episode 25: Tree Time (Amidah Middle Blessing 6) (with Hazzan Jessi Roemer)
10:26PM Jun 16, 2022
Speakers:
Eliana Light
Josh Warshawsky
Ellen Dreskin
Jessi Roemer
Keywords:
shmita
land
blessing
trees
earth
moment
years
connection
bracha
produce
people
song
talked
beautiful
art
rest
adonai
grow
feel
thinking
Shalom, everyone. Welcome back to the light lab podcast. My name is Eliana Light. And I'm here with my dear friends Cantor, Ellen Dreskin.
Hello, everybody,
and Rabbi Josh Warshawsky.
Hello again!
So great to be back together. And we have as we often do an opening question I want to hear, when do you feel most connected to the earth? When do you feel connected to the earth, either in general, or particular story that is coming to mind right now? Oh, I'm first. Listeners, I'm going to ask myself that question. When do I feel connected to the earth? Well, my mom tells me that when I was a small child, I would run around our backyard and hug trees. And that hasn't really gone away. That is a tendency that stays with me, when people ask why I moved down here to Durham, North Carolina, one of the top three reasons is the trees. And they might laugh, but I'm telling you, the trees down here are incredible. They're so big, and so massive, and so old. And there's just this beautiful sense that I get from the trees, that they have been here a lot longer than me, they're going to be here a lot longer after I'm gone. And it makes whatever sort of little thing that I'm thinking about. It's really pale in comparison to the grandeur of time, I was just at this conference called Cornerstone. We played this crazy phrase game, shout out Dr. Shore, I don't know if you're listening or not, but I'll send this to you. Where one person says a word and other person says another word that is alliterative and the third person finds a definition and one of the groups came up with "tree time," the idea that trees kind of run on their own time span and if we look at our life and tree time, it seems a lot more spacious, one might say. Also, there's this cool thing down here, where when you drive the trees, foliage, like all the greenery just goes over the road, and my friend calls it a tree tunnel, which is really beautiful. So even though the pollen this year has been terrible, I feel grateful to the beautiful trees here for helping me feel rooted. One might say, in the earth. Josh, I'll pass it to you. How do you feel connected to the earth?
I love that. When you when you ask this question just now I brought me directly back to a specific memory as a time to like, as opposed to feeling connected to a variety different places. And in college, I spent a summer in the rainforest in South Paulo, Brazil, instead of taking science credits at Columbia, you could like do conservation biology in the rainforest for five weeks, and it counts as two science credits. And I'm not a science person. So I was like, Sign me up. So I went to the rainforest for five weeks, and I did a project about the understory of eucalyptus trees, which were brought in to the rain forest to help with deforestation, which was really wonderful for a little bit of time. But then eucalyptus trees are colonizers, so there were like eucalyptus groves everywhere, they were sort of taken over the forest. But what I would do is I would just wander through these eucalyptus groves, and like count the bugs in different squares to see if there was a lot of life living around them. And those were some of the times when I was most alone, in the most literal sense, where I was just like out in the rain forest by myself, everyone had a different project. And so I would just in a grove with Eucalyptus growing by myself, just counting bugs and just being in the forest by myself alone. And I think about that often whenever I'm out in nature, just like what was a moment just to be alone with the trees. And there was also like, there were a couple of paved roads in the forest. But they were always in those sort of tree tunnels that you were talking about. And there would be these giant spider webs going across the road and some monkeys that were all over the place. And that was my most immersive nature experience. And I think back to it often.
That's so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing. I love that image just being present. All I need to do right here is be by this tree and count all these bugs. That's great. Ellen,what about you?
I find that more and more I'm seriously considering us humans as animals, which I which sounds normal because of course we are. And I don't think we put ourselves in a different class. And the more I think about us just being as another kind of animal on this earth and more I feel connected to being a living being and what you were saying about the trees Eliana, I'm intrigued with the idea that we're breathing in connection with trees and with plants. That, that right there is a relationship that cannot be severed. That is such an every second that I take a breath, a reminder of, of that connection. So I use that a lot as kind of a mantras kind of, of meditational thing of, I guess, trying to reconnect now. And, oddly enough, the counting of the Omer reminds me of that, because even though it's not, we're no longer farmers, And I'm still connected to that idea of the original counting of the Omer being all about harvest and offering and, and being grateful for that kind of abundance. It didn't have to be that way, this symbiotic relationship with nature. So I'm, I'm reattaching, myself these days.
That's beautiful. We breathe in with the trees breathe out, and vice versa. It's all around us all the time. But like with so much of what we talk about on this show, it takes something nudging us calling our attention to notice what is going on. So what is going on? Why are we talking about trees and the earth? What are we doing here, Josh?
Well, Elinan, we are making our way through our Amidah Journey. And I love what you're saying about just pausing and noticing, because there are so many places to pause and notice in the Amidah, and we're in the process of entering our open house of the Amidah we're really kind of far into it. At this point, we've explored a whole lot of the texts we've had so far already, starting from the very beginning of just preparing ourselves to enter into this house, we kind of stood on the doormat for a little bit with adonai s'fatai tiftach. And then we moved into just those words of blessing Baruch ata Adonoi, what it means to just open ourselves up to blessing. And as soon as we entered, there were so many things to see the house was really decorated with a lot of really nice things. Every room with its own theme talked through our ancestors and calling them into a moment of prayer, we talked through the sort of powers that were expressing both in the divine and also within ourselves. We talked about holiness, and what that means. And then we talked about all the different things that we're asking for requesting or naming that we want to call out for ourselves or that we notice in the world, those being a beginning with knowledge, moving into a place of repentance and forgiveness, figuring out what comes after repentance and forgiveness, which we hope is redemption, and then coming into not just our spiritual sense, but also our physical bodies and thinking about healing, what healing looks like what healing feels like, how we ask for healing, and what kind of healing vibes we're sending out into the world. And now we've arrived at the blessing of Shanim, Nevarech Hashanim, which we'll talk about in a second, as we move into what these words are trying to say and how we orient ourselves towards this piece in this new room in our Amidah Journey. Alright, we think we're ready to jump in. There we go. So I'm going to read the blessing in Hebrew. And I'm reading today from the Lev Shalem Conservative Siddur. So I'll read in the Hebrew and then I'll read the English translation we have here. And again, our questions are just what do we notice? What are we seeing? What are we experiencing within these words? Barech Aleinu Adonai Eloheinu Et Hashanah Ha’zoat, v’et kol minei t’vuatah l’tovah, v’tein bracha, or v'tein tal u'matar livracha, Al p’nei ha’adamah v’sabeinu mituvah u’varech shnateinu kashanim hatovot. Baruch atah adonai, mevarech hashanim. In this Siddur it titles all of the brachot so this one is titled A Time of Abundance. Adonai our g?d make this a blessed year for us. May its varied hardest harvest yield prosperity, may the land be blessed, or be blessed with the dew and rain and satisfy us with its goodness. Bless this year that it'd be like the best of yours. Baruch ata Adonoi, Who is the source of blessing of each year. What do we see, what do we notice any other translations you're working from?
I'm looking I would love to go more into and I think that probably we could say something about how come that that one point there are two different phrases depending upon the time of the year. I'm looking at Kol Haneshamah, the Reconstructionist Daily Siddur. And for each of the Chatimot of the Amidah, there's a different name for g?d in the Chatimah, and so just interesting that for this blessing, it's Blessed are you All Bountiful, And there's a lot of repetition in the translation upon bounty, and all the forms of produce that the land brings. And also that that K'shanim Hatovot that good years or this one specific translation specifically says, give blessing to this year, as in the good years of the past. There's that phrase of like the good old days that stuck out at me when I was reading it.
ln, it's interesting. I also noted something about time, which was the phrase hashanah hazote, which really brings it into the present moment, in the sense that the petitionary prayers that came before. We want healing, we seek redemption, all of these things. In general, all of these things as soon as possible, probably. But time seems kind of fluid in those moments, and yet here we're saying Shana hazote. This is about this year. This is about what is happening now. And what has happened in the past and what has happened in the future. It really grounds us in time, I'm working out of My Peoples prayer book, and it's titled Shanim, years, this blessing. But it's interesting, it was interesting to me when I really started to read it that if what we're actually asking for is produce and good things to come out of the earth. Why is so much of the blessing focused on time, they seem to be two different spheres.
I take that right back Eliana to what you said about tree time. The very beginning of the all this produce and all the gifts that nature provides us are entirely dependent upon the seasons happening, when they happen and the amount of nutrients from the earth and the amount of rain coming from the sky that the, the years need to do their to be on on that time, in order that there can be tree time does those cycles
you know, what you're saying kind of makes me think of the fact that our calendar adjusts itself. We've the way that we've established our calendar changes so that we can be connected to the right agricultural cycles, right, we we add in in the lunar calendar. In Judaism, we added a whole month, whenever our holidays get a little out of whack so that we can line back up with the years and line back up with the seasons and make sure that we're encountering that we are ready at the moments when the earth is ready. So we don't ask the earth to realign itself for our holidays. We're the ones that have to adjust to make sure that we're connected to the earth when it's ready for us. And so I thought that was really interesting. And I also connect the word that pops out at me, in addition to the word Shanim is the word Tov. And that it comes in three totally different iterations. The first is right, the good produce the T'vuata Tova, and then the Vesaveynu Mituva is let's be satiated from its goodness. And I wonder if there's a way to read it not just as the Earth's goodness, but as the year's goodness, I don't really know necessarily what that would mean.
One thing that I'm just now noticing is that in both of the Siddurim that I'm looking at the Reconstructionist and the Reform Siddur, don't say Vesabeynu Mituva. They say Vesabeynu Mituvecha and they turn it back to g?d. And I prefer giving the land its own agency to, to respond to do it itself. I hope in the same way that it's a living being then I give us, you know, we give ourselves agency.
And I feel like theologically that's an interesting choice for the Reconstructionist Siddur, and even the Reform service to move to g?d's goodness as opposed to the land's goodness.
Many, many,
many old, old Jewish texts were there. And it allows us to compare and contrast kind of ancient versions of texts that we have with the modern versions we have. And I don't think we've actually looked back in it during our Amidah series, so let's see what we have. Barech Aleinu Adonai Eloheinu Et Hashanah Ha’zoat l’tovah v’chol minei t’vuatah V’kareiv meheirah sh’nat keitz geulateinu v’ten tal u’matar al p’nei ha’adamah V’shova olam m’otzrot tuvecha v’tein bracha b’ma’aseh yadienu Baruch atah adonai, mevarech hashanim, so that means bless this year for us for goodness through its produce adonai our g?d and quickly bring the year near that ends our exile. So this just kind of drops a whole nother theme in it connecting the earth to the exile because the next blessing spoiler alert is about the gathering of the exiles. But we've just dropped a line right in here grant dew and rain on the surface of the ground and eternal abundance from the stores of your goodness and grant blessing through the work of our hands, which is also a piece that we're missing the ma'aseh yadeinu bit. Blessed are you, adonoi, who blesses our years. Any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I think that's super fascinating. And it also made me think about trying to pull this out of its agricultural context and think about you know, us who don't live necessarily always within an agricultural society anymore. What is our produce? Maybe our produce isn't only like the fruits but maybe it is like fruits of our hands also. So what does it look like to be asking for success as in the the way that we produce in our labor in this bracha not just necessarily from the fruits but also from the work of our hands
And, the what are we harvesting and over a period of time? What are we going to consciously trying to grow there? I love that idea.
And just to go back to the question and the point about when we change the the verse in the in the particular blessing right we said in part of the year we save attain Raha right give give blessing and a part of the resave v'tein tal u'matar livracha give dew and rain with blessing we say the bracha one from Passover until the beginning of December. December 3 is the date that I have here at my Siddur and then from December 4 up until Passover, we save v'ten tal u'matar livracha blessing for dew and rain. I correct me if I'm wrong. But I think this is one of the only phrases where there's a shift in the phrase that happens on a specific calendrical date as opposed to a holiday. Right. So it's on this day when they assumed that this was in that time period, when that we would start the dews would start to really fall in earnest, the rain would start to fall. And I think it's really interesting. We talked about this a little bit with my sheep. Everyone's been worried I gotcha. I'm earlier in the Amidah that we only asked for this in times when we know it's going to come. Right We don't say we don't say tal u'matar in the summertime, because we don't ask for things that are unrealistic. Or we asked for things or we name things that we think are going to be able to manifest that aren't outside the realm of possibility, which I think it's important that we we're intentional about placing these words here in a time when we knew that something could actually happen as opposed to pipe dreams.
I'm connecting this too to the beginning of our Amidah where it is inserted mashiv ha'ruach u'morid hagashem, which we talked about causes the wind to blow in the rain to fall. And how many people have the custom of adding b'vracha, in that which is in blessing. Now, this bracha has just put the bracha there. Why do we need to add the bracha, in that moment, and in this moment, because we know that the weather and the climate and the rain can be for blessing and not for blessing that it doesn't discriminate, I would say right, that it's an acknowledgement that there is rain that is for blessing and rain that is not for blessing. And it brings up another issue here, which is just as I think in the healing blessing, we wrestled with the connection that a certain kind of theology has between personal morality and sickness and illness, with the connection between collective morality and weather and rain and whether your crops will grow or not. And the important things to remember about that tension in that theology and the difficult things I'm wondering if that's come up for anyone.
You know, I think that that paragraph of which occurs after the Shema really is part of our our Shema, veya hafta, pair paragraphs recitations that people have particularly reformed Jews, it was left out of the reform Siddur this idea that and if I don't behave well then my crops will dry up kind of thing. But it is written that passage not as me personally, it's not first person singular, it's it's plural. If all y'all don't get your act together and take care of the land, then yes, eventually your crops are going to get smaller, your land is going to get drier, your nothing is going to work for you. If you don't remember your partnership, your relationship with this physical land on which you live, we're aware of the fact that you know, we're in Shmita year right now. And so even though we are not personally farmers that one of the three of us it's I think that all of us have been spending a lot of time thinking about what what should we tap mean now and in these days of climate change, etc, how important it is to let the land rest that idea again of the land being a living thing like Shabbat and us or you know, just going to sleep at night that the land needs that time or it will not be able to produce with us or for us if not given that same rest that we know that we need. So on all these levels, again, living things in partnership. I think that's really beautiful.
I love it. You're saying about living things in partnership. I think it brings me back to a song I learned when I was a kid, which is by his name is Dedi Groucher. Oded Groucher, he's an Israeli singer song connects two very disparate verses. One is this blessing from mevarech hashanim, u'varech shenateinu kashanim hatovot 1v'kol minei t'vuata l'tovah, with the verses from Genesis where g?d promises the land, to Abraham and to Jacob. And so in connecting those verses, you're gonna give this you're gonna receive this land, this land is going to be yours. And hopefully you'll receive blessings from it. But there's this partnership, there's this action that has to go along with it. ki et kol ha'aretz asher atah nireh lecha eten, it's going to be yours. But there's a responsibility that goes with it being yours that you have to do something that care of it, you have to steward it, you have to give it the rest that you take for yourself. There's a partnership inherent in that blessing that we have to realize and actualize.
This is making me think of a podcast I listened to recently, of course, I cannot remember which, but hopefully, I will find it we will put it in the show notes about the national parks in America and how the national parks recalled, right America's greatest idea. And we're so lucky to have all of this beautiful land that is so pristine. And the podcast was talking to Native American tribal leaders, about the fact that a lot of the National Parks happened because native people were pushed off of this land, and that there was a understanding of nature is one thing, and we keep it pristine, so that we can come and visit it when we want to. And we are something else. And we are separate from that. And what it would look like to actually give the national parks back to the tribes that used to live there. So that it could be living and breathing again, because we have so separated ourselves from the ecosystem, our economic system requires us almost to not think about where our food comes from, to not think about where the animals are, and how they get to the restaurant or to the grocery store, and not think about who's picking our food. And we have so kind of crowbar separated ourselves from that. So that even though we can think of it as a metaphor, like what have we planted? What are we harvesting, and this time, I think it's also good to think about actual agriculture and the way that things are brought to us and are grown for us. I feel very lucky here. This whole episode might just end up being Eliana does a pitch for moving to Durham because I do that a lot. But one of the things that keeps me here is, my friends Meredith and Molly who run one soil farm, which is a Jewish farm, that is only a half an hour from the city. And they have a JCSA Jewish community supported agriculture. And every Wednesday, I get the vegetables and the fruits that they have grown in the soil, with their own hands, according to Jewish values, what that means to them. And we've gone out to the land, over Sukkot, and even just on a Shabbat to celebrate, and our friends call ourselves farmer adjacent. What does it mean to be able to be farmer adjacent and have this connection and actively seek it out? Even if you're not in a place where you feel that's possible to give yourself more of this tangible connection, because we can think of it in kind of an abstract way, knowing that our three major holidays, Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot all have a major agricultural element that we are not necessarily in touch. Now. How can we think about that both metaphorically, and maybe get a little more into it physically.
The phrase in touch takes on a whole new meaning, when you think about being a farmer or even being farmer adjacent, or having that exposure even, you know, for part of the year, even a day actually being in touch with the land. In that way. I'm in the middle of reading a great book called Braiding Sweet Grass, and it's by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, a scientist and is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. And she really goes into in this book, the scientific ways in which certain flowers grow next to each other purple and golden flowers grow next to each other because it's more attractive to bees. And and, and one is purple and one is just talks about asters and golden rod, the purple and the golden together and the first thing I went to was the color wheel and how these are complementary colors and they are she has the most beautiful scientific explanations for things combined with the attachment to the land that comes from being indigenous native American. There's one passage that she talks about which I Would love to share now if that's okay with everybody else. She says we are showered every day with the gifts of the earth. gifts we have neither earned or paid for air to breathe, nurturing rain, black soil, berries and honey bees, the tree that became this page, a bag of rice and the exuberance of a field of Goldenrod and asters at full blue, though the earth provides us with all that we need. We have created a consumption driven economy that asks what more can we take from the earth? And almost never, what does the Earth ask of us in return, the practice of Earth asking something of me of many makes my heart swell, I celebrate the implicit recognition of the Earth's animacy that the living planet has the capacity to ask something of us and that we have the capacity to respond. We are not passive recipients of her gifts, but active persist participants in her well being. We are honored by the request, it lets us know that we belong. This, this idea of all of us really being deeply involved in this ecosystem. And this checks and balances and caretaking and stewardship is brought home again and again. I think this blessing right in the middle of all this just says hello. You know, you are a DOM from Adam. Ah, you know, a DOM doesn't mean Adam, the guy. The best translators translation that I've heard of a DOM is earthling because Adama is the earth. And we are all that were from that Mother Nature, Mother Earth, it's all more than metaphor.
That is so beautiful. And now I'm singing a song from my childhood in my head from Sesame Street, we are all earthlings to remember that we are all earthlings spinning around together on our planet of the sun. Oh my g?d, every time I think about it, it makes me cry. It's just the most beautiful thing in the world. And that's such a beautiful passage, Ellen, you know, we think maybe about the covenantal relationship between the Holy One and the Israelites. But now I'm thinking what does a covenantal relationship look like between us and the earth, even though we are of one kind of entering into this agreement. It's so, so beautiful. I love that you brought up Shmita Ellen and thinking about what it means for the land to rest. But this year, through people really putting out really great resources. On shmitah, I learned an element of the halacha, the law of shmitah That I'd never noticed before, which is that it really requires you to be local, you're really only supposed to eat things that beasts around, you could like go out into your fields and eat. Right, because I think the rabbi's who are putting this together, we're also thinking, Well, what if you're not a farmer, part of Shmita is letting people come and take from the land and harvest for themselves, which gets back to the what is the economic impact of what we do in the land, but then it's also and then what's leftover is for the beasts of the field and the animals to come. And what it looks like to localize and not just think about the impact that we have on the land, but the impact that we have on our neighbors and the economic system that's going on around us to concentrate more locally.
Yeah, I think that I think there's something really powerful in first, the localization, but second of all, you're saying about the covenant or relationship with g?d and applying that to the land, I think is so powerful, and sort of fits in with where this bracha is, in this section of the Amidah, like you were saying on right, we have to, we have to act with wisdom, we have to use our wisdom to know how we're going to interact with the world around us, we have to make sure that we're healing ourselves with body, our healing our bodies and healing the land around us and taking care of everything that we see. And then we have to use that to engage and apply to the land also, we're Judaism requires something of us, I think that the thing that's powerful about it, the only way to engage is to practice is to do the things is to try out and to do it within community and to do it in connection with the things that people the land around us. So I think it feels really natural to apply all of these things that Judaism is teaching us specifically to our connection to the earth as well.
I'll take it all the way back to Shema. And what does it mean to hear the ones echad-ity with everything else, you know that there's a connection there's a biological, scientific, spiritual everything connection going on here that all of these blessings I think, do such a great job of just waking us up to the smaller elements of that. That big oneness,
Ellen, I will never get tired of hearing you say echad-ity. It is one of my favorite words. In the entire universe. And with that, we'll be right back
We have a really special treat today I am here with the amazing Hassan Jessi Roemer. Hi, Jessi, I am so glad to have you. So glad to have you on the podcast today. I am excited to talk to you about a particular song, which is brought you here. But before we get there, I want to ask a very broad question that you can take in whatever direction you would like. Tell us about teffilah as it appears in your life.
Oh, right, as it appears in my life, it shows up in different ways. I think the initial draw, for me T'fillah was really in community starting with the community that I grew up in, I grew up in a chavurah of 26 families in the Washington DC area, which had its own style of, of davening, of praying and gathering and rejoicing. And we didn't really actually what we call ourselves "Reconformadox," we had it was it felt like a mesh of a lot of different styles of doing stuff in, actually, what I realized later that it was really heavily influenced by renewal, style. davening. And in fact, one of the founders was a central renewal Rabbi Rabbi Arthur Waskow
. And so I think my first experience with T'fillah was really like that kind of a communal coming together. And it always involved song in a way involves a lot of music. My mom was a cantor and a musician Cantor Sue Roemer, zikhronó liv'rakhá. And, and she would, you know, kind of pull together a room in a way that really, people were engaged in something that felt very, very communal, and also very personal. But bits feel I didn't, so that that was sort of the general context for for me for immersion in T'fillah growing up. And I think it became more personal once I started. seminary once they started attending cantorial school, with the aleph program and the renewal movement, or renewal. Yeah, I guess we are a movement. And I started to understand a little bit more deeply what it would be to have a personal practice of T'fillah. So and that is sort of deepened and changed and morphed over, you know, the past several years, since I started those studies and finish those studies and went into, you know, working as a congregational Hazzan. But probably one of the most kind of tactile ways it shows up for me is, is offering kind of ritualistic offering gratitude in an you know, in sort of a ritual way. So, lots of times, not always, but lots of times when I wake up in the morning, for example, I, I remember to kind of offer thanks, sometimes I remember to do it before my eyes open sometimes afterwards. And another way that it shows up pretty consistently is also offering thanks before I eat, which, again, this is more maybe blessing than T'fillah. But the line is, is thin. And for me it is it's a little moment of prayer, it's a little moment of reflection. And it's something that evolved kind of naturally for me, after being immersed more in the, you know, studying this, the practices and the traditions of our heritage. And then it shows up, you know, in in communal moments still, for me a lot. I mean, I'm involved often in leading it. And it's also, you know, I've evolved musically into a space where I realized that what I'm trying to do most of the time, like when I'm in concert, when I'm leading, you know, singing, not necessarily in a quote unquote, prayer service. I realized that what I'm aiming for is it is a kind of a T'fillah moment, you know, achieving a moment of spirituality, which for me is really about allowing everybody, and me, and everybody who's with me allowing ourselves to sink in, and allow that moment to be not just about the particular text or not just about the note that we're hitting, or that we're trying to hit, but really about, that those things are a vehicle to connecting with the source, and connecting with each other at all. And as a result, you know, silence and sound have a lot of relationship there. So sometimes T'fillah is creating a prayerful moment is about allowing a note to ring into silence and just letting the silence be the prayer, the silence after singing. And then And then, you know, also the singing is itself a prayer with that, quote, When you sing you pray twice. So those are the those that's sort of what comes most readily to mind when you ask, How does T'fillah show up? For me?
That's beautiful, so many great threads, the silence after singing is a prayer, I definitely feel that. And now because I know what we're about to talk about, I'm almost thinking of Shmita, this year of land rest, but I'm gonna let you define it for yourself. And for us as a silence after singing, kind of in the land way what we're talking about on this episode of the podcast is the blessing for Shanim for years, in the weekday, Amidah, which is really a blessing for abundance and produce, and the weather working together with the Earth, which one might also call Hashem, or g?d, to create the abundance that we are in relationship with. So I'm talking to you, because I'm Jessie, because as we heard a little clip of right before, your song, Sej Anos, six years, has really become a piece of liturgy for Shmita, you don't really think of the Shmita year as having liturgy as having particular set prayers, which so many of our other ritual times in Jewish life do so I want to ask you, how did Sej Anos come to be? What was your inspiration for writing it at all for the way that you wrote it and brought it into the world?
Well, so this song came to be in the lead up to the actually believe it or not, the previous Shmita year, so seven years ago, or a little more than seven years ago. And as we were approaching that year, I started looking at, you know, the, the three times that Shmita is mentioned in the Torah, or the concept, I should say, of shmitah, as mentioned in the Torah, because one thing I was going on, as we as we know, when you when you're studying to our text, when things get repeated, it's it's an indication that they should be paid particular attention to, right, so things that get repeated are important. And what I particularly liked about studying these three different passages that appear at different points in the Torah, but but sort of all indicate the same thing. And in fact, the two of them have very, very similar language, two of them are very specifically about allowing the land to rest and replenish itself. And while they're all three of them are about that, but really, two of them mentioned the land. And then And then the third one really focuses on the people. And I loved how this these the three huge times this gets mentioned into a rabbit, the the release of the land is intertwined with the release of the people that you can't, that you really can't have one without the other. And that part of the process of allowing the land to rest and breathe and replenish is this process of redistribution of wealth among a community. So it got me started thinking about you know, Shmita is of course release, but it's also about redistribution, redistribution of energy, and resources are kind of re equalizing in a sense. There was sort of a confluence of things that made this composition happen one of them was that I was listening to a lot of at that moment, a lot of Iraqi and a lot of Turkish music, and, and also a lot of views The songs and lifting up I was privileged to have grown up near in the same in the same area as Flory Jagoda z"l, and had had the privilege and opportunity of learning from her at various points during my growing up years. And really Ladino was, you know, something that both she and my mom kind of made a regular a part of a big part of my, my Jewish cultural education, at least music that you know, that was sung and Ladino was a big part of that.
Can you share a quick word about what Ladino is for our listeners?
Oh, sure. Absolutely. So, right. So Ladino is a combination of Spanish and Hebrew. It's basically the the, you know, the Yiddish of the Spanish speaking Jews. So Yiddish is, you know, the combination of Eastern European languages in a program primarily German and Hebrew, but also Polish and Russian. And depending on where you were Ladino is similarly developed. Similarly, the same way for Jews that were living in Spanish speaking countries. And so I had long kind of love the sound of it and and then started thinking, Oh, I wonder I'm sure there's a there's like I basically looked up but a Ladino translation of the Torah, and was like, thinking about, you know, if I'm going to write some take some verses from Torah, why don't I, you know, think about taking it from this Ladino translation, which I did. To tell you the truth, I don't remember exactly how the melody came about. Other than that, I at that time, I know, I was listening to love Turkish, like I said, Turkish Iraqi music and Ladino songs. And what's funny about it is that I kind of, I just started playing with the verses in the Latino verses, and then this tune came out. And then after I finished it, and like, kind of did very kind of quick recording of it, and notated it and sent it to my band. And then somebody said, Oh, wait, this is in seven, eight, the time, the time of like the, you know, the musical time of it isn't seven, eight, which means that you repeat counts of seven, in order to produce the rhythm. And of course, what is it about, it's about repeating counts of seven of years, seven years, every seven years, you have a Shmita year. And I have to say, it was not a conscious intention. I set out to write it. It took somebody else noticing that for me to be like, Oh,
sometimes that happens, the best Midrash the best commentary is what other people find that our music that's so beautiful. Why pick these particular verses from Leviticus as opposed to the other two places where it appears and Torah?
Yeah, good question. So there were a couple of reasons. One of them is that I really like the whole, like, the whole everything that surrounds these verses in Leviticus and like, I like reading this whole section, and it but I think also just, I was looking for the most succinct articulation of the idea that you plant your your fields, and, you know, prune your grapes for for six years, and then the seventh year is a rest. And so it was it was also that it was also that this this particular section that Torah had it laid out sort of the most cleanly in the most succinctly and that kind of, in some ways lent itself to poetically, to music.
Very beautiful. And listeners, we're going to put a link to the text in the show notes so that you can see it, both in Ladino. And in the Hebrew and in the English to get a taste of that for yourself. I think it's so beautiful that the song came to you in a previous Shmita cycle. Just as a musician, myself, I know, sometimes I can be in a rush to put things out but then some things also benefit from rest, from work and from rest and from work and from Red. What I love about the lines from Leviticus, and even titling it says on your six years is that there's also some importance put on the six years meaning it's not a negative thing to work. It's not a negative thing to produce in the world, but it needs to be balanced with rest. There's a reason that comes once in seven cycles and not six rest and one work right, right. I'm wondering why Shmita In this year of land rest, well, first of all, how you would define shmitah? And how it has shown up for you in your life? Did you ever see it as a spiritual practice? And has it changed since this piece of music kind of came channeling through you?
Such a great question. And I think also it connects to the thing, the qualifier that I'm about to say, which is that I did write and record this piece seven years ago, and put it out before, before the last the previous shmitah as a recording on an album, I was working on my first album with my band, Ezuz. And so in that sense, the song didn't, didn't wait those seven years to come out until now. But what did happen was this cycle as it came around, again, I started thinking about, okay, how do I, what's the next phase of this cycle for this song? Now that we've, you know, because we do come around this every seven years. And that's when I started thinking about making a video for it. So the song wasn't new this cycle, but the video I produced was, and I'll say that, that in and of itself is, to me, it feels like a little bit of its own Shmita practice, taking a text and working with it every seven years to produce, sort of build, build on what I've already worked with, and work with it to produce something else. And I think it has, I think, I think it's made me think a lot about, you know, even just, you know, having to put the work into the song, first of all, how it was going to be rearranged house when we put out and then this this cycle, it propelled me to think even more deeply and engage even more deeply with what watch me to actually is because there are ways as we as we, you know, as an artist, you, you don't actually have to think about something until you have to think about how to express it. So a lot of what came out of this cycle of putting together that video has deepened my sense of Shmita and shmitah Practice and I and that had to do with, you know, how do you define? How do you define rest in a perpetual cycle of activity? Because our community at large does not observe shmitah. And even if we were to there are all kinds of questions about how can you do that sustainably. So how do you so how do you find the rest in that? How do you mark the seventh year nonetheless, as a way of finding rest, and I think part of what we found in making this video and this is an idea that the videographer came up with because we were talking about how do you how do you show rest, visually, and the videographer, my videographer Michael Mina said, what if we filmed people just exhaling, you know, just breathing in deeply and exhaling. And that became a very beautiful, sort of a shortcut way to show you know, what we were trying to get at, which is this. It's both rest and release, right? You're releasing when you exhale. And that really focus turned my attention more clearly to how do I find places to exhale? How and where, in ways in times, you know, in a sort of this on perpetual cycle of activity where I wouldn't normally be thinking about it. Another big element that I didn't mention in the making of this video was that it was shot in an urban botanical garden. And part of what was really important to us was to just to show both work, people working in the garden and also the, you know, the kind of wildness of it what happens when you let things grow wild, and just show the proximity of that garden to the city. Philadelphia is the city I'm in and this is where this garden is Bartrams garden. Several of the shots show like a wild meadow where you can see this city in the background and to me also that kind of encapsulated, you know how bringing the wild into urban existence is sort of the same as like bringing Shmita or mini Shabbat into your, your day to day existence
That was so beautiful. I think the other thing that was really sort of working on this video and working again with the music and the texts, really brought to the fore for me was sort of looking at the relationship between art and Shmita. And I mean art in the broadest sense like in that creating music is also creating art. But we were also showing this specifically with the with with visual art and I wanted to throw it to bring visual art into this video. And I asked my friend, Selena Alka, who is an incredible visual artist, you know, I called this meeting basically, with between Selena and Michael, the videographer and me and I said, I don't know how to do this. But I would love to create a video that incorporates music and visual art, and, and expresses, shmitah expresses rest and sabbatical and release. And the and I think what was interesting to me about the intersection between art and and, and Shmita is, well, there are several things, but one of them is what they have in common, which is they both, when they're done, well compel you to be in The Now. And to appreciate the moment and the beauty of a moment, they both have that same function, in a sense, they take you they both lift you outside of your day to day, and that they're in a sense in tension with each other, because to create art is if so is work. So how do you think about, you know, does Shmita taking years Shmita also mean, not making art because that would be a release of work. So we, and I'm still I'm still interested in that interplay, because I feel like part actually is work, and also is a vehicle a channel for release. And so how do you harness the potential of art, making art being immersed in art appreciating art, to help fill us facilitate a sense of release,
I love that. And I love bringing the word release in with Shmita as well. In the years where we're not plowing our fields, stuff is still growing, right? The earth is just being kind of left to its own devices, everything becomes a lot more local and a lot more earth driven, as opposed to the other years, which are people driven in a way in that kind of covenantal relationship, which we talked about with Josh and Ellen, earlier in the episode about what does it look like to have a covenantal relationship between human beings and the land human beings in the earth as an entity,
I think what you know, the couple more things about just like connections between art and shmitah come to mind. And one of them is that I want to mention is that part of the kind of the inspiration for getting this video finished, was the the Hassan shmitah art competition, which, you know, I really think of it shmitah Art motivator is really what it was that, you know, this organization organization called Hazon, which is about Jewish sustainability, and relationships in the land sponsored this opportunity for artists to create art art about about Shmita and submit it. And what I thought was fabulous about that was that it they basically created this, this whole platform, that was a way of engaging further with this idea, which is still so foreign to most of us, you know, in our, in our lives in 2022. And in the act of sort of engaging with all the art that was produced as a result of this initiative, I think that in and of itself was sort of offered moments of Shmita for people to be able to like I was saying before, because art does that same thing, it lifts you out of your work a day routine, and it forces you to kind of like engage with the now and engage with beauty, like revel, just be for a minute. Just be and revel in what's in what's in front of you, which is exactly what Shmita has asks of us. So I will say that. And then I will say that, of course. It's there's something about the concept of shmitah that really kind of inspired a lot of other kind of artistic ideas that I haven't even gotten on working gotten to working on yet. So I feel like it's motivation over the next six, six years now to think about how do I think those bring those things to the fore.
That's beautiful, and I hope you do rest and release. It's often in those moments where it's easier For a song or a dance or something else to be channeled is when I am letting myself just be and revel in what is around me. I love that language. And even watching the video which of course will link to in the show notes, watching someone take a deep breath, inhale and exhale has an effect on me as the watcher. And now I'm thinking about a conscious inhale and exhale. That's kind of like a Shabbat in miniature. And Shabbat is just like a Shmita in miniature. And Shmita is just like, the world that we want in miniature. And art is kind of a channel through all of these different facets.
Exactly. It's all of it. Each of those things is like a little taste of Olam Habbah Or Olam, shira Ahavah. Once, maybe Gan Eden, how do you bring those little moments of Gan Eden and Olam Habbah into Olam Hazeh was the one that we're in, in the moment?
Well, certainly your music and your art, and you're bringing together of people in song and spirit has done that for me. And I hope for our listeners. And I want to thank you so so much for taking the time the rest in the release to speak with me today.
Oh, it was such such a pleasure. I'm really, really delightful.
We're going to link to Jesse's band camp and to the search on your video in the show notes. And also, make sure to stay to the end of the episode where we will be playing this beautiful song in its entirety, I hope you get to take a moment to rest and revel in that space. And with that, we'll be right back.
Welcome back, everybody. We're going to close up our time today as we usually do with a little bit of practice. In all this conversation about nature and our connection to the earth, how space and time are connected in the cycle of the year as they are in the cycle of our lives. So we're just going to get into a comfortable position and, you know, sit with some connection to either the floor or maybe you're outside taking a walk, just feel the bottoms of your feet as as they touch the ground or touch the floor of your room where you're sitting. And we take a quotation from the book of Deuteronomy that says Ki haAdam Hu Etz Hasadeh said that an earthling an Adom, is like a tree of the field. And in our own way, we are that, and we're going to take a moment to center in that spot of feeling the ground or the floor, beneath your feet, in its rooted way. How are we connected to this earth?And how might we feel in any moment, the energy of that Earth coming up through us through the ground, from which we come to which we return. And through which we are nourished our entire time here. We gain our nourishment, and we actually do have a trunk. That's even what we call it, through which our bodily fluids flow through which the air that we take in just like the tree does. We take it in through our pores, we soak in its beauty through our senses, and it turns into oxygen. It turns into blood in our veins that flows through and nourishes us to the tips of our fingers, the tips of our toes, and all of our internal organs. And we pause for a moment just to feel that flow from the sky. From the sun from the earth from the rains and the dew in its season and over The years the patience that it takes to grow to be tall to be strong in one score strong enough to bring forth fruit sharing and for the nourishment of others a we in our own time, learn to share our gifts as freely as those of the trees and maybe remember to live in partnership with nature it's time to be a blessing to our natural elements as they continue to be a blessing to us
Wow, Ellen, thank you so much for guiding us through that. I feel a little more expansive now. A little more in tree time I guess that's what we're calling this episode. I love it so much. Thank you once again, Ellen and Josh for being with us. Thank you, Christy Dodge for editing Thank you Melissa for shownotes thank you so much and we'll see you next week.