Shabbat Shalom. Shanah Tovah.

We have a garden in our backyard. I really enjoy spending time in the garden. It’s not much, just a little plot that gives us some fresh veggies from time to time and takes a little bit off the grocery bill. More than anything, though, the garden is for me a teacher.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the outdoors. For a handful of summers, I led wilderness trips for teenagers, and found the natural world and our travel through it to be a great classroom. The lessons that we receive from climbing a mountain, though, are often different than those I get from my time in the garden.. If I could characterize it in a word, I would say that working in the garden teaches me about relationship. It is not that we have no relationship to the Earth when we are merely walking it. Far from it. However, time spent with my hands in the soil drives home the notion of partnership in an explicit and graphic manner. I find that once a patch of sprouts appears above the surface, I feel responsible for its welfare. To garden, as I see it, is to assume the risk of tending for life. To know when to give and when to receive. To walk the subtle lines of relationship.

The Israelite story is one of agriculture, not hunting and gathering. Our tradition seems to place the highest value on food that requires the greatest partnership between human and Divine. The two centerpieces of any Jewish festive meal are bread and wine, both of which involve time and energy consuming steps on the way to being. Intuitively, we might have thought that the piece of fruit plucked straight from the wild, undisturbed by human action, would command the greatest ceremony. God’s work unadulterated. The pure flow of the Divine into this world. However, it is actually those human-labor-intensive foods that take center stage. Hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Who brings forth bread from the Earth. Borei p’ri ha’gafen. Creator of the fruit of the vine. To me, this speaks of the value we as a people place on relationship. Divine blessing is most precious, we learn, when we play a part in its formation.

I remember sitting in a Shakespeare lecture here in Ann Arbor a number of years back when Professor Ralph Williams suggested that we do not “fall in love.” We “fall into desire,” he offered. “We climb into love.” I agree with him. He was talking about relationship. We may feel an initial spark with another, but that spark must be nurtured and helped to develop in order for it to grow into something I would call love.

As we “climb into love” with another person, likewise I believe we must work to develop our relationship with the Divine. A rabbi of mine spoke several years ago on Erev Rosh Hashanah about “locating the gratitude.” It’s a beautiful image. But gratitude, I am led to believe, is much more dynamic than that. This year I want to say: cultivate the gratitude. Let us pay close attention to our blessings and do what we need in order to help them manifest in our lives as genuine gratitude, genuine love and appreciation for the Source, the Creator, the Friend from whom all blessing emerges and to whom all blessing returns.

We each arrive here this evening with our own set of inspirations and motivations. I imagine that many among us come together in the name of opening our hearts, in prayer, in song, in silence. Some in all, others in none of the above. Perhaps some come to simply being present here, in community. However it takes shape, our being here can be seen as a declaration of relationship. To the Divine. To one another. With our own selves. To each of these, our presence can be an act of cultivating gratitude, of offering, if we so will it.

Tomorrow, we will read the stories of two offerings, that of Abraham and that of Hannah. In Abraham’s story, the Binding of Isaac or the Akeida in Hebrew, a father nearly sacrifices his son in the name of God. For much of the Jewish world, and in fact much of the Western world, this event serves as the prominent emblem of human faith in the Divine. Abraham, the true servant of God, is willing to offer his own son on the altar.

Hannah’s story, as well, tells of a parent’s willingness to offer her son to God.

There is an obvious connection between these two pieces. Each tells of a long-awaited parent’s joy, then subsequent act of offering the child back to God. Looking closely at these two offerings, though, we see that they are not one and the same. Abraham’s offering, though stopped before completion, is absolute. He acts to remove Isaac from this world, so that he may be—as he truly is, presumably—entirely God’s. Hannah, on the other hand, offers her son to God as a priest, a servant, so that he may dedicate his days to revering God from this world. Hannah gives up her son in life, while Abraham offers his in death.

The Akeida is for me personally, and I imagine for many of you, one of the most troublesome passages in the entire Bible. I was expressing this sentiment to an acquaintance of mine a few years back. “Oh,” he said, “let me solve the Akeida for you,” and proceeded to give me his understanding of the text. Needless to say, he told me nothing that made the story any less painful. Even more than the content of his explanation, though, I was left turned off by his very perspective that he could “solve” such a complex and terrifying scene. If I were to have the conversation again, I would stop him after the first sentence and say, “No. Please do not solve the Akeida for me.” The Akeida, like any piece of Torah, like any good story, is not meant to be solved. It is meant to be heard and to be seen, to be shouted at and wrestled with. It is meant to make us push and dig and observe what it is that we inherit. As Jews, we are not called upon to solve much at all, least of all something as mysterious as the Akeida. Rather, I believe, our task here, whether in anger or in joy or both, is to be in relationship with what we hear.

Back to the garden. Cultivation, as anyone who has ever tended even a single houseplant knows, can be delicate work. Plants need water, but not too much; sun, but not too much. (Need to get to know…) Being in the garden offers me the lesson that sometimes it is not merely the amount of love and care that makes the difference. To be in relationship with another life is to navigate a dance of giving and receiving. Plants, like people, need space to grow and give back in their own right. To solve the Akeida, it seems to me, is to deny it the right to develop and bear fruit in its proper time.

I offer these images as a means by which to connect to Torah. Perhaps, within these Biblical pieces, the same suggestion being made as a model of connecting with God. By that, I mean that I hear a message for us tomorrow—as we receive these two stories one after the other—of warning against absolute solutions, against stopping the flow of relationship.

Abraham is full of love and appreciation for the blessing that God has just bestowed upon him. In my mind, he is so full of love, of absolute offering, that he fails to give God a chance to love him back. But look at the story, right? God tells him to do this. But as I will share a bit more of tomorrow, we are not the first generation to have been bothered by this story.

There are a number of midrashim, rabbinic legends, which turn the surface meaning of the story on its head. I too am moved to attempt to uncover what might be hiding between the lines. As it stands, I can only receive the story as holy, but broken. It tells of deep longing for God. But I am left wondering: is there any room for a relationship, an exchange between God and Abraham, when Abraham has given himself away—through Isaac—so completely?

Does God really need this kind of love? Does God want this kind of zealousness?

What a blessing for us that we are reading these two stories side by side

Let us imagine for a moment that Hannah’s story comes as a response to Abraham’s.

The sheer power of Abraham’s gratitude and his yearning to express it to God is moving. But looking at Hannah’s story on its heels strikes me as taming what is perhaps too relentless, too raw a love.

Hannah’s relationship with God, in my eyes, displays a certain subtle understanding of what it means to express love for another. With Hannah, there is room for a response. There is room for growth. There is room for the life-affirming power of relationship.

Abraham relates to God, on the other hand, so relentlessly that this one relationship comes at the expense of his others. He and Isaac do not speak any more in the Torah. The next interaction that Isaac has with his father is when he and Ishmael bury Abraham. And Sarah? She dies in the very next scene.

These 10 days of repentance, of returning, the tradition seems to say by way of these Biblical selections, are rooted in offering—in realizing that we cannot, and do not, live but for the grace of God. The commentary of Hannah, if you will, perhaps offers us instruction for tuning our offering.

Hannah says: “I will give him to God all the days of his life.” His life.

We will read on Yom Kippur, from the book of Deuteronomy: “Both life and death I place before you now; both blessing and a curse. Choose life, that you may live, you and the seed of life within you.” Choose life, we are told. This path of t’shuvah, of returning and drawing close to our truth and our light, is not one of self-sacrifice or denial, of giving away everything we have and everything we are to God. It is more complex than that, more delicate. It involves the patient work of learning to know oneself, of learning to know Another. It involves taking the risk to relate.

Over the course of these High Holy Days, I invite us to be in relationship: with the stories we chant, with the prayers we recite, with all the images that are conjured up to take us on this journey.

With ourselves. With each other.

And if we so choose, with the Source that Fills and Surrounds it All.

Whether in joy, sorrow, anger or simple contentment, I invite us to give and to receive. I invite us to “choose life.”

Shanah Tovah.