Embracing Life through the Tree of Life

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5784 (Sept 2023), Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Shana tova. It’s so sweet to be here, together, in a new space, entering into the new year in community. As we embark on this period of time - Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur - I want to share a few framing thoughts for this High Holiday season. I’ll walk you through my thought process. Kavana is in its 18th year. The Hebrew word chai is the numeric equivalent of life (chet = 8 and yod = 10). So this is a year for embracing and re-embracing life. 

Life comes up in so many ways in the liturgy. The Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, we read Parashat Nitzavim, in which God says: “I am placing before you life and death, blessing and curse. U’vacharta ba’chayim - choose life, in order that you and your descendants may live.” On the High Holidays, of course, we also have the image of the sefer chayim, the Book of Life. We say “l’chayim tovim u’l’shalom” - asking to be inscribed for a life of goodness and peace.

What does it mean to choose life, to embrace life? All roads lead to the creation story, where human life begins. It is the paradigm for our human experience - our creation myth (not in the sense of text that isn’t true, which is what I thought a myth was when I was a child, but in the sense of a text that perhaps didn’t happen in historical time but has deep truths to teach us about who we are and how the world works). This year, the Kavana staff decided to play with this text across almost all of our Rosh Hashanah services and programs. 

Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning of Genesis 2:

4. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 

5. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a human to till the ground. 

6. And a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 

7. And the Lord God formed the human of the dust of the ground – “Vayipach b’apav nishmat chayim, vayehi ha-adam l’nefesh chayah.” – and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living being. 

8. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there God put the human whom he had formed. 

9. And out of the ground made the Lord God every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; with the etz ha-chayim, the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is going to be the one that gets the first human beings in trouble. (Messing up, feeling guilt and shame, and suffering consequences for our actions are all themes worth revisiting as we get to Yom Kippur.) For today, though, on Rosh Hashanah, where we celebrate the creation and birthday of the world, I’ve been musing on the relationship between the human being and the other tree, the Tree of Life. 

In the Torah story itself, do you know what happens to the Tree of Life? This tree is mentioned just two more times at the beginning of Bereishit. Once humans eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, their eyes are opened and God worries about what will happen if they also eat from the etz hachayim… vachai l’olam, and live forever. The Tree of Life, it seems, is the secret to mortality and immortality. Perhaps that’s why, at the end of chapter 3, the human beings, Adam and Chava (Adam from Adamah - the earth-being - and Chava, the em kol chai, mother of all life), are exiled from the Garden, and k’ruvim - fiery angels - and a fiery ever-turning sword are set up “lishmor et derech etz ha-chayim” - to guard the way to the Tree of Life. The first humans are exiled and cannot return to the garden. They are no longer immortal; they no longer live in a place of blissful protection. There is nothing they want more than to return to the Tree of Life, but that is precisely what they cannot do. 

You won’t be surprised to hear that the Tree of Life is a jumping off point for lots of midrash, rabbinic interpretation. For example:

Bereshit Rabbah 15:6: And Adonai Elohim made every pleasant tree sprout from the ground: [With regard to the Tree of Life,] It was taught that this was a tree that spread over all living things. R Yehuda bar Eliai said: The tree of life extended over a journey of 500 years and all the waters of Creation divided into streams beneath it. Rabbi Yudan said in the name of Rabbi Yehudah bar Eliai: It is not only the boughs that extend 500 years, but also its trunk that extends 500 years.

In the midrash, the tree has dimensions of mythical proportions: it is 500 years tall and 500 years wide, as big as the world itself!

Several medieval commentators – notably David Kimchi and Rabbenu Bachya – notice and comment on the placement of the tree “b’toch ha-gan”. Reasoning that only one tree could truly have been located in the center of the garden, they decide that the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are, in fact, one in the same. Two trees emerging from a single trunk – an interesting image.

The mystics especially love the Tree of Life. If you’ve ever studied kabbalah - Jewish mystical tradition - even a little bit, you’ve doubtless seen an image of a map of the sefirot, the 10 different emanations of God. That map is also nicknamed – you guessed it – the Tree of Life.

So, returning to our story, we human beings come – at least on a mythic level – from the Garden of Eden. Once upon a time it was our home, and the Tree of Life was at the center. Our human yearning is and has always been to return to the tree. The tree has dimensions so huge that it encompasses all of life – we want to connect to the earth, to Oneness, to life itself. On some level, the tree represents God, and the deep-seeded desire in us all to connect not only to Creation but also to the Creator. Lastly, returning to the garden – connecting to the tree – means re-connecting to ourselves way back when, when we were in our most pristine human state, before anything got too complicated, before mistakes had been made. Our journey this time of year is a journey of return.

How frustrating, then, that in chapter 3, Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden and told that they can’t live in proximity to the Tree of Life any longer. 

The world we find ourselves living in today is as messy as could be. Each of us is a flawed and complicated human being. The High Holidays strips away any pretense about that… we all have individual work to do, and there are no hierarchies, no one is better than anyone else in that regard. Each of us comes from or is part of a complicated family tree. The stories we read over this holiday – about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac – certainly model that complexity. We live in an imperfect society, one where injustices large and small are part of the fabric of our society, so much so that sometimes it’s hard to see what’s right in front of our faces. We live at a moment when politicians are trying to claim lies as truth and truth as lies, when there are many trying to ensure that democracy crumbles. Watching these dynamics play out in the US (as we head into an election year) and in Israel is painful and hard. We also live on a planet where we’ve forgotten that it was once our responsibility as human beings to till and to tend the garden! We human beings have used resources of this planet with abandon, with disregard for the impact we are having, and the consequences are starting to be felt in earnest with natural disasters and smoke-filled skies, with many of the hottest days ever on record this summer. 

Accepting mortality and imperfection – of ourselves – and accepting that we live in an imperfect world – is part of the work of the season. This is what it means to choose life. 

Torah can come from anywhere, and I found this theme, of all places, in the Barbie movie. The film begins with Barbie living in a pink paradise of sorts, a version of a Garden of Eden… boring but perfect on some level and predictable. When a problem arises, she travels from Barbie world to the real world and then back again, trying to fix it. At the end of the film, the Torah of Barbie is that, even knowing the messiness of it all – that life is complicated and people will be mean and she will grow old and die, she chooses to live in the real world.

That’s us this time of year. We understand, acknowledge and accept the imperfections of ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our world. We get that we have been exiled from the garden and no longer can access the Tree of Life, and that there’s a flaming sword blocking the path back to the garden and since we’re stuck out here, all we can do is make the most of it. Can we, too, choose and reaffirm and embrace life in this real and broken world?

There is one more Jewish tradition about the Tree of Life that we haven’t talked about yet, and perhaps this is the very tool we need. The Tanakh brings up the Tree of Life again – and you know this one, a quote from Proverbs (3:18):

(יח) עֵץ־חַיִּ֣ים הִ֭יא לַמַּחֲזִיקִ֣ים בָּ֑הּ וְֽתֹמְכֶ֥יהָ מְאֻשָּֽׁר׃ (פ)

(18) It is a tree of life to those who grasp her, And whoever holds on to it is happy.

You may recognize this verse as the one we sing liturgically every time we put the sefer Torah back in the ark at the end of every Torah service. In this Proverb, what is the Tree of Life? Torah! This Proverb functions as a promise that, in fact, there is something eternal that we can hold onto… something that is forever with us, right here, right now, in this world.

This is the grand paradox that animates these High Holy Days. We want to better ourselves and try to be the most perfect beings we can. We want to return – return to ourselves, return to the Creator, return to what it means to be human, return to the Garden of Eden. We cannot return; on some level we know that the entrance to the garden is forever blocked by a flaming, ever-turning sword and by fiery angels. And yet, the Tree of Life is also right here with us and all around us. It is life itself, it is God, it is Torah, it is the tools we need, it is everything we look to for guidance and sustenance and we can plug into the source anytime we need to, on a regular basis. The paradox extends to the work of the season: we are destined to be imperfect, yet we must strive towards perfection. We must try to return, and also we’ll never be able to return. 

We seek God’s presence, but we can’t actually stay in it. We are destined to live in the flawed, imperfect world that we do, and we move in and out, getting closer and getting further away. We search for where we’ve been, and as soon as we grasp it, we lose it again. We move in and out of seeking and finding and losing and yearning. There’s a constant movement between ourselves and the tree – which looks like an infinity loop.  I heard Joey Weisenberg teach last year about what happens musically in a niggun, and it’s very similar but on a vertical axis. Every niggun begins grounded, with a part A that’s a low part, usually repeated, and then we climb and the melody explodes into a higher part B – as though we’re trying to reach the Divine. But we can’t stay there… what goes up must come back down. We move up and down Jacob’s ladder, in and out of contact with the Divine, in and out of being able to find ourselves.

This High Holiday season, I hope this framing and imagery is a helpful one to you. We are each Adam and Chava, the earthling and the mother of life. The spiritual work of these holidays is to ground ourselves again and again in what it means to be human on the most fundamental of levels. We try to remember what it was to live in the Garden of Eden and hold it up for ourselves as a model, even as we know that we can never fully return to there.

This is why we say, over and over again in this season, the line from Psalm 27:

Achat Sha’alti me’eit adonai otah avakesh: Just one thing do I ask of God, for it is the one important thing that I seek: Shivti b’veit adonai kol y’mei chayai – and that is to dwell in God’s house (or to be settled in life), all the days of my life.

This is my prayer for us, as we embark on these Days of Awe together: that each of us individually, and all of us communally, are able to engage in seeking the Tree of Life. Despite the impossibility of the task, may we grow closer in this season to who we were in the beginning and to who we are in our core and to who we are meant to be. May we hold fast to Torah – also our Tree of Life – and find that we already have access to the accumulated wisdom of our tradition that will help us make our way in this mess of a world. May we choose life in this season, and find a way to make our lives count. Shana tova.