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Lead Us Upright To Our Land
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Lead Us Upright to Our Land (excerpt)
By Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman


Remember how waving the lulav and etrog is a Jewish rain dance?  In Judaism, we are asked to perform rituals with kavannah, a clear and focused mindset. How do I put my kavannah into praying for the right rains while engaging in a practice that signals business as usual in overseas travel and agriculture, both of which are directly contributing to the wrong rains, at the wrong times, in Israel and here at home? 

I made a local lulav to ritualize my longing to return from exile, to this land where I live.

During the morning blessing before the Shema, Jews pray, “Gather us in from the four corners of the Earth, and lead us upright to our land” – v’tolicheinu komimiyut l’artzeinu. The plain meaning of these words is a prayer for Jews to return to the Land of Israel. 

Yet the blessing does not say “and lead us upright to the Land of Israel.” It says “lead us upright to our land.”

I am deeply connected in particular ways with the Land of Israel. It is a central part of Jewish tribal history – our legends, history, and the location of a particular place-based connection to God. But we are called by God now, at the beginning of the age of climate change and ecological collapse, to passionately and proactively root ourselves in the actual land upon which we live, day after day. For me that is the land now known as North America, and specifically the land of the Massachusett and Nipmunc people, on whose soil I breathed my first breath and took my first steps.

I contend that our lives – spiritually, emotionally, and for some physically – depend on being brought home to this land, the land on which we each live. Yet for work, school, and basic home needs, I and most of the people I know spend most of our lives indoors. Most of us don’t know much about the wild plants outside our homes. We don’t know the farmers who feed us, the source of our running water, or where it travels to and what happens after. We don’t know the topography around our homes, the nearby hills and valleys (except perhaps to notice slopes as we drive or bike). Unless we live very close to the shore, we don’t know how high we are above sea level, or the boundaries of our watershed.

And we don’t know our land’s history. We don’t know what our streets looked like a hundred years ago, and what great debates or lazy decisions made them that way. We don’t remember the farmers’ fields lined with stonewalls, back when European-settled New England was 80% deforested. And further back we also don’t know. Our minds cannot imagine what this place was like for Massachusett and Nipmunc people, how they thinned the great Eastern forest understory. How the old growth forest blanketed the Appalachian mountains up and down our coast until Europeans came. My mind hurts from trying to imagine it – like someone who has never seen conceiving of sight. 

"Gather us in from the four corners of the Earth, and lead us upright to our land – v’tolicheinu komimiyut l’artzeinu."

I have a practice when I say this line of stomping my feet on the ground, reminding myself that I am asking God to bring me home here, now, to this soil underneath the foundation of this building, to the proud foliage of New England, to our wild edibles and medicinals, to the changing seasons, changing ever more as the earth warms. To be led upright to our land means to rise before her as we rise before an elder or a beloved teacher. It means to learn about her – her wildlife, plants, topography, water, stones, growing seasons. It means to see the neighborhoods built around us as one snapshot on a geologic journey, designed by blips of human choice, on a planet who will most definitely have the final word. 

The homecoming I long for is not informational. It is not platonic, or casual. It is a passionate lunge toward aliveness, toward the specific aliveness that could be mine in this particular place. It is an animal longing to be animal again. “I thought the earth remembered me,” Mary Oliver writes in her poem Sleeping In the Forest, which I kept pinned next to my bed for about a decade. “She took me back so tenderly…by morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.” 

To make my lulav, I chose an American Elm in place of myrtle – the eyes of the lulav. The leaves are eye shaped, though much larger than the myrtle. They are toothed, so it looks like they have eyelashes! But above all, the elm in my lulav symbolized watchfulness, the need to notice what is around us, to notice the changes that are happening. 

To read Rabbi Friedman's full article, visit http://www.rabbishoshana.com/belovedontheearth/2019/11/27/lead-us-upright-to-our-land
Booklet Section: Sukkot & Simchat Torah
Source: Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman: http://www.rabbishoshana.com/

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