Those Who Sow (Yom Kippur 5786)

Those Who Sow
Rabbi Ari Lorge, Yom Kippur 5786

Feeling happy? There’s a psalm for that.
Feeling angry? There’s a psalm for that.
Is it Wednesday? There’s a psalm for that.
Going to a wedding? There’s a psalm for that.
Do you need Heavenly Guidance? And who doesn’t? There’s a psalm for that.

There are 150 psalms in the Bible. This ancient collection of poems expresses the full range of the human experience: joy, gratitude, rage, grief, celebration…

Because of that, Jews make use of Psalms more than any other Biblical text. For example, they are at the heart of most prayers in the prayerbook. And they are where we first look when we want to find an echo of our present-day experience in our people’s sacred scripture.

So, what is the psalm for this moment as we begin the year 5786?

In order to identify the right psalm, we have to look at where we are. One of the privileges of being a member of this clergy team is that we get to speak with so many of you. And we hear common themes coming back to us.

We hear that this feels like the end of a period of stability. We are at the precipice of a change - one that isn’t welcome. Familiar structures are failing and falling. It is scary and threatening. And we have psalms for that.

We are in, what the famed Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann called, a season of disorientation. A time when we experience the dismantling of the old known world. When we are forced to relinquish a safe, reliable confidence in our surroundings. Our ancestors wrote evocative biblical poetry in similar moments that entered the Book of Psalms.¹

Brueggemann says that living in moments of disorientation engenders a rush of negativities: rage, resentment, isolation, despair, and hostility.² That checks out for the heightened emotions sweeping through our society. He continues that the period of disorientation is experienced as the end of a world, which is why it generates such passionate poetry.³

While the feeling of world-ending is shared by so many in our congregation, our community is split in where we feel the disorientation most keenly. Our clergy hear it expressed by you in two major arenas.

For some of us this feels like it could be the end of an age of American Jewish security and confidence. It feels increasingly dangerous to be Jewish in America. Jews experience antisemitism in their classrooms, at work, and on the street. Synagogues and Jewish schools are more and more fortressed. Social media is an increasingly violent and threatening space for our people. Add to that atmosphere the fact that the bipartisan consensus on Israel is breaking. Jews are being blacklisted in the world of publishing, music, cinema and beyond – under the guise of anti-Zionism when they’re not even speaking about Israel. We see antisemitic expressions by politicians creeping ever closer to the mainstream of our political parties.

For some of us this is the cause of our disorientation.

But…for some of us we’re reeling because this feels like it could be the end of the age of thriving liberal democracy - the system that has kept Jews safe in America. The Church/State separations that our ancestors shored up are being attacked. The anti-immigrant sentiments that plagued Jews in generations past have reared their heads once more. Supreme court rulings have erased the work of our great-grandparents to make American democracy accountable to citizens and not special interests. The voting rights and protections our grandparents and parents fought for are being eroded. Women's rights, the rights and protections for people with disabilities, and the LGBTQ rights we fought for are all being weakened and undermined. For some of us this is the cause of our disorientation.

And for a lucky group of us it is both. Yes, we get to be terrified by two seismic changes.

Whether your disorientation is grounded in one or both of those synopses, our tradition has something vital to teach about living in a season of disorientation.

While our ancestors wrote many psalms in moments of destruction and disruption, Judaism doesn’t dwell on them, outside of our days of communal mourning. Rather our tradition focuses on and favors a different kind of psalm.

Brueggemann calls them Psalms of New Orientation. These psalms note that from a place of disorientation, we can make a shift in our faith or our way of thinking to give us the fortitude to face the new world that is so threatening, and decide that we can change it.⁴

He notes that psalms of new orientation are uniquely Jewish in outlook.⁵ Why? They express a mindset that is rarely seen in other contemporaneous cultures, a mindset of - unreasonable hope.

What we need as we begin the New Year is a Psalm of New Orientation: a psalm of unreasonable hope. And not just any psalm will do. We need Psalm 126.

If you’ve ever chanted birkat hamazon, the Jewish grace after meals, on Shabbat or a holiday you’ll know the Hebrew:
הַזֹּרְעִ֥ים בְּדִמְעָ֗ה בְּרִנָּ֥ה יִקְצֹֽרוּ
We sometimes sing it during our healing prayer.
“Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.”

Those who plant seeds in tears will reap a harvest in joy.

Some members of the congregation have told me they object to this psalm as a healing prayer. I understand why. Those who sow in tears do not themselves always reap in joy. We know from life that our loved ones who fall ill do not always recover.

So is the psalm a lie? No. This psalm was not written to be a healing prayer because the person who is planting and the person who is harvesting are different people, separated by generations. One generation is planting seeds in tears. And a later generation is reaping the harvest in joy.

How do we know that?

Psalm 126 was written after the destruction of the ancient Temple; the paradigmatic moment of Jewish disorientation.⁶ The anchor of Jewish life was desecrated and destroyed, our people were cast into exile. We have psalms of disorientation from this period: psalms of our ancestors shouting and crying out to God.⁷

But sometime afterward, a Psalmist wrote a different message - a message of unreasonable hope, “Those who sow seeds in tears will reap in joy.”

It was a declaration of faith that the actions of his generation would, with time and the sustained effort of later generations, achieve the seemingly impossible: rebuild a Temple worthy of God, and restore the vibrant strength of the Davidic kingdom.

The person who penned this verse knew that he would not eat the fruit of his labor. But he trusted that if he did his part, his tears would water the seeds of a dream that would become a reality some later generation would enjoy.

That was the new orientation of his generation. This was the unreasonable hope he captured in his psalm. Maybe it can become ours as well.

Psalm 126 helps frame what we already know. There are harvest seasons and planting seasons.

As legal scholar Sherrilyn Ifill has pointed out, most of us alive are children of the harvest.⁸ What she means by that is that we grew up during decades of thriving, yes flawed, but functioning democratic systems and a period of expanding rights to more and more Americans. I would add, we also grew up during decades of American Jewish safety and acceptance: we didn’t have to change our names in order to get a job, or endure Christian prayer in our classrooms. We weren’t barred from clubs, suburbs or entire fields of employment because we were Jewish. We have been inheritors of some of the greatest decades in American history, arguably Jewish history. We have been generations who reaped in joy.

Our disorientation, the reason it feels like the familiar and safe world is crumbling around us, is that we sense that the harvest is ending. We’re staring down a barren field. To face this reality, we need a new mentality, we need a planting mentality: we need to be ready to plant seeds we will not see grow to maturity.

Easier said than done.

Harvest mentality pervades American society. Its ethos is not “sow in tears so someone else can reap in joy.” Rather its catchphrase is “you reap what you sow.” We should see the result of our labor. We should profit from our toil. We should reap the benefits of our hard work.

The problem with that mentality is that it dooms us to short-term thinking and action. When we expect change now, we seek out quick fixes and short-term wins. We react to any given day’s crisis. We put out a statement, or demand one. We sign a letter that will make the news for a day. We re-post an article. We choose to invest in projects that promise the quickest results, rather than the deepest or longest lasting. We accuse anything that lacks success we can measure in a year as a failure.

A harvest mind-set works just fine when we are happy with the status quo. But it primes us to fail when we hope to change society. No successful movement for change was built on short-term thinking. Generations of suffragists never got to cast their own vote. Generations of Zionists never saw the founding of the State of Israel. Moses and his generation didn’t see the Promised Land.

To become effective we can shift from a harvest mindset to a planting mindset; ready to accept our role as the generations who will sow in tears so that some future generation can reap in joy.

The most important shift from a harvest to planting mindset is to change the timescale we are working in.

I spent an afternoon with a ranger from the Royal Family’s Balmoral Castle and Estate in Scotland. I wasn’t invited by the Windsors. Turns out they aren’t members of our streaming community. But I’d heard this behind-the-scenes opportunity was not to be missed.

The ranger drove us deep into the grounds where we witnessed amazing landscapes. We reached one area where he explained that the River Dee, so beloved for its Scottish salmon, was hitting a sustained temperature summer after summer that threatened the fish’s survival. As an Ashkenazi Jew who loves lox, you can imagine my horror.

The Royal family began a project to plant native trees over the areas of the river most important to the salmon. In a generation, the shade from those trees will lower the temperature of the water, and in two generations, will prevent the fish from disappearing. There isn’t a more concrete example of a planting mindset than that. How might we think and act differently, if we were imagining solutions for a remote future, rather than for the immediate moment.

Once we shift our timeline, we can also shift our work. We recognize that change will begin small. We will see victories and successes. But they’ll look different. Our goals are counter-cultural. It is no small task to ensure Jewish flourishing in a period of rabid antisemitism. It is no small task to shore up democracy as authoritarianism flares up abroad and at home.

It is natural to want to be part of attention-grabbing, grand actions. But what we need most is to build the infrastructure of change. The infrastructure that will outlast us and propel our causes into the future.

Sherillyn Ifill has been looking back to other planting periods in American history to see how our ancestors planted for us. They built groups with chapters all over America. They brought people together locally for regular meetings, speaker circles, social events, and then bound them together nationally. They spent significant time teaching and mobilizing the next generation; inculcating their ideals and strategies within them. They codified their actions into habits that could be repeated and established organizations and that could be propelled beyond a single generation.⁹ Behind every Herzl and Weizmann, behind every Alice Paul or Carrie Chapman Catt, behind every Thurgood Marshall or Dr. King were tens of thousands of people bound together meaningfully in the infrastructure of change.

Planting requires us to put our phones down, get out of our homes, and invest in people and relationships. Social movements and social change are created through organizing people. But our social capital muscles are atrophied. We are the generations least practiced in joining organizations, groups, and clubs and volunteering our time.¹⁰

Planting will require us to go out and create new networks of mutual concern and action. It will require us to persuade and educate rather than bully and shame. It will require us to use our leisure time for our causes. It will require us to get involved and bring others along with us. For some of us it will mean intensifying what we already do. For some of us, this will be new.

You’ve heard the phrase, “put your money where your mouth is.” In planting time we need a different phrase, “put your time where your anxiety is.” We cannot outsource this work. Each of us has planting to do.

The task in front of us feels, at times impossible. The world is increasingly unfamiliar and threatening. Each day brings some new headline that makes us want to cry. It is an appropriate response to the world around us. But we cannot let our tears blind us, disorient us, or immobilize us. We’re Jews. We plant even as we cry. Or, more accurately, we plant because we cry. May it be said generations from now that we sowed in tears, and that the yield of our hard work, was years of peace and plenty for American Jews and this democracy that has been so good to us

¹ Walter Brueggemann,The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 15-23.
² Brueggemann,The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, 20.
³ Brueggemann,The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, 20.
⁴ Brueggemann,The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, 19-21.
⁵ “That astonishing move is a characteristically Jewish move, one beyond reasonable expectation, one that evokes strident doxology because the new gift of life must be gladly and fully referred to God.” pg 21.
⁶ This opinion is quite old, being established by medieval and modern commentators alike. There is a modern debate about whether the author is awaiting the return while in exile, or had returned from exile and yet is disappointed at how distant the full restoration appears -see Robert Alter’s commentary on Psalms as well as Adele Berlin’s commentary in The JPS Bible Commentary: Psalms 120-150.
⁷ For example Psalms 74 and 79.
⁸ Dahlia Lithwick. “John Roberts’ New Years Blame Game.” Amicus, January 4, 2025. Podcast, website, 1:03:57.
⁹ Carol Sutton Lewis. “Navigating Today, Preparing for Tomorrow.” Ground Control Parenting, December 30, 2024. Podcast, website, 50:34.https://www.spreaker.com/episode/navigating-today-preparing-for-tomorrow-post-election-parenting-with-sherrilyn-ifill--63489556. Dahlia Lithwick. “John Roberts’ New Year's Blame Game.” Amicus, January 4, 2025. Podcast, website, 1:03:57
¹⁰ Robert Putnam wants us to stop bowling alone — Harvard Gazette, The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic, ‘The Interview’: Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely - The New York Times