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When Terri and I return from a trip to Israel, the routine is always the same: the long walk through the airport and then the hopefully not too long wait in the immigration line.  From there it's the luggage carousel, the loud, crowded, confusing snarl of people and traffic, and then the seemingly endless ride home.  When we finally get to our exit, it's a left and then a right up our first country road.  About a mile down the way, that road makes a sharp bend to the left.

That's where it always hits me.  For the last week or two, I have been living in a place where not a drop of rain falls between April and October.  If this trip has followed what has become our normal pattern, we’ve spent most of those days amid the breathtaking, but crusty brown dunes of the Negev desert.  And now I have returned to a place that is effortlessly green.  

A few minutes later, having wrestled the bags into the house, I stare into the woods that surround my backyard and those words echo through my mind: effortlessly green.  They have become for me a metaphor for what it's like to be an American Jew. 

It isn’t just me. I saw it this summer as we walked with our friend Eyal Machal through Chatfield Hollow State Park - beyond the lake, along the stream and back to the slowly spinning water wheel.  Eyal hadn’t been in America in more than twenty years, and I’m not sure how much time he had spent here outside our concrete jungles of New York and Los Angeles.  I’m not sure he ever realized how effortlessly green this country of ours is.  I watched as this friend of mine, this strong, tall man, this soldier turned tour-guide to a country to which no one travels anymore, took it all in in wonder.  “Maybe,” he said tentatively, “I could get a job here as a gardener.”

A couple of years ago, another friend, Oren Shriki, a professor at Ben Gurion University, was staying with us for a few days.  We were sitting at breakfast and I was rhapsodizing about Israel, speculating about what it would take for us to move there. He looked at me like I was some kind of starry-eyed romantic.  “Don’t kid yourself” he said dryly.  “Life is better here.”  

I have been trying over these holidays to capture for you my experiences this extraordinary year just past.  I will forgo a description of the year - you know it as well as I.  But as your rabbi, I want to try and tell you what I think it means.  I have been trying to do so through a teaching of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who observed that what we love we inherit and that what we fail to love, we lose.

On Rosh Hashanah I spoke with you about our trip to central Europe and particularly to Vienna.  Where my travel companions saw a modern, culturally rich city - a city that, a century ago, its Jewish citizens were disproportionately influential in building - I saw a ghost town; a place whose plazas still rang with voices cheering their fuhrer, and whose museums were haunted by stolen treasures.  And I wondered - if what we love is what we inherit, do we even know what to love?

Last night I spoke of our time in Israel.  I spoke of a people I have gotten to know more intimately than I had in the past; a people who are forced to show the world how tough and tenacious they can be, but who desperately want a loving shoulder on which to lean as they sacrifice so much for the survival of all of us.  And I wondered - if what we fail to love, we lose, do we even know whom to love?

Today, I want to ask something different.  I want to ask if we love what we have.  Because what we have here in America is worthy of our love, and I am desperately afraid we are in danger of losing it. 

The Jewish experience in America is unlike any we have had in any other country in the two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple.  At its most basic, in no other country in all that history have Jews lived in large numbers and not been kicked out.  

But the story of Jews in America goes beyond tolerance.  We have prospered and grown here as we have in no other place beside Israel itself.  A few years ago, I attended a benefit performance of a one-woman show about the beloved sex therapist, Dr. Ruth Westheimer.  Dr. Ruth herself was a testament to what Jews can achieve in this free society of ours.  But sitting in the audience in the moments before the curtain went up, I found myself eavesdropping on the conversations going on around me.  The man to my left was talking about the Manhattan skyscraper he had just purchased.  The woman in front of me was telling a friend about the museum exhibition she was curating.  And I wondered as I looked out at the several hundred people in this Jewish gathering, how many similar achievements were being spoken of at that moment?  

You may ask what all of this has to do with us, a modest, little community in a modest, little town.  Jewish success and Jewish wealth translates to the ability to build things, and the ability to change things.  Jewish success, combined with our imperative for צדקה - for charity and philanthropy - has been and continues to be a force for good in this world.  Jews have built schools and hospitals, museums and libraries, social and civic organizations of all kinds in this country.  And we have used our influence to build and support similar organizations in Israel, all the while winning bipartisan political support for the one Jewish state.  What Jews have achieved with their American success is truly remarkable.

Beyond these material achievements, Judaism itself has advanced in America as it has no place else, including Israel.  In a country where church and state are separate and religion must compete for a free people’s attention and allegiance, American Judaism has proved endlessly dynamic and innovative.  Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Modern Orthodox practices have all evolved and thrived here as they have in no other country.  They and a host of smaller, independent movements all seek to respond to the challenges a skeptical, secular, liberal culture presents to an ancient faith.  In short, the dynamism and diversity of our religion has blossomed here in America as it has nowhere else.

And there is, I think something more.  We American Jews constitute a unique people - a Jewish culture unto ourselves.  The vast majority of us are, for one thing, the main repository of the Ashkenazi, Eastern European Yiddish culture that once was the dominant population in the Jewish world.  It’s a culture from which many early Zionists - although themselves products of it - turned away.  Even those Israelis whose heritage is Ashkenazi  find their identities pull more from the Levant than the shtetl.  But if there is a people whose ear still resonates to the sound of the klezmer clarinet, whose mind is engaged by the talmudic conundrum, and whose soul is leavened by a floating matzah ball, it is us.  

With this distinctively Yiddish sensibility of ours we have developed a Jewish culture that has helped shape America.  It was an American Jew - Robert Oppenheimer - who built the atomic bomb.  It was an American Jew - Jonas Salk - who developed the polio vaccine.  It was an American Jew - Irving Berlin - who wrote the most popular Christmas song.  It was an American Jew - Emma Lazarus - whose words are inscribed on the plinth of the Statue of Liberty.  It was an American Jew - Louis Brandeis - who championed freedom of speech at the Supreme Court.  And it was an American Jew - Levi Strauss - who invented bluejeans.

With minimal effort, I could go on like this for quite a while.  But you get the idea.  Unlike Europe, where our influence was limited to that brief period between liberation from the ghettos and extermination in the camps, Jews have impacted American culture as long as this nation has had a culture.

So Jews in America have been, for the most part, successful and even prosperous.  We have used that prosperity to build up civic, educational and cultural institutions here, and to provide crucial, even existential, support for the State of Israel.  We have created a Judaism whose religious diversity is a vital response to the challenge of living in a liberal, secular society.  We have built for ourselves a unique identity that draws deeply on our Ashkenazi past while being a positive and major influence on the broader American culture.

And we have done this all while living in a place where we have never been harassed by the government, let alone expelled, and where no one is shooting missiles at us.  In other words, we have done all this in a place that is both literally and metaphorically effortlessly green.

So my question to all of us: do we love it?  Do we love it enough to claim it as our inheritance?  Do our children love it enough to claim it as theirs?  Because if we don't love it - or love it enough - we are going to lose it.  We are going to lose this unique and privileged existence that is American Judaism.

This is what really scares me.  The Jews who love the museums and the coffee houses of Vienna scare me because they don't appreciate how much of who we are comes from Judaism itself.  The Jews who fail to love our brothers and sisters in Israel scare me because they have lost their sense of their own history and an understanding of what Judaism even means.  But the Jews who just don't love being Jewish enough, or don’t love it at all, scare me the most because they are most of us.  They are the Jews who aren’t here.  And if we are honest, they can be us as well.  If what we love is what we inherit, and what we fail to love, we lose, perhaps we have not really inherited the privilege of being American Jews.  Perhaps we will lose this place that is effortlessly green.

I pray that is not the case.  I pray that the bravery of our brothers and sisters in Israel will inspire us to see what a special inheritance our Judaism is, and embrace it with a love we have not felt in a long while.  I pray that the vitriol we see on our college campuses will remind us that self-righteousness is no substitute for the Jewish demand that we pursue justice. I pray, in short, that the cataclysm that began on October 7 will teach us to love what is right here before us, because to me, being born a Jew is my most beloved inheritance.  To be an American as well is simply riches on top of riches.

I want to leave you with that hope: the hope that we are, even now, learning to love this most unique and precious inheritance of ours.  I want so desperately for it to be true.  But there is a part of me that wonders whether loving - even loving deeply - might not be enough.  We are, after all, a tiny and indeed shrinking minority in a vast country with competing and ever changing interests.  In such circumstances, love might only get us so far.

Which leads me to this: as someone possessed by his faith, I find myself searching to find the truth in its words.  Right before we said the Shema, our cantor sang

והביאנו לשלום מארבע כנפות הארץ, ותוליכנו קוממיות בארצנו

She sang them to the tune of Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem.  They mean “bring us in peace from the four corners of the earth, and lead us upright into our land.” These are not words we recite only on holidays.  We pray them every day of our lives. 

And so I wonder: perhaps we are part of a bigger story.  Bigger and grander.   And perhaps in this grander story it isn't so much our will that matters.

When you visit northernmost Israel - a land now abandoned because of the war - and you stand atop its hills, taking in that great vista where three countries come together, it's easy to lose your sense of direction.  So you turn to your brother Eyal and ask, “where's the border?” And Eyal responds as any good tour guide would:  “If it's green, it's Israel.  If it's brown, it isn't.” 

Such is the reality of the land that God promised to our ancestors; a land flowing with milk and honey.  But a land so flowing because we are God's partners in its creation.  Has that not always been the Jews’ purpose, to show the other nations that, through our efforts, even a brown world can be made green?  Wherever in God’s world we may find ourselves, is that not our real inheritance?  Should that not be our true love?