Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 84: Why soldiers wept when Ran came home, lessons from Tu Bishvat

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

This week, Israel finally brought home the remains of its last hostage, 24-year-old Ran Gvili. To outsiders, the sheer scale of the national sacrifice and the collective exhalation of relief that followed his return can seem like a mystery. Every nation honors its fallen, but few go to the lengths Israelis do to reclaim a body from the hands of the enemy.In this episode, we use the upcoming holiday of Tu Bishvat as an entryway into the Jewish psyche. We explore the idea of "hesed shel Emet" -- the "true kindness" of a dignified burial, which is called "true" because it can never be reciprocated. We dive into a world where a dignified burial is more than a ritual; it is a declaration that even in death, a human being remains a reflection of the divine. Through the teachings of the Malbim and the Sfat Emet, we re-examine Tu Bishvat not as a simple children’s holiday, but as a sophisticated meditation on the human condition. From the sap stirring in the dead of winter to the "inner light" hidden within the shells of the Seven Species, we discover a "New Year of the Human"—a day that honors our unique mission to find meaning in our mortality and uncover the sacred within the broken.--This episode was sponsored by an anonymous donor who asked to dedicate it to all our fallen soldiers and to the sacrifices of the reservists and their families, from October 7 until today. Thank you for your sponsorship.--If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv Anything. I'm recording on Thursday, January 29. Yesterday, Ran Gvili, 24 years old, when he died, was finally brought home to burial in his hometown in Israel. The last of our people robbed from us by Hamas on October 7. Watching videos of the soldiers who found his body, watching them crying and singing when they found out it was him, One of them, I think, was blowing a shofar in one video, in that corner of Gaza where they found him in that cemetery, where the enemy hid our son from us. I've been asked over the last couple of days again and again by foreign media outlets why this was such a big deal. Why Israelis were so obsessed with this issue?

Why battalions were hunting for the last body in Gaza? Why the war suddenly could come to an end when our people were brought back. What about the burial of this last body seem to bring the whole country to a pause? It's not that other people don't care about their hostages or their lost ones, their lost soldiers or fighters. It's that nobody seems to obsess about it quite as much as Israelis. It seems to be bigger here in this culture.

And I haven't really responded. And I kind of felt like it would take far too long to explain, like it's not a sound bite I can prepare for cable television. And not everything about my existence and our existence is for sharing. Not the big things. If you understand this, you don't need anyone to explain it to you. And if you don't understand it, you also don't need anyone to explain it to you. Either you're in the circle of solidarity of responsibility,

and then it's as clear as day. Or you're not, and it's just not your responsibility. you have plenty of other responsibilities. What's the point of opening our souls and laying it out before the world? But then I realize that Tubeshwath is coming. It begins on Sunday evening, February 1st. It's the most disrespected of our ancient holidays.

It's dismissed as a kind of Jewish Earth Day because the Talmud calls it the New Year for the trees. It is an ancient deep day, a day of the guardianship of creation, of the brokenness of the human condition, it's a day that clarifies the meaning of human dignity. It's a day about the debts we owe each other, including the supreme debt,

one of the greatest acts of righteousness we have to give in the Jewish tradition, which is the unrecipricated kindness of a dignified burial. Why do our dead, a corpse stolen from our people by a brutal enemy, Why does that send a battalion into battle? What are we fighting and sacrificing for when we hunt not just for our living hostages, but even for the dead ones? What is this weakness that our enemies are so keen to exploit? The kidnapping of Israelis is a strategic imperative of our enemies

because of this, whatever it is. And why does it also explain our unbelievable resilience and strength? I choose to honor Van in the only way I really have. Let's learn a little Torah in his memory. This episode was sponsored very fittingly by an anonymous sponsor who asked to dedicate the episode to all of our fallen soldiers and to the sacrifices of the reservists and their families from October 7 until today.

Thank you for that sponsorship. Itubishvat is marketed to children, and in these childish days also to adults, unfortunately, as a holiday of trees. Our kids eat fruit, they go out to plant trees, things like that. These are good things, but they're not everything. It's seen by many Jews as a minor and uninteresting kind of holiday, a day that really can only matter to kids. What is even in it? And that's totally unfair because it is one of the more ancient days and holidays of the Jews. It is in the Bible or pieces of it come from the Bible.

It's discussed in the earliest parts of the Talmud, in the Mishnah, and the Midrash. And it's a day that's considered one of the four great new years that define the cycle of the year in the Jewish calendar. It's part of the temple rituals. It's a day that's been a platform for some of the deepest thinkers, some of the most important rabbis and scholars and philosophers of the Jewish bookshelf, to think about the deepest issues and ideas of Jewish ethics. It's big, and it's time we stop thinking of it as small. To be shhvat, the 15th of the month of Shvat, is the new year for the trees.

Why that day? Why the 15th of Shvat? Why not the first day of the month, for one thing? All the other new years are on the first of the month. Why not a different month? In fact, why not the spring, which is usually considered the beginning of the cycle for the trees and the plants, the buds are blooming. Shvat lands in January, February, in the coldest, deepest winter. And the answer, given by, for example, the 11th century Rashi, is that because it is deepest

winter, it is set then. It is set in the natural cycles of the land of Israel, and in those natural cycles, this moment, this deepest winter, is the moment when the very earliest blooming trees, the almond trees, for example, begin to awaken. The sap begins to flow, Rashi puts it. It begins, he says, on the 15th of Shvath, when most of the years' rains have already fallen. In the cycles of the land of Israel, there's the dry season, the last, I don't know, eight, nine months, and all the rains are concentrated in the winter, and they're mostly over by now. So this moment of the first glimmers of awakening from deepest winter, when nothing outside the tree is visible,

but inside the sap is beginning to flow, that's the deep story of Tubishth, he says. And the Svatimet, the Garur rabbi, Rabbi Yehuda, Arya Leib Alter, he died in 1905. He makes a lot of the gap between the outside and the inside. He has this vision of this cosmology. deeply rooted in Hasidic thought and Kabbalistic thought, where he sees a gap between the inner light, the inner truest version of things that is part of the divine, and then the outer shell, the outer husk, that surrounds things, the physicality of the world, the physical world of separate and distinct things, definitions and limitations and physical reality is a kind of cloak, a kind of skin suit,

draped on top of the deeper world, of inner, infinite, light in all things. It's a very old idea. It's a very Jewish idea. It's a cosmology, as I said, rooted in Kabbalah. But what it comes to for the Sfatimat is that in every person, in every object, in every creature, in every moment in time, in every literal physical object, there is this point infinitesimal, a singularity, I guess, in modern terms, of the divine, of the divine light. And it is the driving force. It is the source of being. of existence itself. So the Svath-e-Met, or Svass-Emes, in classical Ashkenazi pronunciation,

apologies to anybody who hears this who's used to Svass-Emes and is saying, oh, these Israelis, forgive me, Reb Alter, we Israelis did in fact go with a Sephardi-Tafati and the Sephardi-syllable emphasis, and I can only apologize. It wasn't my fault. I didn't do it. The Svati-Emeet saw in Tupisvat the expression of this great idea. the deepest layer that is the source of all being is why the physical world and everything in it is precious and holy it is why even things that on the outside appear bad or evil

or have potential to degrade us and dehumanize and hurt we know that in their core in their deepest most inner parts also are precious and holy and sourced from the same divine source the human says the Svatimait has the unique capacity the sentient capacity the capacity for moral choice neither beast nor angel but somewhere in between to sift the shell from the inner light to clear the sand and the fog and whatever metaphor you want to use the layers of pain the brokenness of the world the desire the confusion of human yearnings and to reach down and to take hold of the light and to elevate the light into the world and up back to God.

And so there is in Rosh Hashanah in this idea, he takes Rashi and really runs with it. There's this idea that the moment of coldest winter, but where the life stirs within, is the heart of the living cosmology of Hasidic thought. That's, by the way, what a blessing is doing. When you bless bread before you eat bread in Judaism, or you bless water, there's a blessing for water, when you drink water. Or, you know, how you're commanded to listen to your child or your spouse when they come to you in anger.

You're commanded to listen through the shell to the inner light, to the inner intention, to the inner soul, to the divine source. Through the layers of pain and frustration, no matter how much they obscure what it is that is inside. You speak to the inner light, you find it, you be grateful for it, and you are having a completely different and richer and truer and more constructive experience of the world, of the person in front of you, of the people you love, of the food you consume. The Svat de Mette asked the question, why celebrating the dead of winter? And then he said, because it is the holiday of inner awakening. Because it teaches us about our own soul. is more than all of these things. It's also the most ancient acknowledgement of the gifts of the land. When the Bible talks about the greatness of the land of Israel, in Deuteronomy chapter 8,

it literally explains why the land is good, and it specifically brings evidence of that goodness in the form of the seven species, which are symbols of Judaism ever since. For the eternal your God, Deuteronomy says, is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill. Eretz chita and seora and gaffe and ta'enna and rimon. Errits zeat shemen and dvash. A land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey. Honey meaning date honey, not bee honey.

That land of those seven species represents the goodness and the bounty, and it is therefore customary, unto bishvat, to eat those fruits, specifically praised in the Torah, as evidence of the good land. and in the prayers around those fruits on Tubishmat, we literally explicitly say that we are praising the good land in those blessings. But there's more. The Kabbalist mystics in this great Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah have a field day with this imagery,

since everything in the Kabbalistic mind is a projection of the divine into the world, almost a shadow against the wall produced by the divine light. It's a way of knowing something. the physical laws of the universe, the physical objects in the universe, the experience, the human soul. These are all ways of knowing something about the thing that made them all, about the infinite unknowable God, about the fountainhead of being. The structure of the universe must constitute, in this logic, some signal of the mind of the divine of God. Whatever the heck that term even means,

and nobody could possibly know. But therefore, interaction with the universe, with existence, with the universe that is in front of us, and praise of it and gratitude for it are inherently a conversation with the divine mind. We don't know God. We don't know what the word even means. There's terms used for us to be able to approach, but we don't know the thing we are referring to. If we did, it wouldn't be God. But the most knowable thing we have is our own being, encountering the creation of God. And, you know, whatever is meant in Judaism by the revelation and the Torah. But the direct interaction we can have here and now

is that encounter with the universe. And this is one of the deepest ideas in Kabbalah that what is here reflects what is above, what is there in the divine. And therefore every object you hold in your hand and every piece of food you place in your mouth, and every act, and every moment, and every breath is a window into the divine mind.

In the 16th century, the Kabbalists of Tsfat or Safid in northern Israel, students of the Ari, the great sage, who kind of reconfigured Kabbalah a little bit to be what is the most common version of it today, saw in Tubeshwishvat a path into that understanding. They created what they called a Tubeshwet, Seder, modeled after the Passover Seder, meal that's also a lesson plan that teaches deep things about the meaning of our interaction with

the world and what the natural world around us tells us about the divine and the cosmos. Just for example, the textures of the various fruit eaten at this Seder. And they start with the seven species. I think they hit 30 fruit by the time they're done is a language of gratitude for the abundance of the world. What do I mean by texture? Walnuts and almonds are hard shell on the outside and a soft edible inside. and that represents the protection of the divine, that hard shell on the outside.

Olives and dates have a soft outer shell that you eat and a hard inner pit that you can't eat. That hard inner pit is the divine spark hidden within all things, that is unassailable, untouchable, and destroyable, and the heart of all things and the continuation of all things. And then there's the fruit that are completely edible, figs, grapes, and they're the wholeness of things. the reminder that all things ultimately are one. That's what I mean by a Tubeshvat Seder.

And it ties into Judaism's larger ecological view, which is real, it's old, it's not invented by 1960s hippies in America and California. Tubeshwishvat is Judaism's song of love, basically, for the natural world. The Torah, for example, is deeply fond of trees. and all of these references of the torte-trees, we read and learn and celebrate and pray and teach our kids in school on Tubeshvath. In Deuteronomy 2019, we're given this rule about wartime. When in your war against a city, you have to besiege it, a long time in order to capture it. You must not destroy its trees wielding the axe against them.

You may eat of the trees, but you must not cut them down. Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city? A tree can't move. A tree is vulnerable. You can't take down the tree. But it isn't just trees. That idea that you can't destroy a tree when besieging a city becomes a foundational principle of Jewish thought and Jewish law

that is far larger than trees. Baltashchit is the name of the principle, drawn from the word used for destroy in the verse. You shall not destroy. The sages of the Talmud extend this prohibition not to destroy way beyond trees to animals, to objects. You can't kill a farm animal that's uncooperative or unprofitable. That's in the Talmud. You don't throw away old clothes.

This is a core principle of Jewish religious life. You don't destroy the creative and useful things of this world. Let me try to update that for our modern experience. You don't throw out a working iPhone to buy a newer iPhone. phone. In Judaism, you don't need more things. What we need all of us is to see the worth and value of the things that are present here and now. We need more appreciation, a more accurate estimation of this ocean of bounty in which the average modern person lives. I once read a really interesting account of gorillas in the rainforest, and there was this throwaway comment

by this science journalist that really stuck with me. This journalist wrote, gorillas basically live in a salad bowl. They live in the rainforests and they eat the forest around them. Well, so do we. We live in a giant bowl of food

that has food thrown at us at every turn and we have toys and attention-grabbing entertainment that we can't escape even if we try. We're endlessly distracted and systematically stuffed by every imaginable entertainment and every conceivable delicacy that is available to the human mind to produce every hour of every day.

We live a life of almost infinite abundance, so much so that we feel the emptiness of it all everywhere. The things of this world that Talmud tells us, and it tells it to us through these verses that we learn about the ethics of too Bishvat. And the sages of the Talmud tell us this again and again and again, the things of this world have value. Inanimate objects, even inanimate objects. Obviously animals, cruelty to animals, as an absolute prohibition in the most fundamental noachid laws, but even objects, live with them, admire them, appreciate the clever, useful things of this world.

They are part of the creation and the part you interact with most directly and intimately. And so they're extensions of the creator to which we are instructed to be grateful. They are signals of the divine mind, of the physical result of the great act of creation. The objects around us as much as every other thing aren't replaceable. The dopamine hit of the newest gadget isn't worth the loss of the value of things. the hollowing out of our experience of things, of our experience of being here now. Things are precious. Moments are precious.

Know the value of things. Be grateful for them because otherwise you will find yourself living in a pile of worthless junk. No matter how much you spent on that junk, it will have no value to you. And your experience of them will be a pale shadow, an unhappy thing. In tractate Ta'anit of the Talmud, page 23A, we read the story or several stories about Khony Amar Gel, Khony the circle maker. He's one of the more colorful heroes of the rabbinic imagination. This is probably the most popular midrash read in every school in Israel on Tu Bishvat.

One day, Khonni is walking along the road. I'm reading the translation from the Safari website of this page of the Talmud. One day, Khonni was walking along the... the road when he saw a certain man planting a carib tree. Choni said to him, this tree, after how many years will it bear fruit? The man said in response, it won't produce fruit for 70 years. And Chonny said to this man, I think in Aramaic it's clear he's an old man. Chon he said to him, is it obvious to you that you'll live 70 years that you can expect to benefit from this tree? And the man says to Chonin in response, I found a world full

of carib trees. Just as my ancestors planted for me, I am planting for my descendants. We make the world that future generations will inhabit. And that's part of the story of protecting the trees and the animals and appreciating the objects of the world. Adam, when the world is being created, God instructs Adam to be the guardian of the world. And that matters profoundly. And it doesn't just matter for the world itself. It matters for the next generation of people. Because here's the thing. We can also destroy.

Another famous midrash also tells a story, read in schools, of a conversation between God and Adam in the Garden of Eden. And the middress tells us, at the hour when the Holy One, Blessed Be He, created the first human being, he took him and let him pass before all the trees of the garden of Eden, and he said to him, See my works, how fine and excellent they are.

Now all that I have created I created for your benefit. Think upon this, and do not corrupt and desolate my world. For if you corrupt it, there is no one to fix it after you. Did you hear it? Did you hear God's threat? The world was made for you. And no one will be there to fix what you destroy. In other words, if you destroy the world, I made for you,

you yourself will not survive. The guardianship of the world is a commandment in its own right. It's for the world. But you don't cut down a tree and a siege. You don't kill. You don't waste. You protect the world around you. It's part of that mission of guardianship.

But it's also the survival of humanity itself. Make sure you don't screw this one up. Nobody's going to be there to fix it because you will be gone. All these stories are Tubeshwatra, but it goes deeper. And here the Kabbalistic tradition specifically hones in on Tubeshvat and the eating of the fruit of the land and all the things it symbolizes as part of the repairing of the great break in the human condition, the great fall, when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. The Torah introduces the two great trees of the garden in Genesis 2.9.

And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And then God issues a prohibition. This is the first prohibition in the Bible. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden you may freely eat. But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die. The philosophers of the Jewish tradition, the rationalists,

had to understand what the heck this was about. What do you mean? If I gain the knowledge of good and evil, isn't the point to gain knowledge of good and evil? Isn't that what this is all about? how can a person who has no knowledge of good and evil do good? And their answer, Maimonides is the classic example, the greatest of the Jewish philosophers of 12th century Cairo. Maimonides' answer is simple, simple, frustrating in that it's simple.

A lot of things he does are very sophisticated and complex. He kind of dismisses the problem as essentially a semantic problem. He explains what's so terrible about eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He explains it's the wrong kind of knowledge. In The Guide to the Perplex, this great philosophical work where he lays this out, he says, Adam was born with perfect philosophical knowledge, objective truth, total rationalism, closeness to God, closeness to the ultimate total truth.

That's why he can have just a conversational relationship with the creator. He knows the universe perfectly, and that means a kind of second degree or close degree knowledge of God's own thinking. You go from perfect philosophical truth to the knowledge of good and evil. That's a fall, because it's a fall from truth to subjective knowledge. Good and evil, Rambam points out,

aren't absolute philosophical truth. There's subjective moral experiences. Perfect knowledge was replaced with subjective, limited, sometimes false, by definition. knowledge, limited by human desire, human subjective emotions, the limits of human perception. So it really was a fall. The mystics had a different take. I think a more interesting one. For Nachmanides, or Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is almost exactly the opposite of what Memonides read into it. It isn't that they replaced

good knowledge with bad knowledge. It's that, as a matter of the fact. It's that, Adam and Eve obtained actual knowledge, real true knowing, conscious awareness, and understanding. And that itself was a crash. Before eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam had only instinct, perfect instinct, instinct that's built into the nature of him and the relationship with God, in sync totally with God's will, automatic access to the totality of the truth of nature, a total connection to creation. And so how could he possibly have had free will?

How could he ever have chosen wrong? He knew nothing else. He couldn't want anything that wasn't perfect. And so there was no meaning to his choosing right. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil gave him free will by placing a veil of subjectivity over his experience. His inner perceptions, his yearnings cloud over his purpose. knowledge. He gains a personality. Before the tree, Adam did what was right because it was his

nature to do so. After eating from the tree, Adam had to choose because he could want to do the wrong thing. He could want, he could possess a desire that is harmful, and therefore he has to choose between the good and the bad. He gains choice. It was the first rebellion, and the moment of the creation of free will, and the moment we became human. Two more rabbis and we're done here. I want to get to two of my absolute favorite rabbis already mentioned in this talk.

One is the Malbim, a rationalist, a curmudgeon, a wonderful teacher, a guy who got kicked out of every major rabbinical job he had, but was still one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 19th century in Eastern Europe, and get to the Sfatimit, because the Malpim and the Sfatimatimat, kind of, and not them alone, it was big, but I'm going to simplify. But they kind of carried that Rambam-Ramban debate over the meaning of the fall into the 19th century, 700 years later.

They took up this debate and made it, I think, more interesting and frankly deeper. Rambam said, bad knowledge, okay, led to the fall. He had perfect knowledge, and then he had bad knowledge. and therefore it's a bad thing, right? It's just wrong, it's bad, it's not good. He went from philosophical knowledge to this wrong knowledge. Ramban's answer was, but isn't that just another way of saying we became human? Isn't that a good thing because that gave us moral choice?

Otherwise, we wouldn't have had moral choice, and what's the point? Why are there, there wouldn't be mitzvot, there wouldn't be religion, there wouldn't be any value to any human decision, any moral value, any ethical value. The Malbim, Rabbi Meir Leibus bin Jihil Michal Weisser, this brilliant and prolific rabbi of the 19th century, he issues probably the most powerful that I know, the most powerful retort response of the Rambamist rationalists. He says, don't confuse moral choice with free will. In other words, even before the fall into subjective knowledge,

Adam had free will. He had a relationship with God. had moral responsibility before falling into subjective knowledge. But it was a question of a fall from intellectual clarity to moral conflict. I think an analogy is the best way to do this. Before the fall, Adam's will was aligned with reality, objective reality. So if God said, don't eat that, Adam understood that was a literal law of nature. Like if God had said, don't jump off a cliff. you don't jump off the cliff, not because you need like a subjective moral choice

not to jump off a cliff, but because gravity will make you go splat. You're in sync with reality, with truth, with the objective truth. For the malbim, this was a pure relationship because there was no static on the line. There was no misunderstanding. You stand as a separate creature,

but the whole system makes sense to you. The problem with subjectivity is that it's a breakdown of the machine. once you enter the realm of Tov Vara of the good and evil, the pleasant and unpleasant, Tov Vara could be spoken of food, delicious and disgusting. You are no longer seeing the world as it is. You're seeing the world mediated through your own ego. So the decision to do right in the state of confusion after the fall, moral choice, as Nakhmanides lionized it, celebrated it,

it's really just a cure for a sickness, for a mental confusion. You don't make yourself sick so you can then take the medicine and celebrate the medicine. The ultimate goal is health. A healthy person doesn't need to choose to breathe. It just breathes. Why would you want a relationship with God that requires this exhausting, never-ending internal war when you could have had one based on clear and harmonious understanding and clear, vision and knowledge of how the universe works, and therefore of how the divine mind and will

built the universe. Isn't the second one better? I have no fear, oh mystical Nakhmanidians, because the Svathamit, the Hasidic master, the second Gera-Rabi, he had a good answer to the Malbim. He teaches the Svatimit that the sin of the fall, the actual fall, was indeed part of the divine plan. And in fact, there was God's plan to move humanity from the static perfection of absolute knowledge and perfect knowledge to a state of fallenness that is the only state, the precondition, that allows for growth. If Adam had stayed in the garden, he would have been an angel or like an angel in every way that matters.

he would have been perfect and motionless. But God doesn't want us to be perfect and motionless. God has already all the creatures of creation that do not have a choice. What we bring to the table is choice. And so we had to. God wanted the rise of subjectivity. Because God wants what the Svatimid called service from below. The person who is surrounded by darkness and confusion,

but chooses to find that hidden, spark of truth of light of the divine, despite the darkness. The fall into subjectivity is a promotion, is a spiritual promotion, from a world that is perfected to the world that needs to be fixed. Olamatikun, the world that requires repair. We lost the clarity of the garden. We were plunged into darkness, but we gain the ability to give God something an angel cannot give, something that makes us valuable and precious, which is to make the choice in the dark, in the darkness of subjectivity, of all the limits of human life. The Malbim sees the tree of knowledge as a tragedy, a breakdown of intellect, but for the Svatimet,

it's the beginning of the great human mission of clarifying the world, repair, harring the world, the Svatimit called it dissent for the sake of assent. Eridda tore chaliyah. Adam's fall was a necessary exile. And if Adam had stayed in the garden, his holiness would have been a gift, not an achievement.

We can earn what Adam was given, but we can only earn it by falling into the darkness and the limitation of subjectivity, of this crookedness of the world as the verse says it. God wants that service of the heart, that of a vodasheba live, which can only happen when you have a choice to make. God wants that choice. And by entering this world of confusion, we can give God that gift from us, which is more profound than anything an angel can ever give God. From the fall, we are cursed. And what is that curse? Beza'a'at the

Pachah tuchel lech, adjofchah elah adama, because from menu lukakhta, because afarta, and el affer to shove. By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread, until you return to the earth, for from it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return. One of the most famous passages of the Bible,

Genesis 319. What is the curse? If we accept the mystical idea, and I love it a lot more than the philosophers, that the brokenness is the potential. The brokenness is the gift. The brokenness is the ability to choose. The brokenness is what makes us more valuable than an angel.

Then why are we cursed? Why are we cursed to eat bread only from the sweat of the brow until we return to the earth, for from the earth we were taken, for dust we are, into dust shall we return? Why are we cursed with mortality and death? Adam in the garden apparently is immortal. An Adam out of the garden in the world of subjectivity becomes mortal. The curse of mortality becomes part of this life of brokenness that also allows for the moral choice.

Why? And the answer that many rabbis and scholars and thinkers and philosophers and mystics give is that the curse of mortality is part and parcel of the gift without which the gift can't exist. In the garden, Adam knew he was part of an infinite divine flow, would be the Kabbalist way of thinking about it, overflowing, the sheffa of the divine creating by overflowing its infinite self. Leaving the garden was a loss of the awareness of eternity. And so God gives us this curse that we shall return to dust.

It's a promise that we will return to a, of promise that we will return to a, state where we are aware of eternity to God's side. But it's also a gift of perspective. If we were immortal and still trapped in the subjective realm, still driven by ego, we wouldn't understand the meaning of our lives. We wouldn't have any reason to. It would all be one long stretch of suffering in darkness. We would be creatures sitting on an infinite pile of consumer goods and empty of all love for them, we wouldn't appreciate. We would be that dead and numb thing, but not for objects for years, to the gift of time itself. But by making the years limited, the Svatimit argued, the curse of returning to the dust is the gift of humility,

and therefore the drive to find meaning. It creates a deadline to make our moral choices meaningful. if you have forever you procrastinate on your spiritual growth but if you are dust that is going to return to dust every moment counts this is the very serious and dark and painful grandeur of the human being that brief time that window of light

between the darkness before you were lived and the darkness after you lived the brief time in this world in the darkness of confusion and subjectivity, where you can make the moral choice and uncover the light that nevertheless, and despite everything, still lies at the heart of all things. This is the deep sensibility in which the Jewish tradition turns to the tasks of death and burial, which are one of Judaism's most sacred obligations. We have to be buried among our people. Our bones and the biblical phrase have to be gathered onto our fathers.

When Jacob is coming to die in Genesis 4729, he asks Joseph, And I seeta imadi chesed and emet, Alna tkberini in Mitzraim. Deal kindly and honestly with me, or graciously and truly with me. Burry me not, I beg you, alna, in Egypt. Jacob, whose name is a man is, Israel. The first Israel's last wish is to be buried in the land of Israel. The Torah is obsessed with

where people are buried. Abraham and the forefathers and foremothers at the cave of Machpelah in Chavron. Joseph's bones are carried out of Egypt, centuries after his death, by his liberated people to be brought to the land. Maimonides is buried in Israel, even though he lived and worked in the Muslim world in Cairo. Rabbi Judah Halevi, his last act that we know of him is he got on a boat to the land of Israel. We don't even know if he made it, but he wanted, I think he was already 80 years old by then, to be buried in the land of Israel. And our mother Rachel, the biblical mother Rachel, buried on the road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, is buried there, Rashi writes, as a sentinel watching over her children so she can be there to see them on the road they will take when they

go out to the exile of Babylon. We have in the prophet Jeremiah. He remembers Rachel, buried on the road, the Rachel who wept for her children. And she weeps in Jeremiah's prophecy for the children as they pass into exile. Thus said God, Jeremiah writes. A cry is heard in Ramah, wailing, bitter weeping,

Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children. her children who are gone. Thus said God, restrain your voice from weeping, your eyes from shedding tears, for there is a reward for your labor, declares God. They shall return from the enemy's land, and there is hope for your future, declares God. Your children shall return to their country. We are human because we are mortal. We are wise and precious and capable of unlocking the meaning of things because we are mortal. Our mortality is an absolutely necessary part in the tiniest sliver that we share with godliness itself. What other creature can choose? What other creature can find

the divine light? And without our mortality, we would not be that creature. And our death and our burial are thus the signifiers of our value. They are the necessary precondition for it, and how we are treated when we are dead is how we understand what our value is as humans, what kind of creature we are and what the value of that creature is. And so Judaism and Jews are obsessed with dignity for the dead and have been from the very founding of the idea that there is a people of Israel. It's in the earliest pieces of the Bible. In Deuteronomy 2123, the Torah commands referring to a criminal executed for a capital crime, the Torah commands you must surely bury him the same day. Even in that, even the most heinous criminal in death, that great leveler and humbler of man,

becomes the same creature in the image of God who makes choices in the dark. And that overrides everything else. You do not leave his body swinging in the, we are created in the image of God, the Torah tells us. And so is the worst of us. And so the burial must be immediate and dignified. There are the laws in the Talmud of the Mait Mitzvah, the corpse, that it is a Mitzvah to bury. This is somebody who's, it's an abandoned body that you find on the side of the road with no one to bury it. a high priest, the high priest at the temple,

who is forbidden from coming into contact with his own parents' gravesite because he must remain pure for temple service, is required by the Torah to stop and personally bury that person buried on the side of the road when he encounters that person. The dignity of the dust that we are, that we come from and must return, overrides the highest demands of ritual purity for the most highest ranked Kohen priest,

there are no rules bigger than this rule of the respect for the dead because this is the fundamental thing of the nature of the human and of the image of God that we represent. And it isn't just the doing it, it's how you do it. Every Jewish community has a Heveraqadisha,

which literally translates to the holy society, and its job is to care for the dead. And how does a Heverer Qadishah care for a dead person in the Jewish community, they wash them the dead body, and they dress the deceased in white linen shrouds, and they do it in silence. And you're supposed to do it with humility,

feel the humility. We all return to dust, no matter how or where we die. Our obligation to each other is the dignity of that death, to acknowledge the almost angel, light that was housed in that dead body. Chesed shall emet. Jacob asked for chesed

and truth as he dies. And Rashi explains Chesd shal emet, the kindness of truth, the true kindness, is a kindness done in the dignified burial of a corpse because that's somebody who will never reciprocate that kindness, that

dignity. Llan Gvili was brought to that dignified burial, and I am personally grateful for it. Our debt to him for taking that gun and going out to fight to protect people on that terrible day, our debt to him that one piece of that debt, which is the dignified burial, that our enemy, because this is one little thing they know about us, that this will hurt, that enemy took that from us. and now we brought him back

and he had that dignified burial and too beshvant we plant trees we eat fruit we sing a song about a three millennia old legal text that talks about preserving a tree in a military siege that is a song

sung in elementary school and we do it we do these things to remember that we are stewards of the earth God's own mouth charged us with that guardianship of the earth but also to remember that we are giants, we are nearly angels,

made in the image of God and put together by a creator to mend the brokenness of creation, and also that we are very nearly beasts of the field, that we are ourselves broken and confused and living in the darkness, and that there is a choice in that duality, and that this choice is our unique gift, and that our moral failures, like the deepest, darkest winter and the trees,

our failures are the signals of the life and the grander to which we are capable when we break through the veil of confusion, and our pain is the stirring of that life. To Bechvat, the new year of the trees, might as well be called the new year of the human. Happy two, Bishvat. And, Rahn, welcome home. We were waiting for you.