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From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for LifeAuthor: Temple Emanuel in Newton
Bringing weekly Jewish insights into your life. Join Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz, Rabbi Michelle Robinson and Rav-Hazzan Aliza Berger of Temple Emanuel in Newton, MA as they share modern ancient wisdom. Language: en Genres: Judaism, Religion & Spirituality Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Shabbat Sermon: Redemption Song with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
Saturday, 21 March, 2026
For the last two weeks, I have been wearing this tallit. At Kiddush, both weeks, I have discovered that our congregation is very generous when it comes to offering feedback. People had opinions about the tallit which they shared promptly and candidly.Comments like: “What’s with that new tallit? What is it? It doesn’t really look like a tallit. Is it a shawl? Is it a scarf? Is it a new shawl, scarf type of tallit?”Or: “Rabbi, it doesn’t sit right on you. It’s lopsided.”Or a very generous offer of help: “Rabbi, can I give you a signal that your tallit is off, and that way, mid-sermon, you can make an adjustment?”Or: “The tallit must be a war tallit. That’s it. It’s dark. It’s blue. This is a war footing tallit which you are wearing to show solidarity with the IDF and our American troops in combat.”So first of all, thank you. Thank you for noticing and offering your feedback. The truth is, the tallit is not new. It is an old tallit renewed. Many years ago, my in laws were on vacation in Hawaii. My father in love saw this fabric, it was a white fabric with bright blue stars. It was not a tallit. He just imagined that it could be. So he bought the fabric and took it back to Minneapolis, where he was a rabbi. He gave the fabric to a local tallit-maker and asked her to make it into a tallit. He used it as a specialty tallit, wearing it only on Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot, because it was fun, it was different, it was Hawaii, it was celebratory, it captured festival energy.When my father in love retired in 2004, he gave this tallit to me. I loved it so much, because it reminded me of him, that I wore it every Shabbat, every holiday, including the High Holidays. It was the one and only tallit I ever wore. Every Yom Kippur Shira and I would walk home and she would say: “My father’s starry Hawaii tallit is not the right energy for Yom Kippur.” But I wore it anyway. At last the tallit got so tattered, torn and frayed beyond repair that I reluctantly concluded it was time to let it go. But Shira had heard of a local woman who is a tallit wizard. Shira gave this tallit wizard the tattered tallit and asked: Is there anything you can do with this? She worked on it for several weeks, and this is the result.The new tallit is different from the old tallit. It is not as big. It is a different color scheme. It is blue and blue instead of white and blue. But the core of the old is still in the new. It still has the bright stars that first captured my father in love’s attention. And it is still a gift from my father in love, a generational and emotional connection.The truth is that all of us are on the verge of our own moment making something new out of something old; making something that is ours out of something that we inherited from our parents and grandparents.
