“Nothing Growing, but Everything to Learn,” Rabbi Jacobson’s 7/31/26 Qabbalat Shabbat Sermon

Rabbi Suzie Jacobson | Qabbalat Shabbat, July 31, 2026 | Temple Israel of Boston

View the video recording of Rabbi Jacobson’s sermon

Shabbat Shalom!

This week, Moses is at it again — another long pep talk to the Israelites, bolstering their confidence before they set foot in the Promised Land. But this time, we might catch him in a white lie.

Deuteronomy 11 opens with the predictable tropes: love Adonai, keep the mitzvot, remember what God did for you in Egypt, yada yada yada. But then Moses offers some curious, and possibly erroneous, farming advice:

“For the land that you are about to enter and possess is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come. There the grain you sowed had to be watered by your own labors, like a vegetable garden; but the land you are about to cross into and possess, a land of hills and valleys, soaks up its water from the rains of heaven. It is a land which Adonai your God looks after, on which Adonai your God always keeps an eye, from year’s beginning to year’s end.” (Deuteronomy 11:10-12)

This might sound reassuring to nomads who’ve been eating food from the sky for 40 years. But you’d have to be pretty ignorant of regional agriculture to call Egyptian farming a hand-watered vegetable garden and promise that Israel’s rains will bring abundance in comparison.

Egypt was arguably the best place to grow food in the ancient Near East, rivaled only by Mesopotamia. The Nile’s annual flooding guaranteed agricultural prosperity regardless of weather patterns — in a region not exactly known for reliable rain. Even Herodotus, the father of Western history, wrote that “it would be clear to anyone of sense who used his eyes… that the Egypt to which the Greeks sail is land that has been given to the Egyptians…  as a gift of the river.”

You can criticize Egypt for many things; poor agriculture is not one of them. If anything, the Israelites were about to face real disappointment — a land without the Nile, without reliable rainfall, without guaranteed plenty.

Rashi, in his commentary, seems to know little about farming, essentially summarizing the verse as “the land of Israel is SO much better than Egypt.” Ibn Ezra is more honest: “The land is not like the land of Egypt. On the contrary, the land needs God to keep God’s eye on it… Adonai will act like a person who sees all that the land needs and will give everything in its time.”

Egypt’s Nile allowed for a mostly consistent harvest. Israel’s land is not self-sufficient — only through relationship with the Divine and hard work will it produce what the people need. And we know from history and experience that the land of Israel has always required human work and innovation to become the promised land of milk and honey. The early history of the State of Israel teaches us that it takes tremendous human ingenuity to make a desert bloom, to turn brackish water drinkable, to feed a population in a land with real scarcity. Yes, it takes the blessing of rain, which we cannot control. But it also takes human care, creativity, and the constant tending of a people determined to thrive.

Every summer of my rabbinic career, I’ve allowed myself one sermon about my garden — droughts, marauding bunnies, heat waves, failed fences, and occasionally the miracle of an abundant tomato harvest. But this year, for the first time in my adult life, I don’t have a garden. I moved last May, and I have nothing to tend. Nothing to water when I get home. No weekend afternoons pulling weeds or mending fences. No harvest to share with friends. I haven’t bought a single bag of soil all season. I am on a gardening sabbatical — and yet the earth keeps having its magnificent summer without me. Everything is lush and green and growing. I am the one who is paused. When it rains now, I’m not gleeful about my garden — I’m mildly annoyed about canceled plans. When I see a bunny, I think it’s cute instead of cursing its appetite. Eat up, bunnies. You’re not bothering me this year.

But the pause isn’t only a loss. Any redirection of attention lets us notice what was always around us. Instead of focusing on what’s mine — my garden, my harvest, my labor — I get to notice God’s abundance everywhere, unclaimed by me: the rain, the sun, the whole cycling earth, providing for every plant and creature with a rhythm that has nothing to do with my involvement.

That, I think, is the deeper truth underneath Moses’s spin. He’s not really giving farming advice — he’s preparing a people for a harder life by reframing the hardship as intimacy. Egypt’s abundance ran on autopilot; you could live beside the Nile and barely have to look up. Israel would demand the opposite — constant attention, constant relationship, a people who have to actually notice the sky. Moses isn’t lying so much as he’s doing what leaders do before something difficult: he’s giving them a reason the difficulty will be worth it. 

Maybe that’s what this gardenless summer has been teaching me. Cultivation was never only about what I produced. It was about the attention itself — the daily habit of looking closely at something alive and asking what it needed. This year I’ve had to find that attention elsewhere: in a neighbor’s yard, in the adorable bunny I no longer resent, in the rain I no longer measure against my own growth. The soil isn’t mine this year, but the noticing still is.

That, maybe, is the real Torah underneath Moses’s white lie. Not that the rain-fed land is easier, or even better — but that a life that depends on relationship, on attention, on showing up season after season without guarantee, is a truer life than one that runs on autopilot. Whether or not we have a garden this summer, may we all notice what in our lives is asking for that kind of attention — Is it your people – your friends and family? Is it your work or your connection to the community? Is it your spiritual life or your physical and emotional health? What has been begging for your attention? What relationships do you need to nurture and cultivate so the garden of your life thrives? May we have the wisdom to keep showing up for whatever sustains us, rain or shine.