Rabbi Dan Slipakoff’s Rosh Hashanah 5787 Sermon

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Mah Rabu Ma’asecha Adonai!

How abundant, how wondrous, and how intricate are Your works, O God!

Will all you wonderful works of creation indulge me for a moment? Will you please hum? Don’t be shy, don’t try to be in unison, just find your note and go. I’ll start. Listen. An entire congregation buzzing together becomes a shared vibration, a living resonance. Each individual voice remains distinct, yet together we produce something no single person could ever create alone.

In my work as your rabbi, I spend many hours with colleagues and lay leaders wrestling with a stubborn question: How do we inspire people to connect? How do we help each other show up for a cause, for justice, or for our community when the world demands so much of our energy? Too often the default motivators in our world are fear, guilt, or forced obligation. But fear paralyzes us, guilt breeds resentment, and obligation can lead to burnout.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if the answer lies somewhere else: in gratitude. I’ve been asking myself what it might mean to actually become a more grateful person—not as an exercise in politeness or remembering to say thank you, but as a critical spiritual resource. A sustainable fuel for the caring fire within us. And, I learned, it makes us happier and healthier. This is not unsubstantiated; I encourage you to read the plethora of research on the positive effects of cultivating gratitude.

Back in April, my wife Ali gifted me a small book, The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She had grabbed it in part because she knew I have a soft spot for the Cedar Waxwing perched on the cover. You know that profound feeling when someone hands you a book that touches your soul before you even open it? Talk about feeling completely seen. Thank you, Ali. Kimmerer, an author, botanist, and member of the Potawatomi Nation—a people forcibly relocated to the prairies from their Great Lakes homelands—gave me language for what I was beginning to experience. In her seminal work, Braiding Sweetgrass, she writes about this exact kind of radical attention, weaving together Indigenous wisdom, plant science, and her own experiences to help heal our relationship with the world. Her insights have been my gratitude guide over the past two seasons.

Kimmerer reminded me that before I could cultivate that deep, action-driving gratitude, I needed to learn how to recognize what was already being given. I needed to learn (or remember?) how to notice, to pay attention to the good, abundant gifts right in front of me. I didn’t yet realize how much that simple act of paying attention would change the way I moved through the world.

Buzzing has been the sound of my summer. On my recent trip to South Africa, I had the opportunity to join the Ubuntu Beekeeping Initiative, which empowers women to become beekeepers and honey producers. They too were getting ready for Rosh Hashanah. I zipped into my protective bee suit, donned my mesh veil, and walked into the field of 20 humming hives. At first, it was overwhelming. There was so much noise. So much movement. Thousands, maybe millions of bees buzzing around me. And yet, something strange happened. As I stood there, the initial panic I felt subsided into a quiet stillness. I was not in charge here. I was not the center of the story. I was simply a visitor standing inside a vast, magnificent brilliance of creation.

The awe of the hive was the awe of the collective. The name Ubuntu is remarkably apt. Ubuntu is a philosophy shared through the Bantu language family meaning, “I am because we are.”

It was breathtaking. But it was distant. That night, when I got back to my hotel, I opened a short video my wife had sent me of our garden back in Boston. The camera zoomed in on our wild, overgrown raspberry bushes. And there they were. Our bees, buzzing around our raspberry bushes. Suddenly I recognized the sound as the sound of my community. The hives in South Africa had inspired awe. But the bees in my garden inspired something else: relationship. I had cleared space for them, watered the roots, and we share that small patch of soil. I wasn’t just looking at nature as an observer anymore; I was recognizing my neighbors. And once I began to see the world not as a backdrop of things, but as a neighborhood of beings, the way I spoke about it had to change.

Kimmerer calls this shift the “grammar of animacy.” In English, we tend to divide the world rather simply. There are people, and there are things. A person is a “who.” A tree is an “it.” A bee is an “it.” But in Potawatomi, the language itself makes a different distinction. The grammar changes depending on whether you are speaking about something that is alive. Many things we would think of as nouns are expressed as verbs. There is a Potawatomi verb that means “to be a river.” Because a river isn’t just a thing sitting there as an object waiting to be described. It is being a river. Life is happening. Ready for this? The Potawatomi verb used for anything animate is yawe. Yahweh! Yud, Hey, Vuv, Hey, our eternal name for God! What a staggering cosmic confluence! Two distinct traditions, separated by time and space, reached for the exact same breath of sound to name what is alive. In Hebrew, God’s name is rooted in Being itself. In Potawatomi, to speak of any living creature is to declare its yawe.

Oh I just love it. There is a radical dignity in calling a river or a bee a “who.” But the danger of our modern language is that it works in reverse. When we turn the natural world into an “it”, a commodity to exploit, an object to flatten, we rarely stop there. We start turning each other into an “it.” We reduce complex human beings to categories, statistics, or background noise. We strip away each other’s animacy; we devalue our lives. We risk looking right at a neighbor in pain and seeing an inconvenient object. When we reduce the world to things, indifference becomes too easy.

But Judaism refuses to let us stay in a callous place of dissociation. This is why our tradition insists that our very identity begins with giving thanks. The very word for Jew, Yehudi, comes from todah, from giving thanks. Same goes for modeh, the first word in the first prayer we are invited to recite every morning. Giving thanks, naming gratitude, is our primary defense against dehumanization. To be a Jew is to practice seeing the “who” in Creation before we do anything else.

I recognize the warning I mentioned earlier: if we recite Modeh Ani simply out of rote obligation, we miss the point entirely. But our tradition isn’t just enforcing a rule; it’s helping us build an identity. Judaism has understood for millennia what James Clear writes in Atomic Habits: that repeated actions shape our sense of self. We eventually become the people our habits tell us we are. Our tradition knows that if we wait until we naturally feel grateful to give thanks, we might be waiting a long time. Gratitude is not a given, but it is a resource that is always there if you are willing to access and cultivate it. Even if you are in a season of personal suffering, there are still small things to anchor you—as small as a good cup of coffee. And that is why our tradition puts the words in our mouths first.

We wake up and say Modeh Ani. We eat and say a blessing. We see something beautiful and give thanks. So this summer, my family started focusing on cultivating this gratitude. My sons and I say ‘Good Morning’ to the morning, we try to thank the cook when we sit down for dinner together, and we share something each day that made us say, ‘wow.’ We perform the action, again and again, until gratitude stops being something we do and becomes part of who we are. It’s a work in progress, but we’re on the right path. I am so thankful to inherit a spiritual scaffolding that doesn’t just expect me to care about the world, but actually gives me the daily, habit-building tools to become a person capable of caring. Because once you do the work to become that kind of person, you begin to see the world differently.

As Rabbi Joachim Prinz famously declared: “Neighbor is not a geographic term; it is a moral concept.” A neighborhood isn’t just a cluster of houses. It’s a web of living relationships. You know who lives there. You notice when someone is missing or in trouble. You realize that their flourishing is intimately bound up with your own.

So back to my garden: Our raspberry bushes didn’t start in our yard. Years ago, my father-in-law dug up their roots from my wife’s childhood home right before her parents sold the house. Standing in our yard this past summer, watching Ali and the kids delicately wade through the overgrown brambles, I realized those bushes carry more than just berries. As the bees landed on those blossoms, they weren’t just pollinating plants; they were nourishing a living thread of family history. This year, the five original canes have spread everywhere, becoming a jungle. Besides the bees, the robins nested in the thicket, their beautiful blue eggs tucked among the branches. They ate the berries, along with catbirds and house sparrows. The bunnies ate what the birds dropped. All of these berry eaters living in our yard, and yet, there were still plenty of berries for us, once everyone else had feasted. For years, I might have looked at that yard and seen disconnected things: soil, plants, birds, bugs, and rodents. Now I see an ecosystem. I see interdependence.

Once I started seeing my world as a moral neighborhood, how I moved through it fundamentally changed. I notice dry soil and wilting leaves not out of a nagging sense of chore, but out of genuine care. When you stop being a passive consumer of creation, you become an active participant in the web of life. The garden is a gentle training ground for the much harder work of human community. Because once your eyes are opened to interdependence in a small patch of soil, you grow attuned to the strains on the humanity all around us.

Our tradition has a specific, piercing wisdom for the exact moment when another person’s pain enters our field of vision. The Torah commands: Lo tuchal l’hitalem. You must not remain indifferent. You cannot hide yourself. In Deuteronomy, this commandment appears in a law about lost property: if you see your neighbor’s ox or garment abandoned on the side of the road, you return it. You do not pretend you didn’t see it. You do not simply pass by.

It is deeply human to feel overwhelmed by the scale of suffering in our world. When problems feel vast, our natural impulse isn’t malice or coldness, it is self-preservation. We pull back, we shield our hearts, simply trying to manage the weight of our own lives and protect ourselves from feeling helpless. Our tradition meets us right there in that vulnerability. Lo tuchal l’hitalem is not a scolding; it is a gentle, but urgent invitation back into connection. It acknowledges that while none of us can carry the entire world, none of us is meant to walk away from it.

When the Haudenosaunee people, whose ancestral lands encompass upstate New York, share their traditional Thanksgiving Address, they give thanks for every single part of Creation. From the air to the plants to the animals to the humans, the list grows wonderfully, sometimes overwhelmingly long. Kimmerer smirks sarcastically at this, fretting: “Oh, what a pity that we have so much to be thankful for.”

But when we turn our eyes to the world, our questions multiply right alongside our blessings: What does it mean to be grateful for a warm home when a neighbor is unhoused? For food when families down the street face empty bellies? For freedom when so many live in fear of authoritarianism? For the love that surrounds us when someone sitting in this room feels lonely? Is our list of things to worry about getting long? What a gift we have so much to care about.

Once we recognize the ties that bind us together, we realize that we aren’t isolated bystanders trying to survive on our own. We are neighbors in a shared home. And being a neighbor means stepping forward, not to fix everything, but to find a way to care for the people living alongside us. The world does not ask you to solve everything—it simply asks you to share your gift back into the system. And every single one of us has the capacity to care. Each of us has something of immense value to bring to the table, and our world desperately needs all of it.

We come back to where we started—with gratitude. Gratitude is the renewable fuel that sustains our caring. When the world feels hard, and the weight of it feels too much, you can tap into the specific places and the specific beings for which you are deeply grateful, remembering exactly why this world is worth repairing. It is the daily practice that keeps our hearts open and our eyes focused when the work of repairing the world feels heavy. We are called to practice noticing. To actively cultivate a habit of gratitude that opens our eyes and hearts to the neighborhood around us, and then to carry that gratitude forward into reciprocity.

My life gives me a lot to care about, and also a lot of care, from people like all of you in this sanctuary this morning. I have received the gift of being present during some of your highest highs, and your lowest lows. And when I gaze out into this congregation, I am in awe of the full spectrum of the human condition which is etched across your many faces. And so it is my deeply honored duty to care. And to pay it forward. To share the wisdom I receive from you with another neighbor, or connect you with a new friend or a new opportunity. Or to be with you in a punctuated moment of need or in a seemingly mundane passing of time.

You are a vibrant ecosystem of beings, each carrying a spark of the divine yawe within you. On this Rosh Hashanah, as Creation is once again made new, let us notice the gifts right in front of us. Let us cultivate our gratitude, and offer our gifts back to the world and one another.

One voice humming in a room is a lonely sound. But an entire congregation, fueled by gratitude and bringing its unique gifts, buzzing together in mutual care—that is a sound to be grateful for.

So let’s fill this sanctuary one more time. Will you hum with me once more? (Pause as the congregation hums and buzzes together)

Mah Rabu Ma’asecha Adonai! How abundant, how wondrous, and how intricate are Your works, O God!