On Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, Stephen Wise Temple Rabbi Sari Laufer delivered a Maui-related sermon for Rosh Hashanah, entitled “The Lesson of the Banyan Tree.” You can view and read other High Holy Day sermons, music, and photos on our High Holy Day Highlights page.

The Lahaina Banyan tree was planted in Lahaina, Maui on April 24, 1873, a gift from missionaries in India to mark the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the first American Protestant mission. When the Lahaina Banyan was planted, it was only eight feet tall. Today, the tree stands over 60 feet high. It has 46 major trunks, and over the years, has provided ample shaded space for locals and visitors to escape the Lahaina sun.

Like many landmarks and beloved gathering places, the Lahaina Banyan was completely engulfed in flames during the devastating wildfires this summer. Once the flames were extinguished, though, locals were relieved to see that the tree still stood. Her canopy was scorched, her leaves were dead, and the burnt bark and limbs gave it a spooky cast—but there she stood. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Lahaina Banyan has become a source—and a symbol—of hope, of possibility, of the potential for post-traumatic growth. Residents and arborists alike have their eyes on the famed and beloved tree, wondering whether it will survive.  In late August, the arborists caring for the tree told the community that while all of her trunks have living tissue behind the bark, she is low on sap. She is in a tree coma. 

And I thought to myself—man, aren’t we all? I guess maybe not? Some of us might be brimming with energy, feeling excited and optimistic about our  lives, our work, our families. I certainly am—sometimes. But also, I’m a working mom with two kids under the age of 10 (for a few more weeks), so ….

I’m tired. Maybe you are tired too. Maybe you are tired from treatments, from arguments, from maintaining the facade of the perfect life. Maybe you are exhausted by grief, by the gap between the life you imagined and the one you are living, by wondering and worrying about the world and the planet our children and their children will inherit—about fires and earthquakes and floods (oh my!). 

So maybe you arrived today, party hat at the ready—maybe this year was a year of only joy and celebration. Or, maybe you arrived today a little scorched and a little low on sap. 

But no matter how you might be feeling, today is still  Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world! And birthdays are for celebrating! Today is a day of new beginnings, new possibilities, new hopes! Some communities mark this day by reading the story of Creation; there is a sense of making a new world together. But our reading today takes us to the desert, to the scorching sun and blazing heat—to a woman uprooted and lost and hopeless. What better story for a birthday party!?!?

Our tradition has rarely—if ever—read the Hagar story as a tale of hope, much less of comfort or post-traumatic growth. Today, on this Rosh Hashanah morning, I want to suggest two ways that it might be, two ways that we might act in the world when we meet a Hagar, two ways we hope the people around us will act when we are Hagar—uprooted, lost, hopeless—and a little scorched. 

This morning, we meet Hagar wandering in the wilderness, banished from the only home she has ever known. She is lost and weak—physically and emotionally. Literally and metaphorically, she is not sure of her next step. And, I have to assume from my own travels with children, that the snacks are long gone, that Ishmael is hungry and thirsty and—again, speaking from experience—probably whining.

She is so desperate that she leaves her son under a bush, sitting far away so as not to witness his suffering, too traumatized to bear it. Rabbi David Kimchi, a 12th-century French rabbi better known as RaDaK, suggests that it was actually a small tree—and that the semantic difference matters. He says that unlike a desert bush, acclimated to the climate, a tree would have been doubly frustrating. She was so tired and so thirsty, and she knew there had to be a source of water nearby for these trees to exist. In the deepest moment of her trauma, even though intellectually she knew it had to be there, Hagar could not see a source of nourishment, of sustenance, of hope. 

But hope was there, and to understand how, I want to return to the banyan tree for a moment. Because at the same time as the arborists shared what sounded like a dire update, they also assured the public that there was someone now giving her regular care with good long soaks and sprays into her upper branches. They are aerating her soil, giving her compost tea, fertilizer, and mulch. There is someone taking care of her.

So the first lesson for today comes from those arborists, but appears in Hagar’s story too. It is a lesson of hope, of comfort, of caregiving. It is a lesson of showing up:

וַיִּקְרָא֩ מַלְאַ֨ךְ אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶל־הָגָר֙ מִן־הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם

God’s messenger called to Hagar from heaven …

Secretly a country music fan, one of my guilty pleasures is the Alabama song “Angels Among Us,” a Christmastime hit of 1993. About a thousand years before that song debuted, however, the Bekhor Shor—another medieval French rabbi—speaks of Hagar’s deliverance in the desert by saying that: Angels that appear to people on the earth are in the image of people; it is not known that they are angels. It is not, he writes, the way of the Holy Blessed One, to reveal [them]. God, he suggests, does not want us to know immediately that these people, these visitors who arrive at just the right moment, are angels. God wants us to see them as we see ourselves. Yesterday morning, a ram; today, an angel in human form directing us to water, to sustenance and hope and a life that is not only surviving, but thriving.

The news is full of incredible stories of rescuing angels–the firefighter who adopted the baby he found in a Safe Haven box. The first grade teacher who, wounded herself, walked her students to safety during a school shooting. The cardiologist who stopped his half-marathon run to save not one, but two runners with CPR. I believe, as Alabama sings, that there are angels among us. But life isn’t always that dramatic, and sometimes angels rescue us in much quieter ways.

The angel might be a distant colleague whose note after the death of a parent opens a new friendship. The angel might be a friend who, without asking, drops off a carton of art supplies and projects to occupy your children while you are caregiving an ailing parent. It might be the friend, or spouse, or child who sits wordlessly next to you during treatment, or the one who sends texts to make you laugh. It might be the friend or child who walks around the block with you as you rise from shiva. You don’t have to literally save someone who is drowning to be their angel—oftentimes just showing up, picking up the phone, dropping off a meal is what’s required.

Angels are the ones who just show up, again and again, whether you’ve asked them or not. 

Lesson 1a: We can, we should, be someone’s angel. My rabbi, Brene Brown, says that true compassion comes from knowing our own darkness “well enough to sit in the dark” with those who need us. Show up. 

It is not only the angel’s appearance which teaches us about hope, but their words. Lesson Number Two:

In the opening note of their book on trauma, resilience, and healing, Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey say that if we are willing to explore the question “what happened to you,” we might discover a path forward. Their contention is that, in meeting someone else’s pain—or perhaps our own—the fundamental question we ask should not be, “What’s wrong with you?” but rather, “What happened to you?”

Perhaps the angel of our story is an Oprah fan, because seeing Hagar, they say:

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר לָ֖הּ מַה־לָּ֣ךְ הָגָ֑ר אַל־תִּ֣ירְאִ֔י כִּֽי־שָׁמַ֧ע אֱלֹהִ֛ים אֶל־ק֥וֹל הַנַּ֖עַר בַּאֲשֶׁ֥ר הוּא־שָֽׁם׃

“What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heeded the cry of the boy where he is.”

What troubles you, Hagar? What happened to you? Not a judgment, not a diagnosis—an invitation. “Tell me your story,” God is asking. 

Richard Tedeschi is one of the psychologists who first coined the term post-traumatic growth, and he says that:

It’s important to acknowledge that as if we’re trying to move towards eventual post traumatic growth, we have to recognize that these events have really challenged the way we think about our lives and our anticipations of what’s going to be happening in our lives. That initial phase of looking at what’s happened and how it’s distressed and disturbed our lives is an important part of the change that comes in the future.

In order to grow from our pain, we have to sit with it, and we have to share it.

In 2018, the Columbia University Medical School established the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics. Among its programs is the narrative medicine program, a term coined in 2000 by department head Dr. Rita Charon. Seemingly countercultural in our nation of privatized, 15 minute healthcare, Dr. Charon maintains that listening to a patient’s entire story as opposed to just listing various symptoms is possible—and vastly preferable. Imagine, she explains, an elderly woman comes into the clinic, complaining of back pain. 

‘Have you had an X-ray or are you taking any medication? Have you seen a neurologist?’ The woman says, ‘Well, I can tell you what makes my back hurt. It’s when I pick up my grandson, and I get this feeling at the base of my spine.’ The doctor might then say, ‘What happens if you try aspirin or Motrin? Does that help?'”

What’s wrong with you, and what’s the easiest way to fix it and move on?

“But another doctor, if he was trained by us,” continued Charon, “would say, ‘Tell me about your grandson.’ And the grandmother would say, ‘He’s 18 years old and has autism, and I’m the one who’s been raising him since birth, but he’s bigger than I am now, so it’s very hard to pick him up.'”

What happened to you? What is your story? What shaped you and inspired you and hurts you and gives you hope? At its heart, narrative medicine is the commitment to hear what patients really have to say, to see them in their humanity—rather than in simply their medical complaints. What would change if we approached our loved ones, our friends—even our nudniks that way? God meets Ishmael ba-asher hu sham, where he is. God meets them in their fullness, exactly as who and what they are. Can we do the same? For ourselves and for others? 

Hagar’s story does end with redemption—for her and her son if not for the Jewish people. God shows her the well of water and leads her to drink, promising also that her son—almost abandoned twice—will be a great nation. They are given the promise of healing and post-traumatic growth. The Torah’s account is succinct and sudden; life is not. 

Redemption, healing, regrowth? Those take time. My colleague, Rabbi Michael Latz, reminded me that, “We don’t heal trauma through grand gestures. We heal it with gentleness and tenderness and showing up for each other, over and over again.” We heal it in Meal Trains and Yizkor services and laughter and a reminder in our calendar to check in days, weeks, and months after. We heal it by sharing our humanity, and seeing it in others, in approaching their stories with curiosity and not judgment. 

And guess what? Just the other day, just in time for this New Year, this day of the world’s birth, this day of new beginnings–botanists on Maui noticed a bright green leaf growing amidst the many trunks of the Lahaina Banyan.

Shanah Tovah.