Dear friends,

Last week, at the 2025 Covenant Award and Pomegranate Prize celebratory events, I had the privilege of addressing our community. My reflections, while personal, speak to the complexities of the current moment. As we approach Rosh Hashanah, I share these words with the hope that they offer you another meaningful entry point into the sacred work of introspection that Rosh Hashanah calls us toward. 

Wishing you all a year filled with health, meaning, and purpose,

Shana Tova U’Metukah, 

Joni

Recently, I read a quote in which Reb Nachman says, “My place is only the Land of Israel; wherever I travel, I travel only to the Land of Israel, and for the moment I shepherd in Breslov and similar places.” Another translation though less close to the original is “Wherever I journey, I journey only to the Land of Israel.”

When I read this, I began to think about my early understanding of Israel.  First, from my grandmother, my Bubbe, Devorah Siegel, who was a member of the Zionist women’s organization, Pioneer Women—now known as Na’amat. I would occasionally travel with her to meetings and somehow, I came to know that there was a plaque with her name on a bookshelf at Tel Aviv University library.  I have sincere doubts that it was true, but I do remember thinking as a 6 or maybe 7-year-old child that I would go to Israel and take a photograph of the plaque and show her when I returned. 

I must have intuited at her age that she couldn’t travel to Israel though she told me many times it was a dream of hers to do so. 

Around the same time, I had a 2^nd grade teacher, Morah Kagan, at the Chelsea Hebrew School in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A rather elegant and articulate woman, she would often paint us a beautiful picture of Israel sharing the things she read, films she saw and stories of family and friends who lived there.  She was a Holocaust survivor from Poland and a widow.  She had a kind of melancholy about her but when she spoke of Israel it seemed that she was transported.  She told us she was saving money dreaming of the day she would see her family and all the places she had heard and read about. 

This notion of dreaming — of seeing the land — has stayed with me all these years. Though the naivete of that little girl is gone. 

Since college, I have traveled to Israel most years, sometimes for work but always to see family, friends and colleagues. Each time I feel as if I am being awoken by the scent of the orchards and the sea and desert air.

I must admit to you that I have mixed and painful feelings about what is happening in the State of Israel regardless of who did what when.  I look away from the news more frequently than I ever have because I am both heartbroken and angry, protective and proud. 

Protective of my Israeli family, friends, colleagues and those I have never met — who over many years have experienced unbearable loss, are in harm’s way and continue to live in what has been and remains an untenable situation even when life may seem altogether normal from the outside. 

I am both angry and heartbroken about the current situation, the government’s failings over many years, Hamas’ relentless abuse, and the death toll and destruction in Gaza.  I am proud of all those who stand up and say, “we can do better.”

And through all of this –there is still no doubt that “wherever I journey, I journey only to the Land of Israel”—emotionally, spiritually and towards her promise and her possibility.

I am writing this on the 23^rd of Elul.  This is the day that is attributed to Noah sending the dove out a second time from the ark hoping for a sign that the flood is abating. On this day the dove came back with an olive branch in her mouth, announcing as it were, that land is near and the time to begin a new life has arrived.     

Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, President of Hebrew College, recently wrote:

“Elul offers us a prolonged, preparatory period of personal and communal soul-searching leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This is both a responsibility and a gift. Teshuva entails a different kind of return—arduous, uncertain, unpredictable, and alive. It is a return not to what was, but to what is and what might be. It is a return not to who we were, but to who we long to be. It is a return not to an irretrievable past, but to each other and to God. In this sense, the call to teshuva is a call to both belonging and becoming.”

In these waning days of Elul, my hope is for each of us to open our hearts to the long view of our history – with each breath we take — this history, most assuredly, lives inside each of us.  

And even through the pain and anguish of this time, I hope we can find it within ourselves to listen to the call of belonging and becoming.  To find the strength to stand up to injustice and cruelty and to use our imaginations – the creative forces inside each of us — to consider another way, to use our voices to summon a spirit of connection, and to use the divine spark within each of us to reveal that which is still hidden but is yearning to emerge. 

May we all go from strength to strength in this holy endeavor.