Yesterday, Debbie and I returned home from our first-ever trip to Australia, a visit to our daughter who is studying there for the semester, and, as it turns out, a wonderful place to spend Passover. Of the many tales I have to share from down under, koalas included, I want to frame my thoughts today with a modest one: going to synagogue on the first day of the holiday.
I have always loved services on the first day of Passover, most of all because they include a prayer called Tal, meaning “dew,” announcing the arrival of spring in Israel. Tal marks the end of the rainy season and gives voice to a quiet hope: that the heat of the long summer months ahead will be tempered by the life-giving blessing of dew. Likely composed by the Hebrew poet Elazar HaKalir in Byzantine Palestine, the poetry of Tal is beautiful, and when chanted by cantors like ours, sublime.
I have heard Tal every year of my life, but until this year, never in Australia. And as I listened to the prayer in the Outback, I found myself thinking about its significance: not just the prayer itself, but what it says writ large about what it means to be a Jew. This morning I offer you three interrelated conceptual framings.
First, territory. Whether recited in Israel, America, Australia, or anywhere, the Tal prayer is one and the same. It is a petition not for the well-being of those reciting it, but specifically for those living in the land of Israel. As Americans, we are accustomed to praying facing east, toward Jerusalem. In Australia, one prays facing northwest. The direction changes, but the point, literally and figuratively, remains the same: the spiritual focus of global Jewry directed toward one particular place on the map, Israel.
Second, time. Connected, but less expected. I had never prayed Tal in the Southern Hemisphere. Here in New York, we are emerging from a long winter, ready for spring and summer. But in Australia, they are heading into winter. Last week they turned their clocks back for the fall. Their seasonal reality is the reverse of ours. And yet the prayer is unchanged, a uniform diasporic practice synchronized to a single sacred clock. I remarked to the bloke sitting next to me in synagogue how curious it was that we were praying for dew just as Australian winter was arriving. His body language suggested that neither my observation nor my accent held much interest for him, which, I suppose, is its own kind of insight. What binds us as Jews is not local calendars, but a shared, standardized, translocal sense of Jewish time.
And third, text. The accents may vary, and the languages Jews speak are diverse – English, Farsi, Turkish, Arabic, French, Spanish, and more – but the text is the same. Judaism does not fit neatly into categories of race, ethnicity, or nationality. Rather, we are a people of the book. It is the texts of our tradition – our prayers, our narratives, our laws – that have sustained us across time and place. More often than not, those words are in Hebrew, the linguistic thread that connects us from the opening verses of the Bible through Byzantine poetry to the headlines of Israeli news today. Many of us have had the experience that I did last week, of walking into a synagogue anywhere in the world and realizing that despite the differences, we still feel at home. Our prayers, poetry, and practices all emerge from the same shared textual inheritance.
Three interrelated concepts. Taken together, they are a way to frame Jewish life and living, reframed for sermonic purposes: territory, time, and text. Jews do not have a catechism – a fixed set of dogmatic assertions that function as a litmus test for entry or threshold for belonging. We may have our sages, but we have no pope, no centralized authority that speaks ex cathedra for us all. What connects us – and, I would hope, binds us – is something both more simple and more demanding: that we each, in our own way, engage with and aspire toward Jewish territory, Jewish time, and Jewish text.
Each concept deserves a sermon of its own, perhaps one day, a chapter in a book. Today, for reasons that will soon become clear, we shall begin with Jewish time. According to the secular calendar, today is Saturday, April 11, 2026. But for Jews, it is not the Gregorian calendar that anchors our peoplehood. It is the Hebrew calendar, and today is Shabbat, the 24th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, in the year 5786.
Let’s go deeper. A few minutes ago, we said the m’varchim ha-hodesh blessing for the coming month of Iyyar, which begins next week. When a Jew announces Iyyar, it signals far more than a mere turn of the calendar page. It marks the arrival, among other observances, of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, followed one week later by Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day for its fallen soldiers, and then, the very next day, Yom HaAtzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, the day on which David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the state in 1948. In no small way, these days frame the contemporary Jewish consciousness – from Shoah to gevurah, from the abyss of destruction to the triumph and the ongoing challenge of Jewish sovereignty. Each date discussed and debated, each one inscribed not only on the calendar, but on the Jewish psyche and our communal life.
It is a lot of dates, and a lot of emotions to hold at once. But in truth, this is only the beginning. Because if you ask any observant Jew what day it is today, they will begin by telling you it is the ninth day of the Omer.
The Omer refers to the 49-day counting period between Pesach and Shavuot. Originally a harvest measure, counting the Omer is a ritual rooted in our agricultural beginnings. Over time, it came to carry a second layer of meaning, linking Passover, our festival of freedom, to Shavuot, the festival that marks the giving of the Torah. We imagine the journey of the Israelites from the splitting of the sea to the foot of Mount Sinai, and we locate ourselves in that same progression, step by step, day by day. The freedoms of Passover find meaning only insofar as they are directed toward a higher calling and service to God.
It is a lot, and believe it or not, I could go on. The very name of our Torah reading is Sh’mini, referring to the eighth day – but it all points to the same thesis: to be a Jew is to live by the Jewish clock. Our time is calibrated not only by the secular calendar, but by the Jewish one, historical and metahistorical.
While traveling, I had the chance to read my doctoral advisor Paul Mendes-Flohr’s posthumously published biography of the prewar German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig understood the central challenge of the assimilated German Jew of his day – akin to that of the American Jew in our own – as the effort to live simultaneously in two worlds, secular and Jewish, “within time and beyond time.”
What Rosenzweig meant is that as modern Jews, we live with multiple, and often competing, claims on our hyphenated identities: the professions we choose, the pursuits we prioritize, the communities we join, the ways we educate our children, where we give our charity, and how we express our loyalties of every kind. And at the top of that list of balancing acts is the allocation of our most precious commodity of all: time. How we spend it, how we prioritize it, and whether we do so Jewishly.
Are the rhythms of our weeks, our months, our years marked by Jewish time? Do we anticipate and prepare for a coming holiday? Do we feel a sense of longing after it concludes? Do we invite people over for Shabbat dinner? Did March Madness refer only to basketball, or did it also include our Passover planning and celebrations? Do we see ourselves as inheritors of ancient Israel’s travels, travails, and triumphs? That their time is our time? That we are not merely remembering a story but meta-historically, living inside it?
As Rosenzweig makes clear, it is not a zero-sum equation. It is not that one clock cancels out the other, that we must choose between secular time and Jewish time. These tensions are not easily harmonized, if they can be harmonized at all. The question is whether we can live with that tension, claiming loyalty to both secular time and Jewish time, and in so doing, transform the push and pull between them into something creative, generative, and even sacred.
This is what it means to be a Jew today and – to raise the temperature just a bit – what it means to be part of the Park Avenue Synagogue community. Ours is a community that unapologetically affirms a connection to Jewish territory: the land of Israel is fundamental to who we are. Ours is a community that champions a deep engagement with Jewish text: literacy, study, observance, and lifelong learning. And ours is a community that champions, no less unapologetically, our connection to Jewish time.
It is why we gather for the holidays, why we mark sacred time together week after week, and why our congregational school meets on Shabbat. Not a day among others, but a principled choice, one that signals our commitment to the most foundational building block of Jewish time: Shabbat. As Ahad Ha’am famously wrote, “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.” A Shabbat-based congregational school is not for everyone, and that is not a moral judgment. I know there are many worthy claims on your time and on the time of your children, and I know we are not the only game in town. The expectation is not perfection, but something both more modest and more demanding: a clear, consistent signal that Shabbat is a priority in your life and in the life of your family. Sometimes it is important to restate communal commitments. Without shared commitments, we are not a community; we are a crowd. Without a shared sense of Jewish time, we lose the thread that connects Jews through time and space.
Solomon Schechter, the founding president of my alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary, once famously asked what, if anything, connected the twelfth-century sage Maimonides and the eleventh-century sage Rashi? The former lived in Cordova under Islam, the other in France under Christianity. One spoke Arabic, the other French. One was an Aristotelian, the other hardly knew the name Aristotle, and so on and so forth. Schechter answered his own question, stating that as they both observed the same fasts and feasts; as they both revered the same sacred symbols, though they put different interpretations on them; as they both prayed in the same language, Hebrew; as they both were devoted students of the same Torah, though they often differed in its explanation; . . . the bonds of unity were strong enough even to survive the misunderstandings between their respective followers.
For a people as small as ours, we are remarkably diverse – our origins, nationalities, ethnicities, politics, levels of observance, beliefs, and beyond. It is not uniformity that binds us, but the rhythms of Jewish living. Not agreement, but alignment. Jewish time – our feasts and fasts, sacred days – a common calendar of memory and aspiration. That is what holds us together across distance and difference, past, present, and future. And it is in that shared cadence that we have and will remain one people.