Rabbi Brad Levenberg
Outside my office window is a Japanese Maple tree that captures my imagination every year. Maybe it’s because of how I like to sit in my office, on the couch with my eyes tilted toward the window and the tree always in my sightlines. I love watching that tree, watching it grow year after year, watching its leaves turn a deep red every fall (as it is doing right now). I know that at one point, that tree was fragile, almost spindly. Today, though, it casts shade, shelters birds, and punctuates the season. What was once a hope, that the tree would grow and grow strong, is now a part of our landscape.
This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, offers a similar lesson. The blessings it describes are not quick or dramatic. They are blessings that appear slowly: a harvest that grows, a home that endures, a community that passes tradition from grandparent to parent and parent to child and child to grandchild. The Torah is teaching us that faithfulness is not measured in days but in decades.
That is both a comforting and a challenging understanding. Comforting, because it tells us that our work matters even when we don’t see results right away. Challenging, because it asks us to keep showing up, to keep planting seeds, to keep nurturing traditions, all the while trusting that, in time, they will bear fruit.
Congregational life is like that, too. We often measure with immediate numbers: attendance, programs, costs. But what matters most is harder to count: the child who sings the prayers years later, the member who feels held during loss, the friendships that carry people through life’s seasons.
In perhaps the least 2025 thing of all, Ki Tavo invites us to be patient and to trust that our labor of love will blossom in ways we may never fully witness. It invites us to remember that the truest blessings endure across generations, just as our people have endured.
May we walk this long path together, planting and tending, so that those who come after us will inherit shade and shelter, and, perhaps even more importantly, know that they are part of a story larger than their own.
Shabbat Shalom.
