Congregants hug in front of what’s left of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center after it was destroyed by the Eaton Fire. Photo by Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Naomi Levy
January 17, 2025
This essay is adapted from a sermon the author delivered at her Los Angeles synagogue, Nashuva.
We are all so heartbroken over the devastating Los Angeles fires. Many of my congregants have lost everything.
This week, a dear friend of mine who lost his family’s home in the Palisades Fire said to me, “I’ve been dealing in my own way with all the things I’ve lost. But I’d love to talk to you about the spiritual angle in all of this. I believe that will give me strength.”
As it happens, this is a weekend when we honor the spiritual legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King — and our Shabbat Torah reading is about Moses and the burning bush. I can’t think of a better time to talk about loss, and the power of resilience.
Scholars who study human resilience teach us that if you want to instill resilience in your children, it’s essential not to downplay the difficulties in your history. Tell your children the story of your family, tell them the story of your people. Tell them the hardships that your ancestors endured and had to overcome so that your family could be here today. Knowing your story is the key to the art of resilience.
We are a people who know what it means to lose our homes. History has taught us to travel light. Whether we are Ashkenazic, Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews, we’ve learned that you can lose everything and rebuild.
My friend who asked me to discuss the spiritual angle of his lost home and the devastating fires always comes to our home with his wife on Sukkot. That’s been our tradition year after year. Sukkot teaches us about our people who found grace in the wilderness and in their wandering — who carried their sanctuary, their holy place, on their backs, and kept journeying toward the promised land.
So I talked to my friend about Sukkot, the holiday we have so often celebrated together. It reminds us, I said, of the power of our perseverance in the face of loss. Each year, eating outside in our temporary huts, we recall the fragility of our desert dwellings, so that we can understand that all we own, all we have, can vanish in an instant — but our spirit remains strong.
True shelter, Sukkot teaches us, does not reside in physical structures, but in the love we share with one another, in the ways we lift each other up.
That’s the miracle we are witnessing all over Los Angeles today, as thousands of people volunteer and donate to help strangers begin again.
Of course, Sukkot also teaches us that we can find shelter in God’s sheltering presence, in the comforting rhythms of the sun’s return each dawn, and in the hope we draw from the moon and stars through the dark night.
To all those who have lost their homes this week, I am not offering you these teachings to minimize your pain. I’m sharing these teachings to maximize your resilience. As a famous Hasidic teaching reminds us, sometimes the heart is not yet ready to receive. So place these teachings on your heart, and when your heart is ready, when the time is right, perhaps they will enter your heart like water on parched land, and you will be nourished.
Sometimes that nourishment flows from an unexpected source. I was reading in The New York Times last week about Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the famous sex therapist whom we lost this year. Dr. Ruth, it turns out, was a bit of a pack rat. While going through her apartment, her children found turtle figurines everywhere. Apparently, Dr. Ruth loved to collect turtles.
Dr. Ruth was a Holocaust refugee who, as a child, was put on the Kindertransport with nothing and sent by her mother to freedom. She lost both her parents in the Holocaust. Dr. Ruth said she loved turtles because the turtle has to stick its neck out to walk. We can stay closed and safe, but we’ll never get anywhere. Or we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable and keep growing, and keep going.
I remember once, when I was visiting Rome, our guide took us to a famous fountain adorned with turtles at the gates of the Jewish ghetto. Some say the turtle represents the Jew. We’ve learned to carry everything we need, our homes, our belongings on our backs. And in strength, we keep going.
In our Torah reading this week, Moses is shepherding his flock and he spots a bush on fire. We’re told, “And the bush was not consumed.” He comes closer to this marvel, and God calls out to him from that burning place. It’s a call that changed the course of Jewish history, a call that has inspired downtrodden people all across the globe through the centuries.
Our people have inspired the world not with the power of our numbers, but with the power of our hope.
The burning bush that was not consumed is a message planted in our souls: Homes have burned, but our spirit cannot be consumed.
Dr. King preached the message of Moses far and wide. Where others saw despair, he taught a vision of hope and possibility to our world, one that recalled Moses’ message, with profound consequences.
One message from the story of Moses that calls to me: Sometimes, anguish can be a source of strength. You can transform your grief, and even your outrage into a sacred calling to help others and to heal this world.
Dr. King didn’t preach his dream from a rosy place. He lifted the Black community and our world from a broken place.
Every Shabbat we pray these words of hope from the prophet Jeremiah when we sing Lecha Dodi: “The city shall be rebuilt upon its ruins.”
So may it be.
