Our Choir Director Julie Buehler’s Introduction to Choir Anthem: “Light One Candle” by Peter Yarrow

This week is a Jewish holiday—though that’s not why we’re doing this song. It’s the holiday of Purim—based on the Book of Esther—a celebration of the power of an upstander to stop violence. There are many elements of this story: a Persian queen who sacrifices her royal marriage because she refuses to be objectified, a civil servant who refuses to bow down to a false leader, a secret Jew who gives up her identity to prevent a genocide.

But we are not singing this song because of Purim. Nor are we singing it because it refers to lighting candles for the Maccabees, celebrated in another Jewish holiday, Hanukkah, for which the song is commonly known.

We are singing this song because our world needs more than just hope right now. The world needs activism. Activism to celebrate the human and humane within each of us, activism to say no, activism to stick up for those in need, activism to light a real candle of hope or a metaphoric candle of action, helping others.

The shared traditions that make up Unitarian Universalism contain much evidence of active resistance; this song reminds us that justice and freedom demand activism, and that peace requires wisdom, and that society needs to remember the commitment and belief of those who came before us.

Sermon

Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.

As our choir director Julie noted in her introduction to “Light One Candle,” both the holiday of Purim—which began this Thursday at sundown and concluded at nightfall on Friday—and the holiday of Hanukkah, for which “Light One Candle” was written, celebrate resistance.

Sometimes resistance requires also some subterfuge. This week in her blog “Life is a Sacred Text,” Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg titled her March 10 entry “Esther: The Patron, uh, Saint of Crypto-Jewry.” Rabbi Ruttenberg wrote on Monday,

“Purim is almost here. (It begins this Thursday night!)

“So today we’re going to look at a place where that holiday has a particularly strong historical resonance…

“Let’s begin with a bit of context, first, shall we?

“We’ve got the Reconquista—the Christian battles to wrest what’s now Spain from Muslim rule; by 1248, the Christians controlled everything but the small state of Grenada in the south. (That last bit they got in… January, 1492.)

“Anti-Jewish violence, in the wake of incitement, began in earnest in 1391—at which point many Jews became conversos, converted to Catholicism. But some / many tried to be Crypto-Jews: secret Jews who attempted to maintain their own tradition in secret.

“Then, in the summer of 1492, the monarchs of Spain (and five years later, Portugal), commanded all Jews to either convert or be expelled from the country, leaving behind everything they owned, setting out impoverished on a perilous journey. So even though an estimated 100,000 or more did leave, many more decided to stay and go the Crypto-Jewish route….

“One holiday that was of particular importance to many Crypto-Jews was, yep, Purim—the story of Esther, chosen to be queen from among all the trafficked virgin maidens in the kingdom, but urged by her kin Mordechai to hide her Jewishness from King Ahasverus for her own safety.

(She even changed her name from Hadassah to Esther, and Esther’s root word means hidden. And traditions suggested that she found ways to navigate keeping kosher and Shabbat as she could—needless to say, this story resonated for many Crypto-Jews.)

“Crypto-Jews observed Purim under the slightly safer name, ‘Festival de Santa Esterica,’ (Festival of Saint Esther) and then, eventually in the Southwest and Latin America, ‘Dia de Ester’ (Esther’s Day)…..

“The Spanish Inquisition was abolished in… 1834. When the Mallorcan Jewish community was finally recognized by the Israeli Rabbinate in 2011, they noted that Purim was especially significant to these folks. All these hundreds of years later,” (from Esther: The Patron, uh, Saint of Crypto-Jewry).

Today in our own country, some people find that they must be in hiding in certain contexts for their own protection. The Washington Post this week published a story titled “‘I don’t feel safe’: Trump’s passport gender policy sparks fear for trans travelers.”

Reporter Hannah Sampson wrote, “Westley Ebling and his partner gave each other the same gift for Christmas: the promise of a trip to Mexico City this fall.

“The trip would have capped years of effort to get where Ebling is now, at 26: living as a transmasculine nonbinary person with all his legal documents in alignment. Except the one that he says would allow him to travel freely.

“Ebling, who lives in Washington, applied to update his passport with a male gender marker in mid-January, before President Donald Trump took office. The application arrived at the State Department after Trump signed an executive order reversing policies that allowed transgender, nonbinary and intersex people to mark their gender as “X” or to select the gender marker of their choice without providing medical documents.

“For weeks, it was stuck in what Ebling described as ‘passport purgatory,’ despite his payment for expedited service.

“’They still have my passport, but even if I were to get it back, I’m not sure I could travel with it,’ said Ebling, who works for the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Lambda Legal, in an interview last month. ‘It’s basically like transgender folks have been put on an informal travel ban, unable to leave the country that so despises us.’” (from ‘I don’t feel safe’: Trump’s passport gender policy sparks fear for trans travelers – The Washington Post).

Others are being expelled from the country, or—while not being expelled from the country—are being expelled from their jobs. The NPR radio show “Here and Now” this week featured an interview with Lt. Cmdr. Geirid Morgan, a transgender Navy officer and former rescue diver, about President Trump’s executive order banning transgender troops from serving in the military. Morgan is one of several plaintiffs in a lawsuit that is challenging the constitutionality of this order. (from Trans Navy officer reacts to looming ban on trans service members in the military | Here & Now). The piece noted that there are 14–15,000 trans-identified people in our military, most in leadership positions, all of whom could soon be expelled.

The same “Here and Now” episode also featured a short piece on Mahmoud Khalil. Heather Cox Richardson, in her March 10, 2025 “Letters from an American,” gave a more detailed account.

She wrote, “…the administration’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Syrian-born Palestinian activist who figured prominently in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University last April, seems designed to rock society. According to Democracy Now, Khalil is an Algerian citizen, but he holds a U.S. green card and is married to a U.S. citizen who is 8 months pregnant.

“…. On Saturday, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Khalil….

“The revocation of a green card is very rare. The Associated Press noted that the Department of Homeland Security can begin the process of deportation for lawful permanent residents who are connected to alleged criminal activity. But Khalil hasn’t been charged with a crime….

“… the Trump administration has arrested and detained a legal resident for expressing an opinion that Trump officials don’t like, likely using Khalil to launch this extraordinary attack on the First Amendment because they don’t expect Americans to care deeply about his fate. Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters, though, officials will use it to silence opposition broadly….” Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American March 10, 2025.

So, where am I going with all this in the sermon that opens our pledge season, as we sometimes jokingly call it, “The Sermon on the Amount?”

Let me refer to a third Jewish holiday, Tu B’Shvat. This is the holiday that originally marked the end of the tax year for fruit. In Rabbi Arthur O. Waskow’s book Seasons of Our Joy: A Modern Guide to the Jewish Holidays, he writes, “The tithing system included a one-tenth tax on fruit. The tithe of fruit could only be given on behalf of the fruit crop of a given year out of the fruit that actually ripened in that year. So in order to organize the tithe correctly there had to be a tax year—and agreed date by which to define the end of the fruit crop of the previous year, and the beginning of the fruit crop of the next year.” This year, Tu B’Shvat began at sundown February 12 and ended at nightfall on February 13. Waskow writes, “Why was the late winter month considered the time to end and to begin the year of the fruit crop? Because, the Gemara explains, even though most of winter is still to come, most of the rain had already fallen—so the trees begin to drink from it, and their sap to rise…. For hundreds of years, this midwinter fiscal new year of fruit trees was viewed as a minor holiday.

This year, our pledge theme is “rooted in love,” and we will use the symbol of a tree too represent our congregation. As I said in our Time for All Ages, I learned in my summer working at Sequoia National Forest that sequoias need fire. Without it, their cones won’t open and release their seeds. This congregation already has survived a pretty large fire, a worldwide pandemic. Many other small congregations did not survive that.

What we are facing now, though, seems even more threatening than a pandemic. Even when we didn’t know how COVID spread and we were closing outdoor playgrounds and sanitizing our groceries, we were all still identifying the same fire, COVID. The same fire was threatening all of us.

Today we seem to have multiple fires surrounding us. This one is starting on our trans neighbors, this one on our immigrant neighbors, this one on our federal worker neighbors, this one on farmers who said they were doing anything to address climate change, this one on anyone whose work in any way includes diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, this one on Ukrainians, this one on the city of DC, this one on Medicaid recipients.

Not all of us survived COVID. How many of us will survive this multiple conflagration? I suggest that one of the things that will help us and others survive is this congregation. The roots of this place can ground us. The strong surrounding bark of this congregation may protect us. The branches of this place may give us places of relative safety from which we may speak and act.

To return to Tu B’Shvat, Waskow says, “In the last 500 years, Tu B’Shvat has taken on more significance.”

Waskow notes this renewed interest began with mystics in the town of Safed, above the Galilee. The mystics connected this festival of the trees to a Kabbalistic image of the emanation of God as a tree, and to the tree of life in the garden of Eden as a symbol for the Torah. They created a seder of fruit eating as a celebration.

That fruit seder for Tu B’Shvat eventually made its way from the mystics of Safed into the wider Jewish community. In the late nineteenth century, the growing Jewish settlements in Palestine began having their children plant trees on Tu B’Shvat, and the Jewish National Fund began collecting money from Jews around the world for planting trees in Israel.

Waskow notes, “In the early 1970s the many-layered Jewish imagery of trees—biblical, Kabbalistic and Zionist—became important to a number of Jews who were seeking to work in an explicitly Jewish way toward ending the Vietnam War. Most were young, but they included the venerable teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel. To them it became a special concern that United States government policy took as one of its tasks the destruction of Vietnamese forests—and to them it felt especially striking that Torah requires that even if one decided to make war against a city, its trees must be protected.

“Out of this focus on the tree they developed a Campaign for Trees and Life for Vietnam, which raised money for reforestation and reconstruction of devastated areas of Vietnam and which planted symbolic trees of peace in such places as the U.S. Capitol. Often these plantings were done on Tu B’Shvat, and the day became (to a rather small number of people) a focus of caring and working for peace.”

Like the day of Tu B’Shvat, our congregation can become a focus of caring and of working for peace and justice, even if for a rather small number of people. But the way it becomes that focus for any of us is through the work and support of all of us. It is our time, our talent, our treasure that grows the tree that is the Unitarian Universalist congregation here in Somerville.

I want to share from Waskow again, but for those unfamiliar with Jewish tradition, when Moses is called by God to confront Pharaoh and lead his people out of Egypt, God speaks to him from a burning bush, a burning bush that is not consumed by the fire. Moses asks who God is, and the name God claims is so holy that it is never spoken, but it is translated as “I am who I am” or “I am who I am becoming.”

Waskow ends his chapter on Tu B’Shvat by saying, “From the same command of the Torah not to destroy trees in wartime, the rabbis deduced the general command of “Bal Tasch-chit (Do not destroy),” an entire ethic of protecting the natural world…. If even the trees of our enemies are to be preserved, they said, all the more the earth and air and water when there is no war. So out of their own expansion of the verse of Torah that protects trees into a pattern of protecting the environment, we might draw a general expansion of Tu B’Shvat into a day of celebration and reaffirmation of the necessity of protecting God’s world.

“Indeed, Tu B’Shvat comes at precisely the most precarious moment in the cycle of nature. The darkness of Hanukkah may look more frightening to human eyes, but the actual danger to non-human life is greater when the cold has set deeper…

“The ancient Jewish sensitivity to the tree as a symbol and metaphor of Torah (the Tree of Life) and God (the Tree of the S’phirot) is what stirred the interest of the comparatively modern Kabbalists of Safed in Tu B’Shvat. We may extend their sensitivity by looking at the Most Holy Name of God as a calligraphic tree in the cycle of its life: (Then Waskow spells out the name) the Yod, a tiny seed; the Hay, a flowing curving expanse of roots; the Vav, a tall trunk; the Hay, a flowing curving expanse of branches. From the branches and their fruit come the new seed, the new Yod. The tree like the Yod-Hay-Vav-Hay, always begins anew; can always say—like the Yod-Hay-Vav-Hay—I AM WHAT I AM BECOMING.” Our congregation too is always what it is becoming, and we each have a part to play in that becoming, especially in this precarious time.

I end with a story by UU minister Lynn Gardner.

“The tree stood in the middle of the village. Its trunk was so large that it took six people holding hands to reach around it. The roots were strong and wide, and its branches spread out over the village square, offering shelter from the rain, or shade from the summer sun. Its fruit was juicy, sweet, and plentiful.

“The people of the village loved the tree. Children played beneath it and climbed its lowest branches. Young people knew that if you whispered your dreams to the tree, they were more likely to come true. People who proclaimed their love or friendship for one another beneath its branches found their relationships to be nourishing, and elders discovered that their sweetest memories could be counted on when they were near the great tree. The tree had been witness to so much, and when the breezes blew through the leaves, one could hear echoes of generations: laughter, conversations, dreams, prayers, and songs.

“Animals loved the tree, too. Rabbits lived in burrows under the roots, squirrels and monkeys lived in the branches, and bats and birds flew in to eat the abundant fruit. The tree seemed to buzz with life!

“One day, a traveling merchant arrived in the village. He rested in the shade and ate two pieces of delicious fruit. ‘This fruit is incredible,’ he said. ‘I would like to have some to sell in the next villages that I visit. Who owns this tree?’

“’No one owns this tree,’ replied a villager. ‘If anything, we belong to it.’

“’Well, then, if no one owns the tree, then no one will mind if I pick the fruit!’ said the merchant, and began to fill a basket.

“’I mind,’ said the villager, ‘and today I am the keeper of the tree.’

“’What do you mean, keeper of the tree?’

“’We each take our turn being here with the tree. We could never own it. We are here as protectors, as sustainers.’

“’That’s ridiculous. This tree doesn’t need you! You could just take what you need; take what you want. The tree will continue.’

“But the villager couldn’t be persuaded. ‘Sir, this tree isn’t like that. We don’t come here to take from it…even though we receive much. We are keepers of the tree because this is where we are nourished. This is where some of our most precious memories are, and where our people have dreamed. This is where we remember who we want to become.’

“’Well,’ said the merchant, ‘you may think this tree is very special, but it still doesn’t need you to sit with it. That is preposterous!’

“’Ah,’ replied the villager. ‘The tree itself may not need me—but what of others who come by? Just this morning I sat with a woman whose heart was heavy with worry. Had I not been here, she would have had to carry that weight alone. And this afternoon, a tired couple came by, and they rested with me. They said they had been looking for a place like this. And then an elder came by, and we watched the birds in the branches together.

“’And now you are here. You were confused about what this tree is, and how to be with it. Imagine if you had arrived and not found anyone here to talk with? You might have continued thinking that everything you do is all about you. Luckily for you, my friend, I’m here to let you know that when you care for the tree of life, it becomes about so much more than just you.’

“And the merchant sat for a while in the shade, thinking about these ideas that felt new and a little challenging. As the sun went down, he picked up his bag and headed out of town, whistling a song that he hadn’t thought of in years. On his way, he shared a smile with each person he met, his heart feeling strangely light and joyful.

“And the people of the village? They continued to sustain the tree of life: to care for one another and to share their gifts, with grace and gratitude. May it be so for each of us.”

May we care for this tree, the tree that is our spiritual home, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Somerset Hills.

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