14 Elul: Rising Again

This summer, I haven’t been able to spend as much time as I’m used to spending at my family’s lake house on Cape Cod. After weeks away at conferences, I could feel the siren song of the lake drawing me for miles ahead of my arrival.  When I arrived, though, I found my beloved place had changed, and it was a bit disorienting.

We are drawn to return, to head back to the familiar. Especially at this time of the year, we Jews are tasked with doing teshuvah, repenting or returning.

I learned recently about the lifecycle of salmon. They hatch upstream, swim downstream and out to the ocean, where they live most of their lives.  Then, when they have matured — when they’ve grown old and look craggy and hook-nosed — they swim back upstream to their birthplaces to spawn. Shortly after spawning, they die, their bodies dissolving into nourishment for the environment.

For salmon returning from the ocean, this business of swimming upstream is no small feat; they are swimming up waterfalls, battling the pull of gravity and defying the odds of becoming dinner for bears, eagles and other wildlife.  A friend from the Pacific Northwest described with a smile her family’s tradition:  they love to stand by waterfalls, cheering on the salmon as they make their valiant upward leaps, rising again and again. And the fish are returning right during Elul!

I marvel that these fish are compelled to complete their cycle of returning to the very place where they hatched, there to spawn the next generation.

My friend described another interesting Pacific Northwest phenomenon.  For some time after Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, the surrounding landscape was barren and gray; in pictures it looks like the surface of the moon.  After a while, vegetation began to regrow and the rivers began to flow again— but now, the rivers were flowing along completely different courses.

I’m thinking of those fish, searching for the places where they had hatched, desperate to get back home to repeat their lifecycle, to be fertile and multiply. Against all odds, they were rising again, determined in their returning.  

We human beings also want to return. We yearn for old familiar places and old and better parts of ourselves— but like those salmon, we may find that the places we are returning to no longer look familiar.  Like the salmon, we too may have changed, sometimes beyond recognition.

We all know the old saw, “change is the one constant.”  One of the tasks of being human is meeting change and trying to accept it.  We acknowledge a new normal, ever-new in each moment, and we respond with as much grace as we can, despite the disorienting newness we encounter.  It is in figuring out how to move forward, how to respond and find equilibrium despite the changes, that we determine the quality of our lives.  Like the salmon, may we rise again.

Rabbi Judy Kummer is a board certified chaplain in private practice, offering in-person and remote skilled spiritual care visits, eldercare programing and lifecycle events. She has served as Executive Director of the Jewish Chaplaincy Council of MA and other nonprofits, and has served congregations in DC, NY and NJ. She is happiest outdoors hiking in the woods, swimming in a lake at sunset or tending to her Boston organic garden.