March 21, 2026
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Vayikra
Redemption Song
March 21, 2026 – 3 Nisan, 5786
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
For the last two weeks, I have been wearing this tallit. At Kiddush, both weeks, I have discovered that our congregation is very generous when it comes to offering feedback. People had opinions about the tallit which they shared promptly and candidly.
Comments like: “What’s with that new tallit? What is it? It doesn’t really look like a tallit. Is it a shawl? Is it a scarf? Is it a new shawl, scarf type of tallit?”
Or: “Rabbi, it doesn’t sit right on you. It’s lopsided.”
Or a very generous offer of help: “Rabbi, can I give you a signal that your tallit is off, and that way, mid-sermon, you can make an adjustment?”
Or: “The tallit must be a war tallit. That’s it. It’s dark. It’s blue. This is a war footing tallit which you are wearing to show solidarity with the IDF and our American troops in combat.”
So first of all, thank you. Thank you for noticing and offering your feedback.
The truth is, the tallit is not new. It is an old tallit renewed.
Many years ago, my in laws were on vacation in Hawaii. My father in love saw this fabric, it was a white fabric with bright blue stars. It was not a tallit. He just imagined that it could be. So he bought the fabric and took it back to Minneapolis, where he was a rabbi. He gave the fabric to a local tallit-maker and asked her to make it into a tallit. He used it as a specialty tallit, wearing it only on Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot, because it was fun, it was different, it was Hawaii, it was celebratory, it captured festival energy.
When my father in love retired in 2004, he gave this tallit to me. I loved it so much, because it reminded me of him, that I wore it every Shabbat, every holiday, including the High Holidays. It was the one and only tallit I ever wore. Every Yom Kippur Shira and I would walk home and she would say: “My father’s starry Hawaii tallit is not the right energy for Yom Kippur.” But I wore it anyway.
At last the tallit got so tattered, torn and frayed beyond repair that I reluctantly concluded it was time to let it go.
But Shira had heard of a local woman who is a tallit wizard. Shira gave this tallit wizard the tattered tallit and asked: Is there anything you can do with this? She worked on it for several weeks, and this is the result.
The new tallit is different from the old tallit. It is not as big. It is a different color scheme. It is blue and blue instead of white and blue. But the core of the old is still in the new. It still has the bright stars that first captured my father in love’s attention. And it is still a gift from my father in love, a generational and emotional connection.
The truth is that all of us are on the verge of our own moment making something new out of something old; making something that is ours out of something that we inherited from our parents and grandparents.
The writer Allegra Goodman recently published a collection of short stories about the Rubinstein family of Boston. It is called This is Not about Us. One of the stories is about the weight, the trauma, and the promise of Passover seders when different family members have different approaches. It is a multi-generational family. The oldest generation, Irving and Jeanne, had two sons, Steve and Dan. Irving was a Holocaust survivor. He was exceptionally stern when it came to the seders. It was a pure Maxwell House seder, the people around the table reading paragraph after paragraph dutifully, without joy.
Roll the film forward. Their parents have passed. The sons are now the older generation.
Dan is the father of Phoebe, a twenty-something musician who drives in a van throughout the country with her boyfriend Wyatt, with their guitars, scrounging up a living as itinerant performers. They are vegan. So much diversity in one family.
Dan runs the first seder as his father did, joylessly, reading every paragraph of the Maxwell House Haggadah. But the second seder shifts to brother Steve’s home. Steve’s wife Andrea runs the seder, and it could not be more different. Allegra Goodman writes:
While Dan was non-practicing Orthodox, Steve was egalitarian, which meant
Andrea did everything. She had compiled her own Haggadah with readings from
Emma Lazarus to Emma Goldman. At Andrea’s table, you never knew what
would turn up. An orange for oppressed humans. A tomato for migrant farmers.
A banana for refugees…
Instead of moving everyone along, Andrea stopped to ask deep questions.
“What is freedom? What is it, Nate”
“Um,” he said.
“Is it doing whatever you want?”
The seventeen-year old knew better than to say yes.
The seder continues in that conversational, improvisational mode, supplemented by instrumental music. The sons, raised in their father’s stern way, retire to a different room while the rest of the table sings. Hearing the sound of music that their father would never have countenanced at a seder, the brothers ask: “What would Dad say if he were here?”
And they realize that their father and their children, who had never met, since the father died young, would never have understood one another. The vegan free-spirited itinerant musician and the Holocaust survivor, Phoebe and Irving, would have stared at one another with mutual incomprehension. Is there a healing for this divide?
The title of this short story is “Redemption Song,” which is the title of the last song that reggae artist Bob Marley ever sang. The story ends with the younger generation, in Allegra Goodman’s words, “bellowing Bob Marley’s Redemption Song.”
Which inspired me to do some research on this song. Bob Marley wrote and sang this song in the shadow of his own imminent mortality, while living with advancing cancer. His widow, Rita Marley, explained that while composing and singing Redemption Song, he was in a lot of physical pain. Musical historians describe Redemption Song as his “last testament.” Unusual for Bob Marley, he sang this song unaccompanied by other musicians. Just him. Just his voice. The core message is that if we want redemption, we have to make it happen ourselves. It is on us.
In Allegra Goodman’s story, the younger generations succeed in reclaiming the meaning and joy of the seder by making it their own.
Which means that the question of the hour is: What is your redemption song? How do each of us create a seder that we would want to attend? How do each of us create a seder that our children and grandchildren would want to attend? How do we take the seder that we inherited and make it our own? How do we take what is old and make it new again?
For my father’s tallit, and for all of our seders, there is a lovely flip when we take what is old and make it new again. Ironically, by changing things up so that they connect with our own world, later generations can embrace more deeply what previous generations cared most deeply about. By innovating, we reclaim.
Which brings me back to my father’s tallit. His Hebrew name was Aharon. The atarah of this tallit quotes a teaching from Pirkei Avot: hevei mtalmidav shel Aharon, ohev shalom rodef shalom, be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace. I miss him every day. And I am still guided by him every day. By reinventing his tallit, we are bound closer than ever.
What will you do at your seders to bind your generations, with all their difference, closer than ever? That is truly a redemption song. Shabbat shalom.