Sitting in a theatre in Victoria’s Oak Bay neighbourhood, listening to Rabbi Meir Kaplan sound the shofar, I found myself thinking about a sentence I had spoken only days earlier at the JWest groundbreaking:

“Our tradition teaches that each generation plants for those who come after.”

At the time, I was standing in a parking lot surrounded by hundreds of people preparing to break ground on a project intended to serve generations we may never meet. A few days later, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, listening to the shofar’s ancient call echo through a theatre in Victoria, I realized that the same idea seemed to be following me everywhere.

The Days of Awe ask us to confront our mortality. But Judaism’s response to mortality has never been permanence. It has always been transmission. One generation plants. Another harvests. Then plants again.

The rabbis tell the story of an old man planting a carob tree. When asked why he would plant something whose fruit he would never live to enjoy, he replied: “Just as my ancestors planted for me, I plant for those who come after me.” That may be the most concise summary of Jewish civilization ever written.

Standing at the JWest groundbreaking, I looked out into the crowd and saw my three sons, ages ten, ten, and eight. Suddenly, the project in front of me no longer looked like buildings, classrooms, childcare, housing, or community space. It looked like an act of trust: a generation building for another generation, a promise made tangible. The future stopped being an abstraction.

I was not building for strangers. I was building for them. And one day, when their generation is called upon to lead, they too will be asked to build for those who come after them.

That is how the Jewish story continues. One generation receives. One generation contributes. One generation passes responsibility forward.

As the groundbreaking drew to a close, two King David High School students stood before the crowd and sounded the shofar. I did not think much of it in the moment. Only later did I realize how perfectly it captured the day: the next........

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