Undo Our Knotted Fate: a weaving midrash for unending crisis

The following sermon was delivered by Rabbi Ariana Katz on leil Rosh HaShanah 5786, 1 Tishrei 5786 | 22 September 2025.

Art for this year's High Holy Day season created by Naomi Rose Weintraub
Hinenu logo and custom font created by Miranda Cohen
Sermon coaching from Jon Argaman
Videography by Danny Schwartz

Sing Ana B’Koach, tune by Joey Weisenberg

I want to tell you a story.

See, all she was was a weaver. Her shuttle flew between the warp in an unending rhythm from waking until rest. She had been at this a long time. In fact, weaving is all she’d ever known.

She was used to pausing to use both hands to pick up the yarn when she got to a knot. She knew how the tension in the yarn felt when it was getting closer, slowing down the flow of the thread as it flowed through her hands. She knew how the dread in the pit of her stomach felt before it arrived, and the momentary relief after it passed only, giving way to the sinking realization that a knot would soon come around again.

At first, it was only one knot every few hours. And her daily task, from the time she rose up to the time she laid down was to move the yarn along. The flow of yarn was un-ending, coming from the Spinner’s wheel for all time.

But, as it goes with yarn, tangles emerge. Sometimes the Spinner released yarn faster than she could weave, and it lay on the ground in loose coils. She could sometimes get lucky, and calmly keep weaving, not disturbing the pile of yarn and making accidental knots. But sometimes she rushed, she felt angry the Spinner didn’t meet her pace, and the threads tangled, jamming up the works. Sometimes there were knots she could easily undo, pausing the pulse of her treadle to undo a simple slip knot. But sometimes the knot was too complicated to undo at the speed that the yarn was being spun. At this point, she would do her best to just keep plowing forward, moving the knot in with the rest of the fabric, trying to hide it amongst the other colors and patterns. Busy patterns were her favorite, really good for hiding things and passing the time.

And what was she weaving, you might be asking yourself? She often asked herself the same question. Tasked with it from infancy, day in and day out she wove images of sunsets she had never seen, scenes of family tenderness unknown to her. She shaped the arch of a cat’s back, only familiar because of the picture in the pattern from which she wove. Bowls of luscious fruit were simply stitches on a grid, blushing cheeks of plump babies only bobbins of thread to change for the pattern. Sometimes there would be a knot, but she knew how to hide, mush, hold out to the end of the row to bury the knot in the margins, pretend the knots were intentional.

But the Spinner never seemed to notice when her weaving was interrupted by the necessity of burying a knot. The Spinner just kept churning out thread, even when she had to pause to address the tangle.

Day in, day out, she wove horizons and mountainscapes from waking until sleep claimed her. She wove and wove, hiding knots in the fur of animals or as pebbles in the stream, losing a snare here or there as she could. But soon she noticed that there were more and more knots in the thread as it flowed from the Spinner. And it became harder and harder to hide in the landscapes of whose rolling hills she never had seen. 

One day, as she sat at the loom poised over the edge of her bed, and looked at the yarn already piled up from the Spinner’s morning work. She ran it through her hands, and it was entirely knot after knot. Unworkable. The knots piled up in her hands. How was she supposed to weave? How could she make anything out of this? How could she move forward?

For the first time in her life, she pushed away from the loom. Away from the pattern poised next to her, the creaking treadle at her feet. The Spinner didn’t slow down, but suddenly, she noticed something else besides the unending flow of fresh thread and the pattern she had to weave it into.

Outside her window, she saw the leaves of a tree–there was a tree outside her window! And the light dappled the leaves in a way she had never seen on the pattern pages of instructions for her weavings. She wasn’t even sure that she could capture the dancing light with thread. It glistened in the same rhythm as her heart as it skipped a beat. She felt the breeze that moved the leaves, and her skin was dappled in goosebumps. 

She peered outside the window, craning her neck. She saw ants marching up and down the bark of the knotted tree. The light got in her eyes and she momentarily just stood there, blinking in the sun. She felt the tension in her chest melt away, and she felt a warming of range inside her, realizing that this beauty had been outside her window her whole life, but she instead all her waking hours were consumed by the loom, the Spinner’s thread, and the knots. As soon as she noticed relief and rage consciously, the anxiety it returned, remembering the pile of knotted crises on the ground.

She sighed and turned her attention back to her singular mission. Her eyes resting on the loom, she stared at the tangles and piles of cord. How in the world would she undo these knots, hide these snarls in the tapestry? How was she to keep going when the crises just mounted? And how could the anxiety of this task at hand exist at the same time as the beauty outside her window?

She breathed the crisp air through the now open window, and remembered the berries clustered on the tree. She heard a birdcall for the first time in her life, and the fear that became default in her stomach unclenched. There was now something besides the loom, the merciless knots of the Spinner, the pattern she was supposed to follow. And knowing that, she returned to her post. She lifted up the cord, and threaded it through the shuttle.

Beloveds, time keeps moving, flowing from the Spinner’s hands. We are warping this new year onto the loom, in its cool, quiet, eerie, potential beginning–hanah tovah. Marking this point on the Spinner’s thread with you is every year a profound blessing.

And, comrades, we are in a period full of knots–crises, that is, that come so fast we begin to drown in them. Our horror and grief with each individual knot becomes a deluge, a tangle we cannot escape from of overwhelm, hopelessness, despair. 

In The Serviceberry, Potawatomi botanist and author, Robin Wall Kimmerer offers us the medicine that exists when we look out the window. Awe and gratitude, she teaches, interrupts our body’s fear cycle reaction. It breaks the knots of our fear. 

This kind of gratitude is so much more than a polite “thank you.” Not an automatic ritual of “manners,” but a recognition of indebtedness that can stop you in your tracks. It brings you the realization that your life is nurtured from the body of Mother Earth. With my fingers sticky with berry juice, I’m reminded that my life is contingent upon the lives of others, without whom I simply would not exist…

Gratitude, awe at our internection, does not negate the seriousness of our condition, but it breaks us out of the fear cycle, so that we have a way of engaging with crises from a place of deescalated anxiety, weave with a larger swath of color, think more clearly and strategically. The gnarled mess is still there, waiting for us, growing, but it will regardless of if we stay stuck in our endless loop of fear or look out the window. And that break in the endlessness gives us wisdom, tools, to respond to the next and the next and the next crisis. To learn something from our awe that transforms even what we do with the yarn as it pours forth. Gratitude and awe create a space from which you we can imagine something else from what we’re stuck in.

Our theme, ahavah rabah (abundant love), “fierce love and rigorous joy,” truly came from a sticker on my water bottle. GAY! Created by Katie Blanchard, a Minneapolis based artist, “fierce love and rigorous joy” calls us to turn toward this moment, the reality of its cruelties and relentlessness. Instead of turning inward, calcifying in fear, this kavvanah keeps us open, reaching toward each other. To this unrelenting time we choose to respond with AHAHVAH rabah, fierce love–committment to our love of the world, love of the earth, love of Hashem, love of our good and well meaning ancestors, love of Torah, love of neighbor, love of the opponent, love of stranger, love of ourself. And to this time we respond with ahavah RABAH, abundant, rigorous joy–dedication to practicing the things that tie us more closely to aliveness, prioritizing joy for those most in the crosshairs, knowing that pleasure is necessary to keep ever onward, to the rhythm that Shabbat and the joys of our Jewish time give us, to the ways joys moves us toward others.

Awe, abundant overflowing fierce love, commitment to joy, it picks us up from the loom that is riddled with snares and tangles. It carries us to the window, brushes our hair out of our face, and points to the bush, heavy with fruit. To the bee that’s fallen butt up, overcome with lust and satiety from the nectar inside its blooms. It gives us a moment to let other things ALSO be true in our bodies, for our breathing to find itself again, for the miracle that is the interlocking system of our cells to be momentarily known to us. I don’t believe it is the Spinner who creates the knots, but us humans that seem to create just so many tangles with the abundance we receive in the threads of time.

The loom awaits, the work is for our hands to do–respond to the tangled knots in the thread of time, try to create something beautiful, something that can keep another person warm. Awe interrupts fear, in our bodies, in our thoughts, it broadens the scope of what we are considering, it enables us to keep weaving, no matter the knots that come our way. We weave the unlosening snarls into what we know to be true about the landscape, and detangle the ones we can. We learn to distinguish between a knot and a tangle that we can undo, learn about how our stress makes problems big and small feel the same, so we see just how much we can hold in our hands that is not knotted together. It can feel so easy to be overcome by the crises of this time, to surrender weaving the future because of the horrors of the present.

We are called to integrate into two realities: of crisis, in our own lives and for our world, and awe, the profound beauty that is the world around us and beings ability to act Divinely to one another. It may feel like the fabric is all knots, a woven sheet of crises. And we can become consumed by it. The path forward is not to smash the loom, or ignore the Spinner, or cut out the knots severing the thread of time. Nor is it to be like Sisyphus and try to find meaning in the endless toil of it. It is also not smashing the loom, jumping out the window to land in the berry bush, and running off into the sunset a small, narrow, comfortable world where your narrow plane of existence is good, to ignore the tasks we are called to sit before and make something beautiful with. The path forward is to learn how to move and work with crises, become familiar with our response pattern to adrenaline, our body’s protective but unhelpful attempts to restore control, prepare before it is emergent when we can.

With the shuttle in her hand, a growing backlog of yarn to weave, she got to work.

A few rows in, the knotted mess that had compelled her away from the loom was flowing through her hands. And she felt the same annoyance, fear, stuckness she always did with the tangles. But she looked out the window, and watched a crow pluck a berry off a bush lush with them.

So she changed the pattern. 

Instead of an empty beach, she began to weave that berry bush into her work. Each knot was a juicy dark purple berry. Each knot suddenly became a seed, carrying a different future than the crow or she could imagine.

She realized that in her fear of the knots, there were tangles she could more easily undo, but every snare looked like a knot. So she undid what she could, finding more potential for what she would create.

The yarn kept coming. Sometimes there were periods of great knots when she had to focus on the berry bushes, or slow down to untangle them despite the onslaught. Sometimes there was no time, and it was all she could do to keep weaving. But each time she became bereft at the knots as they piled up, she stepped back from the loom to look out her window, the sunset and the light in the trees and the rocking undulation of the water, the inspiration for what she was tasked with.

Eventually after a few days, this strategy was working so well, and she was so inspired by the world she was creating on the loom, that she would weave so quickly she would be waiting for the Spinner to put out more yarn, rather than trying to play catch up. She would fill the time by reaching out the window to grab twigs that had begun to fall from the tree but get stuck in its branches, and she began to carve. Now, when there was a knot, and she knew there would always be knots, she reached for one of the tools she had made, or knew just where to put the knot in her weaving.

The thread never does stop coming, nor the knots, but we are not completely helpless in the face of them. May 5786 be a year that we step away from the loom and its unending tangles to see the beauty of the world outside the window. May our attention not be claimed only by crisis. May our creativity and persistence allow us to undo the knots in our own lives and the lives of our kin and neighbors. May we be overwhelmed by awe that interrupts our grief of the aching world to fall in love, again and again, with it.

Sing Ana B’Koach, tune by Joey Weisenberg