So hey guys, how's it going? In case you don't know me, my name is Christo Avalice and I'm filling in for Mike today. As Mike posted on Twitter, he's going through a loss in his family. We wish him all the best. He can't record today. And so I'm doing my very best to fill his massive shoes in overviewing what happened on Super Tuesday and what it means going forward. And like Mike, I agree that it was a disappointing night for progressives and Bernie Sanders supporters, but it is by no means the end of the process. There's no denying that last night didn't go as planned or as we would hope, as Mike and I and many of our shared viewers would hope. We were hoping and expecting a massive Bernie Sanders win. If you looked at the polls even four or five days ago, let alone a week and a half ago, Bernie Sanders was poised for a multiple hundreds delegate lead after all the states were counted. But because of the coalescence of neoliberals behind Joe Biden, because of the media narratives that have been spun on overdrive since South Carolina, Joe Biden has been able to manage some kind of massive turnaround and reemerge as the front runner. Again, the race isn't over because if you look at the delegate counts right now, Biden has about a 70 delegate lead over Bernie Sanders. But we expect that to narrow because as more votes are counted from California, Bernie Sanders should gain on Biden. Suffice it to say, Biden will likely lead in delegates after all is said and done from Super Tuesday, but it will not be a massive lead by any means. So Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are basically locked in a two horse race with Biden having the advantage and having the momentum right now. And it really does show just how powerful the party establishment can be when it wants to achieve something. The democratic establishment is never this organized or committed or driven when it comes to fighting for workers or healthcare or the environment or any of those sorts of things. But when they want to stop a democratic socialist with record breaking support from young people, my goodness, they can pull it all together in two or three days, it seems. And Joe Biden, after his win in South Carolina, which was 100% expected and did not deserve the media narratives it got, was basically able to rally Klobuchar and Budacic and Beto O'Rourke and many, many others, Jim Clyburn and many others to his side.  And we know this for a few reasons. Biden basically overperformed in nearly every state. In the states he was expected to win, he won even larger. He also won some states that he was not expected to win, like Massachusetts in Minnesota. Those were not Biden states, but he won them in some cases by clear margins over Bernie Sanders. Another factor is that when you look at voting times, those who voted late, those who made their decisions later tended to vote more heavily for Biden than those who casted early votes. Those who had already made their decision in the weeks prior, who voted more likely with Bernie Sanders. That shows that Biden clearly has the momentum right now. Right now, Biden can still be defeated. There's a couple caveats, however. If we look at the narratives from last night, the two also rands, Bloomberg and Warren, are sounding very different signals. Michael Bloomberg had an awful night and is basically already planting the seeds to exit the race, that he'll be reassessing his campaign. I don't necessarily know if he's dropping out today or tomorrow or when it's going to come, but it looks very likely from my perspective that he's going to drop out and endorse Joe Biden for president. That's my inkling. Or at the very least, he'll drop out, maybe not endorse anyone, but in dropping out, he feels he'll be able to send more of his support to Biden than would go to Sanders, which would of course help Joe Biden. And Elizabeth Warren, for whatever reason, is still planning to stay in the race, at least if you believe the narratives from her campaign last night, who send out fundraising emails and pep talk emails about how the delegates aren't fully known tonight. There's six states voting next week. Warren is still in this and that she's playing for the convention to be the unity candidate. And it's all really, really sad to see at this point because Elizabeth Warren sticking in this race could be the very thing that prevents Bernie Sanders from being able to win. I'm not saying that if Warren drops out, Bernie Sanders is guaranteed victory, but her staying in makes Bernie Sanders' chance to win a plurality and especially a majority of delegates very, very difficult. And we saw it last night on Super Tuesday. Elizabeth Warren was not viable in many, many states. And in the state she was viable, all it really served to do was lower Bernie Sanders' accessible delegate threshold. In some key states like Minnesota and her own home state of Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren effectively allowed Joe Biden to win because she split the progressive vote. In Massachusetts, her home state, she was third place, so embarrassing, but she still got about 20% of the vote, which means that Bernie Sanders lost one of the more liberal states in the country to Joe Biden of all people because she split that vote. And so Warren right now is doing more to help Joe Biden than Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar or Beto O'Rourke ever could have because by staying in the race, she's dividing progressive energies, she's dividing progressive volunteers, she's dividing progressive ideas and on and on and on and on. And Warren really needs to consider dropping out and endorsing Bernie because I understand they don't agree on everything and I understand that this primary process hasn't been the most fun time of the Warren, Bernie friendship and relationship, but at this stage, if she wants to have any chance of implementing her progressive policies and she has a lot of them, wealth taxes, childcare, pharmaceutical production on a public nonprofit basis, I could go on and on. Warren has a lot of good proposals, but if she wants to implement them, the only way it happens is with Bernie Sanders as president and with her working with Bernie Sanders to accomplish those important but challenging goals. And right now, Warren seems to be indicating that she'd rather stay in the race to elect Joe Biden than she would exit the race to help ensure a progressive is on the ticket. Again, guys, this was not a great night, but it is by no means over. This is now clearly a two horse race between Bernie and Biden. It already was, but now the delegate math lays that out clear as day. Bernie or Biden, the nominee will be one of those two men. It's basically a 100% guarantee at this stage. And so Bernie Sanders really needs to continue and hammer the attacks on Joe Biden on multiple fronts. One, it really does need to be noted that Biden's personal and familial scandals will be candy to Donald Trump. Whether it's Barisma or whether it's Biden's gropiness, Biden will be such a potential disaster for the Democratic Party in a general election. There's no avoiding that. But beyond the personal, Joe Biden's political legacy is worse than Hillary Clinton's in some way. And the way Donald Trump won in 2016 was by portraying Hillary Clinton as an out of touch corporate elite neoliberal Democrat that didn't really give a damn about working people. And Trump was telling the truth there. Trump also doesn't give a damn about working people, but all he needed to do was show working people that Hillary Clinton didn't really care about them and either trick them into voting for Trump or demobilize them from voting at all. And Biden's record on trade, on labor policy, on racial justice, on the Iraq war, on bankruptcies, on generational justice is goddamn awful. Biden's record is awful. And Donald Trump and the Republicans will 100% be able to weaponize that to either convince former Obama voters to stay with Trump or to convince millions of people, be they young or marginalized or whatever, that it's not worth voting for either of these men. And Trump will take that.  And Joe Biden will not drive voters. Conversely, Bernie Sanders needs to hammer home that he is the one that will mobilize voters. He is the one that will win over the disaffected working class in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania. Joe Biden is part of the Obama legacy that won those states twice but left those states worst off in 2016 than they were in 2008 in many ways because they were not privy to the massive national recovery that was bragged about by Clinton and Obama and others even though it was largely clustered in a few coastal states that the Democrats did very well in but they lost the presidency and the Senate and the house because at the end of the day, people in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and states like that did not see the recovery and did not see Obama as keeping his promise to them to fight for regular working people. And of course, Joe Biden, who wants to run on the Obama legacy when it's convenient will have it levied against him when it's inconvenient. So Super Tuesday was a bad night for progressives. Many of the down ballot candidates did not find success. Bernie Sanders did not have the result we expected. The neoliberals have shown that they have far greater unity than the progressives do given that Elizabeth Warren continues to stubbornly run but despite all of that, Bernie Sanders is within 100 delegates. He's within 70 delegates. It might even be closer when California is fully counted and in a one-on-one race between Bernie and Biden, Bernie will finally have the chance to really hone in on his one challenger and his fundamental weaknesses both against Trump, but also in terms of representing the increasingly progressive values of the Democratic Party base and of the American public. So Bernie has still got this, guys. This is a body blow, but it is not a knockout. And at this stage, our resolve will be tested. Bernie's resolve, but also the resolve of all of his supporters. In this moment, we need to pull together and keep pushing. If we can't do it now, there's no way we could ever win a general election. So let this be our first big test. Let us overcome it and let us win. So guys, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked it, you'll like a lot of my videos on my channel. Mike asked me to promote my own stuff, so I'm here doing it. My channel is just Christo Avelis. We'll post a link in the description. I post daily political videos. Mike and I generally have the same views. We're both democratic socialists. We both believe in Bernie Sanders. We both believe in the policies of Bernie. So I hope you'll come by my channel. I hope you'll check it out. And I'm always happy to fill in for Mike again whenever he needs it.


With that, I'd just like to turn everything over to Tara Littlefield. Tara is president of the Kentucky Native Plant Society, and she's going to take it from here. Tara, you're on. Thank you, Jeff. Jeff is our Native Plant Society board member and webmaster among many other things. We'll hear more about Jeff's work at the end of the botanical symposium. So welcome, everybody. Super excited to have everyone join this morning. It's a nice sunny morning at least here in central Kentucky. So the botanical symposium. So we've been organizing in this botanical symposium in the fall or winter. For many years now, we started in 2014. Of course, last year with the pandemic, we went virtual and it actually works out really well being virtual since there are a lot of talks. So, you know, pandemic aside, we might continue with at least a large portion of the symposium being virtual so we can record the talks easily. So, but the goal in general for the symposium is to bring together all of our botanical community professionals, community scientists, academics, researchers, gardeners, and students in order to learn about what's going on in the world of Kentucky Botany and beyond surrounding states in the region. Lots of good stuff is happening. There's a lot of benefit to just providing everyone updates of what types of different projects and organizations are working on, you know, different Native plant projects across the state. So, you know, our goal is just to collaborate more and communicate more. And we feel that this is a great way to do it. So, our first presentation that we're going to move into now is kind of, we're going to bombard you with some rapid updates from several staff from the Office of Kentucky Nature Visitors. So, I'm Tara Littlefield. I'm the president of the Native Plant Society, but I'm also a botanist and the plant conservation and natural heritage manager for the Office of Kentucky Nature Reserve. So, I work with a lot of really awesome botanists and colleges folks that are also working on a lot of great Native plant projects. So, we are going to just kind of give you some highlights of what we've been working on and also a few highlights of what Native Plant Society has planned in the coming months. So, I will share my screen and pass it off to Heidi Bronrider, who is the Native Plant Society Vice President and also a fellow botanist at the Office of Kentucky Nature Visitors. Okay. Hello everyone. I'm just going to talk about some of our upcoming events real quick. This coming spring, our annual Wildflower Weekend will be at Natural Bridge State Park. We are planning an in-person event with hikes and presentations and a Friday night social. The event will be $10 to participate and we will offer discounts for membership renewals at the event. And we're very excited to go back to in-person, so we hope you all join. In addition to the Wildflower Weekend, we are holding a statewide botany blitz for the week leading up to Wildflower Weekend. Last year, we held a botany blitz in lieu of an in-person event along with a bunch of virtual hikes that are still available on our website if you want to see them. The botany blitz was such a success and it definitely exceeded our expectations, so we wanted to continue with that in addition to our in-person event this year. So last year, there were 110 observers in the group. Over 3,000 observations were made in just a week span and 460 plant species were documented in Kentucky. So over 80% of those reached research grade, meaning the ID was confirmed by other inaturalist users. And you can see here on the slide some of the results of last year. Some people have fun with this as a competition, so perhaps this coming year, you can try your hand at that. We have a little tutorial on our YouTube page for how to get started if you've never used iNaturalist before, and it's very easy, so we help you join. And we're also planning field trips for this coming year, but that is still in the preliminary stages, so definitely stay tuned to our Lady Sliver blog to hear more about those in the coming year. So if you have any questions about our upcoming events, just put those in the chat for me and I'll be happy to answer. Hi, I'm Rachel Cook with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. Today I'm going to talk to you guys about how I'll be updating the Kentucky Native Plant Suppliers List that's on our website. So what we have currently is what I compiled in January, February of 2020. And this was a survey that I had emailed out to a bunch of different suppliers and I gathered all the information, and this year it's going to look a little different. This year we are going to have a form on the website. So we're going to be looking for people's contact information, you know, public emails, phone numbers if somebody needs to call, what hours you're open, just to get a lot of clarity for people who are looking for to buy native plants. We want like a good description of your business and what your nursery is all about. And then we want to collect a lot of good information on are you wholesale, are you just like selling to the public, do you sell plugs or do you sell seeds? And then a big thing that we want to look into both as KNPS and as myself is at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves is where is this seed source coming from? Is it local to Kentucky? Is it coming from adjacent states? We really want to get a better idea of where the genetic material of these native plants that are being sold are coming from and get an idea of how that is being distributed throughout the state. And then this year we also really want to highlight what services are available. So do you provide landscape design? Are you a business that is looking to help landowners remove invasive species? Do you help landowners install native plant gardens? So we really want to highlight that. And then again this year we want to look at are invasives being sold at your business and really make sure that we know where these products are being sold. Obviously big box stores but we want to kind of help people who want to buy native plants know exactly who they're buying from and what other products are available. So this form is going to be housed on the KNPS website. Therefore if at any point throughout the year some information has changed or you just got your business started or something along those lines is going to be available year round and be updated more often rather than once a year. That way people can see what's up to date on our website. And then for the future I think Jeff aka Mr. Webmaster is going to be working to have a similar form so that we can also track native plant sales. Like if you're just someone growing a lot of native plants and you want to sell them because you have too many or do like a seed swap something like that. We're going to have a form available for that on the website hopefully soon so that we can have that for 2022 now that things are more in person. And then we've kind of talked about looking into a way to record how restorations are like have a way to track restorations in a state. Who's making restoration sites? Where are these restoration sites at? What's being planted? And that really helps us at the office of Kentucky Nature Preserves because sometimes we come across these great things that we think are remnants and we later find out that they are just really good restorations. And that's just something that we would like to keep track of. So that might be coming in the future once we kind of figure out the logistics of that. All right. So I'm just going to give a few highlights from the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. So first I'll update you all on the Kentucky Plant Conservation Alliance. So this is a kind of a group that the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves and Native Plant Society has created over the past five years were kind of a subset of both of those organizations. And we're a public-private partnership of state and federal agencies, land managers, researchers, botanical gardens, conservation horticulturalists, non-profits, private sector, volunteers committed to protecting native plants in natural communities of conservation concerns. So rare plants, rare communities with the goal of preventing plant extinctions. So currently our Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves staff coordinate most of these projects. And we started this because we recognize there was a need for a greater focus on rare plants. And we formed the Alliance in 2016. So this group also networks with the Greater Region, the Southeastern Plant Conservation Alliance. And as I said, a lot of the projects are coordinated by our botanists at the Nature Preserves. And what we do, we organize collaborative meetings like the Native Clover Conservation Meeting that was last year. We organize workdays, outreach, volunteer building, things like that. So a lot of those projects that we've started, you know, are single species projects working on rare plants. And also just kind of looking at ways that we can expand the conservation strategy of these rare plants into the conservation horticultural world. So I'll highlight a few of these. You can see here on the slide, the first one I'll highlight is Kentucky Clover. So Kentucky Clover is a globally endangered bluegrass woodland species. It's endemic to Kentucky. It's actually functionally extinct in the wild already, but we were able to collect seed. And what do you do if a rare plant is really rare and you want to try to increase populations or protect existing populations? So we do a lot of seed banking. We've partnered with the Cincinnati Zoo. Valerie Pence leads that group on propagating Kentucky Clover. Office of Kentucky Nature Preserve staff have been managing sites that are suitable habitat for the Kentucky Clover for introductions. And we've partnered with Kentucky Neoplan Society on organizing meetings to conserve the Kentucky Clover. So I'm happy to report that this is one of those rare plants that has come full circle in terms of collecting seed, managing habitat, working with conservation for the culturalists. And then just this past month, we transplanted close to 100 of Kentucky Clover plants back into the wild into high quality habitat. So those are ways that we're just using partnership and expanding outreach to protect and expand some of these rare plants. Another plant that I wanted to highlight that's also come full circle is the wood lily. So the wood lily, it's this really gorgeous plant right here in the corner on this slide. It's a state endangered pine bearing species that grows in the Cumberland Plateau. And these links, I forgot to mention, we do have articles that detail exactly the whole entire project on the Neoplan Society website. So go to the website to find out more details about exactly all the different work that's been done to conserve these species. But back to the wood lily. This species we started in 2016 trying to collect seed of it. So this is a rare plant that occurs on roadsides and power lines. And there was a lot of threats to this species in terms of mowing regimes and loss of habitat from the pine barrens community, lack of fire or bivery, things like that. So we were losing a large amount of our population. So we partnered with folks like Drop Seed Nursery, the Dangaboo National Forest, Kentucky Heartwood, collected seed. We had to set out cages on these wood lily plants in order to prevent the plants from being browsed by deer in order to collect seed. We worked with Margaret Shea at Drop Seed Nursery to propagate this plant. And she has been working for the past several years to perfect the technique of propagating this plant and has done a fantastic job. And I'm happy to say that this year, five years after we started this project, we were able to transplant over 500 wood lily bulbs into over five different natural areas within the Cumberland Plateau. A lot of that was on the Dangaboo National Forest. Some of it was on Nature-Beserved Property. And then there's a private land there as well. So super excited about that project and look at the article for more information. Another plant that I'll just highlight is the Mountain Lover, the Kissed McCamby Eye. This is a globally rare evergreen sub-shrub that grows on limestone outcrops in the cliff section of the Cumberland Plateau region. And this is one that we just started over the past two years expanding our work with this species. We've partnered with the Atlanta Botanical Garden to collect cuttings from the majority of our Kentucky populations. And they now have them in propagation there in Atlanta. And we've partnered with the Dangaboo National Forest and also Berea College Forest and Nature-Beserves. So eventually within the next year or two, we will get a lot of those plants back and transplant them back into high quality, suitable habitat. And then last I'll highlight the Four Rose Angled Genshin. So Rose Genshin. So this is a state endangered wet meadow species that occurs in the Eastern Highland Rim in Kentucky. This species was just discovered for the state just last year. And it was the first time that this species had been documented west of the Appalachian Mountains. So extremely disjunct from the coastal plain and Piedmont habitat of the Southeast where the main range of this plant occurs. This plant occurred on private land. And we're still working on protection efforts of this one population. But unfortunately, the landowner did not want to sell and really wanted that habitat for a different purpose. So we worked tirelessly over the past two years to collect seed of this plant. And we've partnered with Ironweed Nursery, Alisha Bocella, to propagate it and transplant it into protected wet meadow habitat. So that occurred this year. We're still monitoring the progress of those transplants. So that's another really great project that involves multiple partners. I mean, a lot of these rare plant and natural community conservation takes a lot of partnerships and a lot of effort to really make a difference to make sure that these plants and communities are protected in the long term. I wanted to just mention something that's a pretty exciting thing that's happening now for plant conservation in Kentucky. A lot of you might know of the state wildlife action plans. For every state has one, their multi-year strategies in which every U.S. state and territory assesses the health of its wildlife and lays out steps for conserving it over the long term. So these plans establish a framework for conservation efforts that aim to protect species before they are endangered, with each plan custom-fitted to its jurisdiction's unique needs and priorities. So traditionally, state wildlife action plans have just included animals. And the Fish and Wildlife Agency's lead these plans. And over the past 10 years, there's really been a lot of work from different plant conservationists to start including groups like plants in these state wildlife action plans. So I'm happy to report that Kentucky is one of those states. So currently right now, we're in the Southeast region. About half of the states currently have plants within their state wildlife action plans, as species of greatest conservation need. And we are actively now working with Kentucky Fish and Wildlife over the next year and a half to add plants to the swap. So that's really great. That will expand a lot of targeted plant conservation for a lot of our rare plants. So we're really excited about that. We're also, it's kind of an overlapping project, but every four years we update the Kentucky's Rare Plant List. And we are currently, Devin Rogers is helping out a lot with this project is assessing all of the plants in the state to make sure that we know what the conservation status is of all of our rare plants. So once we get that new updated Rare Plant List finished, then we will work on a subset of those rare plants in different priority actions in conservation and add those into the state wildlife action plan. So that's really exciting. And then I'll just end with just giving you all an update of our Rare Plant and Community Monitoring on our natural areas across the state. So over 65% of our rare plants are in disturbance dependent communities. So disturbance dependent, that's the open grassland communities, blades, barrens, wet meadows, bogs, seeps, communities that need fire or woody removal or other disturbances in order to maintain those habitats. So the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves is really trying to expand our science-based conservation strategies of these rare plants in natural communities and work in collaboration with natural areas managers on monitoring and looking at different ways to measure success of management prescriptions and to study the effects of practices on rare species and communities. So with this new effort in collaboration with natural area managers, we have over the past 10 years set up over 150 long-term monitoring plots across the state, and these are primarily all within our remnant grassland communities. These vegetation plots look at management effects over time, and they also help us classify these communities. We look at the floristic quality assessments of the plants that occur there. And then within these monitoring plots, we also have single species, rare species monitoring embedded within them. So just letting you guys know that there's a lot of science that goes into looking at how these species in these communities change over time and how our actions affect their conservation. So I'll pass it along to Tony. All right. Hi, everybody. I'm Tony Romano. I'm a botanist with Kentucky Nature Preserves, and I'm going to provide a quick update to our roadside grassland project that was started in 2020. So just as a very brief background, roadsides have increasingly gained recognition for their potential conservation value. They've been shown to provide important habitat for pollinating insects. Including some at-risk species like the monarch and the rusty patch bumblebee. And these roadsides can also provide really important refugia for rare and conservative grassland plant species. So in recognition of that, we've started a statewide roadside survey project. And Tara, if you want to go to the next slide. So this is a five-year project we initiated in 2020. It's in partnership with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. And so the goal of this project is to survey all of the state-maintained roads over the course of five years with the goal of identifying and evaluating remnant habitats, rare species, and also pollinator resources. So this map shows kind of our plan. As you can see, we're splitting it up so that each year we survey about 20 to 25 counties. In 2020, we surveyed the counties that are highlighted in blue. So that's primarily the Big Barrens region of the state. And then in 2021, we surveyed all the counties in that light pink color. So it's more southeast, including the Cumberland Plateau. And then next year, we'll be moving on to Western Kentucky. And just to show you what that looks like, a little in a little more detail. This is our progress map to date. So all of those blue-colored roads are ones that have been surveyed so far. It's about 13,000 miles of road. So it's a pretty significant effort. And then all of those little stars are sites where we've conducted a habitat evaluation. So that means there was something there that, you know, one of our botanists saw and decided to pull over and take a look. And so I'll just kind of go over our results quickly. As I said, we've completed 13,000 miles of road and we evaluated 200 sites. Out of those, we identified over 140 sites that had either a rare plant present or some other grassland indicator species. So some sort of, like a good example is the leatris in this photo. So something that indicates that maybe this used to be a remnant grassland or it's otherwise a sun-loving plant that requires kind of a more open condition to persist. And so we found 62 sites in 2020 that kind of met that criteria. And then this past year, we found 83 sites that met that criteria. But the quality of these sites does vary pretty dramatically. So some of them are high quality. Other than other ones are pretty badly degraded and sort of the desirable species are just barely hanging on. So they're not all created equally. Out of all of these sites, we've identified 30 grasslands that we would consider good or better quality. But I am still reviewing this year's data. So that number might actually go up as we finish our analysis for this past year. And we're ranking these sites based on size, presence of rare species, what the threats are, and the overall floristic composition. And one of the takeaways that we've continued to see over the past two years is that the highest quality sites are pretty rare. They're thin on the ground. So it really underscores the importance of this project to identify these sites and work with KYTC to modify management so that hopefully they continue to support these species. And just a brief update on our rare species observations from this project. This is just kind of a fun stat. But so far we have observed approximately 816 plant species. So that's not quite 30% of our flora, but I'm interested to see what that number will be at the end of the five-year project. I think it'll actually be close to the majority of our flora. And then in 2020, we documented 16 new rare plant populations. And we also updated 37 existing roadside records, essentially confirming that those species are still there and assessing the population. And then in 2021, we documented 25 new rare plant populations on the roadsides. And we were able to update over 40 existing records. So that's good progress. And I'm excited to see what comes in the next few years. And then just one quick little plug here before I finish. We do have a iNaturalist project set up for people who want to help make roadside observations. As I said earlier, our project is limited to the state-maintained roads. So that includes the intersates, the U.S. highways, and then the state highways. But we're not able to look at our smaller local roads and county roads and things like that. So that would be a great way for people to participate is to join the iNaturalist project and submit observations of native plants on those types of roads. Because we do review that information periodically. And we've had some really great finds on there that we weren't aware of. So please consider joining that project. And that's all I have. Sorry. I'm Vanessa Velker. I'm a botanist with OKNP. Today I'm going to be talking a little bit about some iNaturalist projects we've got going. Also our new Adopt a Rockhouse program. So our big year contest is a friendly competition or a personal challenge for people to find and identify as many species in a given year within a particular geographic area. This type of contest originated in the birding world. But over the past several years, it's really taken off in the plant nerd realm as well. So 2021 is Kentucky's third annual competition. You can see from a recent snapshot of the leaderboard that there are some clear leaders of the pack this year. However, there's still time to upload your plant observations from 2021. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that it's anybody's game right now in December, but 2022 is just around the corner. So we'd be really happy to see everybody join up if you're actively botanizing Kentucky. And our next project I want to highlight is the Kentucky Plants of Conservation Concern. This is a collector project that automatically pulls in all observations that are identified as endangered, threatened, or of special concern in Kentucky. With so many citizen scientist eyeballs covering so much ground, our iNaturalist observers are actually helping us at OKMP to keep tabs on occurrences of rare plant species in the state. And they're also discovering new unknown to us occurrences. So the number of our species observations on iNat that we've been able to pull has been steadily increasing over the last few years since we started monitoring this fight. So again, if you're an active botanizer, we'd love to have you join this group because we really value the citizen science observations. And the final thing I want to talk about is our new Adopter Rock House Volunteer Program. In 2022, we're excited to be rolling this out. This will help us continue to collect population data on the recently delisted species, white-haired goldenrod. This is a very rare goldenrod species. It's a Kentucky endemic. It occurs only in the Red River Gorge area of Menafee, Powell, and Wolfe counties. And within that small area, it only grows on the ledges and protected areas behind the drip line of sandstone rock houses. The species was declared federally threatened in 1988. And through diligence serving, monitoring, and protection efforts, white-haired goldenrod in the gorge made substantial recoveries. And the species was delisted in 2016. At that point, a five-year post-delisting monitoring plan was put into place to keep tabs on those populations. And that monitoring plan has reached its final year this year. However, even with that successful recovery, populations of white-haired goldenrod are still vulnerable to trampling or digging or invasive species. So to that end, we are seeking the assistance of citizen scientists to help us keep an eye on these populations that are still exposed to recreational impacts. And with our U.S. Forest Service Partners and Dan Dorsen, we're developing a mobile data collection survey and reference materials to train volunteers to continue the same monitoring protocols that we've been doing the last five years. So far, we've had a really great response from enthusiastic citizen scientists interested in the program, but we still have volunteer openings and rock houses that people can adopt. So if you are interested in hearing more about the program or you'd like to be a volunteer monitor, we'd love to hear from you. You can send me an email at venessa.velker.ky.gov and I'll put that in the comments in a minute. And to request an Adopt-a-Rock House volunteer application. Okay. Hi. Hello. Good morning. My name is Kinda McDonald. I'm a botanist and lycanologist with Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. And I am the lead on the Kentucky Forest Biodiversity Assessment Program and our Lycan and Bria Fight List. I'm just going to give you guys brief updates because we are behind on the schedule. So just an overview of the Forest Biodiversity Assessment Program, we plan to do a full state inventory within five years of Kentucky. And to achieve that, we are surveying 20% of Kentucky counties per year. We started this in 2019 in partnership with the Kentucky Department of Ag. This program focuses on rare and conservative forested plant species, forest community diversity and structure, herbaceous diversity, forest medicinal and species of commercial concern, invasive species and other threats, and old growth analysis. Just to give you some progress and tentative findings, we're kind of in the middle of this project three of five years of our field work have been completed. Two years have, the data has been analyzed and reported, but we're still working on year three for that. You know, since we've started, we have surveyed over 150 forest blocks and within those forest blocks, we've documented approximately 70 new populations of species of conservation concern. And that is defined by the state ranks. The state ranks go from S1 to S5, S1 being the most rare and S5 being the least rare. So species of conservation concern in this context, we include S1 through S3 species. We also have documented over 550 occurrences of united plant saver at risk species. This is an organization that determines medicinal and commercial plant species that have a lot of risk of becoming extinct due to human over harvesting. We've analyzed a lot of threats for Kentucky forests and the most prominent aggressive threat to Kentucky forests is definitely non-native invasive species encroachment. And over the last three years, three species have really stood out to us being Japanese stiltgrass, multi-floor rose, and Japanese honeysuckle. Going forward, excuse my poorly made map here. I just made it in paint to be really quick. But going forward, we have two more years of field work and every single county that is in white here are counties that need to be surveyed in the next two years. We work with public and private landowners, so I'd just like to throw it out there if you have or know of a forest block that is high quality, diverse, may have forest medicinals or species of conservation or commercial concern. You are welcome to contact me and we can talk about the property and vet it and see if it fits into this program. I'll put my email into the chat, but it's right there, kindle.mcdonald.ky.gov. So if you have a property that you think would fit into this program, please email me and we can discuss it. And this is the last thing I'm going to talk about. This is going to be really quick. Nature preserves has been working on lichen and bryophytes with partners, especially Dr. Allen Risk from Morehead State University to create the state lichen and bryophyte lists. Unlike other groups in Kentucky, lichen and bryophytes are pretty understudied and misunderstood of what we have here in the state of Kentucky. So lots of work has gone in to creating a full state lichen and bryophyte list. And once we have those lists, we are using the nature serve rank calculator to give these species a state conservation rank so we can determine their rarity and our future monitoring and management priorities for these species. We're still in the middle of this project and to be honest, I've done more with the lichens than the bryos at this point. So I can give you some tentative findings from the lichens. Right now we have approximately 680 lichen species in the state but Kentucky is still under collected mostly especially in the crust lichen area. So if someone is an expert in crust lichens eventually I expect that the number of Kentucky lichen species will go up but those are just really hard to collect and identify and you have to really have a lot of practice with those. As going through those we have over 100 potentially rare lichens and that ranking is still going on right now. I've definitely been a little more liberal with which ones are going to go through the ranking calculator but I would rather cover a little too much than not cover enough. So if you guys would like to contribute to this project it's obviously still ongoing we're not done yet. Please post any lichen or bryophyte observations to iNaturalist. There is a lichens of Kentucky project that I have been managing for a couple years now and since we've added bryophytes to this within the next couple weeks I plan on making a bryophytes of Kentucky project to manage and to pull observations from there. So if you'd like to contribute you can post lichen and bryophyte photos and observations on iNaturalist or you can send those photos to my email and again I will put that in the chat and that is all I have. Thanks guys.


So, all of us probably understand and realize that there is a world of difference between our New Year's and January 1st New Year's in this society that we're living in. I heard a rabbi once mention that he was speaking with a non-Jewish neighbor of his and mentioning that the Jewish New Year is coming up very soon. And he mentioned to this fellow that, you know, we Jews, we have two days of our New Year. And the fellow looked at him and said, you have two days of New Year's? He was trying to imagine January 1st and doing that for two days. You know, how much can you drink and how much can you party? And he felt, how did Jews survive two days of their New Year's? So the truth is that if you just try to conjure up in your imagination, what is the stereotypical scene from January 1st, right?  Well, I guess they have their horns too. But, you know, and streamers and office parties and lots of drinking and lots of partying. And that seems to be pretty much the ethos of January 1st. I know certainly in North America that's the case. I'm not sure what happens in other parts of the world. But I think that at least for us in this part of the planet, January 1st, the secular New Year, is essentially a day of partying. Now when we look at our New Year's, Rosh Hashanah, it's radically different. I mean, essentially the way we as Jews spend our New Year's is in a synagogue praying and meditating almost the entire time for two days. Of course, we have our meals, but the meals also are not parties, right? The meals are Yom Tov holiday meals with prayers and with talking about the Torah and focusing on the themes of the holiday. But on some level, Rosh Hashanah is a fairly serious experience. The truth is that the mood of Rosh Hashanah, the mood of the Jewish New Year, is complicated. Like a lot of things in life. It's complicated. You know, if you try to imagine what is the mood of a wedding? When someone gets married, what is the mood of the wedding day? So, you can't really say that the mood of a person's wedding day is party, celebrate, let's have a, you know, there is that aspect to it. On the other hand, a wedding day is a pretty serious, heavy day, right? It's in some ways, it's the first day of the rest of your life. And it's a little bit scary because you're embarking on a tremendously challenging and exciting and new and different and potentially scary kind of an endeavor. So there's a side to a wedding that is serious, that's heavy. And yet, on the other hand, there's a side to a wedding day that is incredibly joyous and celebratory. And so the same really is true of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. It's not really appropriate to say it's entirely doom and gloom. It's a heavy day, it's a serious day. We even speak about Rosh Hashanah as Yom HaDin, the day of judgment. So if it was really a day of judgment, why would we be celebrating by having celebratory meals? We certainly don't fast on our day of judgment, right? Many people, if they have to go to a really, really scary court date, they may not be able to eat in the morning. They're probably freaking out. And yet we are supposed to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. It's a Yom Tov, it's a holiday that has a celebratory nature to it. So there is this sort of dual experience of Rosh Hashanah. But I wanted to really reflect on the contrast between January 1st and Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Why are they so different? Why are they experienced in such different ways? And I think the reason is that if you get down to the nitty-gritty of what is a new year? What is a new year celebration? What is a new year mark? So essentially what a new year is marking is the passage of time. A year has passed and now we're about to embark on a new year. In many ways it's like a birthday, right? On a birthday, I've reached another milestone in my life. I'm now 38 or I'm 67 or whatever the age is. And what's happening when you go through these kinds of milestones like a birthday or a new year, on some level what you're coming to experience is the fact that you've now turned a page on another year of life. And as you get older, because young people certainly don't get this, but as you get older, what happens when you experience the passage of time is you're confronting your mortality. Now someone in their 20s, they can't relate to this because and that's healthy, right?  That's good because I think the Torah wants us to feel ambitious about our lives. But at a certain point in life, reality hits and you come to realize we're not here forever. Our lives are actually very short. And so the new year experience at its most basic level marks the passage of another year from our life and what happens is we begin to confront our mortality. And I think that January 1st and Rosh Hashanah are two very different ways of confronting the passage of time and our own very limited time in this world. And they're expressed by two very different philosophies in life. January 1st was I believe best expressed the philosophy of January 1st by the Greek philosopher Epicurus who said, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you shall die. That's a philosophy. It's saying if tomorrow you might die, meaning if today might be your last day on the planet, so how do you spend your last day here? So Epicurus says, live it up, party, have a great time. So I think that the philosophy of January 1st of party and party hard and have a great blast and live it up and go for the gusto, that January 1st philosophy I believe comes from the Epicurian approach to facing our mortality. That if we're not going to be here forever, enjoy yourself while you're here. Where does Rosh Hashanah come from? Where does the philosophy of Rosh Hashanah expressed? So I believe it was expressed best by Rabbi Eliezer in Perke Avos Ethics of the Fathers Chapter 2, Mission F-15, where he says, shuv yom echad lifnei moshcha, return or repent or get your life in order, shuv is a hard word to translate into English, but basically get your life in order.  So that's again his expression of confronting immortality. If you're going to die tomorrow, what should you do today?   And that's why you should be doing this every day. Every day a person should really be focused seriously on thinking about their life and the quality of their life and how they're doing and how they can improve and what they did wrong. And the truth is that when you think about all of our holidays, every single Jewish holiday, every day of the year should be every holiday, meaning that Passover marks our liberation from Egypt, the fact that God took us out of Egypt. So when should we think about that? The truth is, every single day of our life. And we actually do. There's a commandment to remember the Exodus from Egypt every day of our life. And in the same way, if you wanted a secular holiday, when should Mother's Day be? Every day should be Mother's Day, right? And when should Rosh Hashanah be? The day where we think about who I am and how I'm doing and can I improve and what's the quality of my life? When should I be doing that? Rabbi Eliezer says basically every day, if it's worth doing today, it's worth doing every day. The problem is in reality, if all of our holidays are important, if every day should be Shabbat and every day should be Passover and every day Rosh Hashanah, you couldn't really get anything right. You're living in a chillent. So what the Torah has us do, the Torah says that we're going to spend certain times during the year really focusing on certain themes. So even though it's true every day of the year, we should be thinking about Passover, but we do spend an entire week really immersed in Passover-ness. And we have to prepare for it, right? We have to spend weeks getting ready for Passover. But there's a part of the year where that's the theme, it's Passover time. And then we have this time of the year where we're now in the month before Rosh Hashanah, the month of Elul. And so this whole month is like a mini Rosh Hashanah. If Rosh Hashanah is an incredibly important day, in the same way your wedding day is incredibly important. So you get ready for your wedding, you prepare for it. And so we get ready for Rosh Hashanah. This time of the year now is sort of a mini Rosh Hashanah, prepping for Rosh Hashanah. But this is the theme specifically now, even though we should be doing this every day of the year. Now where do these two approaches come from? Why do you have this disagreement between Rabbi Eliezer and Epicurus? What is the foundation, conceptually, of their disagreement? It's based upon something. Every argument, every disagreement is not just, you know, people being contrary for the sake of being contrary.  There's usually much more to it than that. When you study Talmud and you see every page that Talmud has disagreements, what Talmud students do is try to understand, well, why are they arguing? What is the, what's the crux? What's the core issue about which they're disagreeing? And you could really almost reduce any disagreement to its core conceptual issue. And so what is the real issue at heart between Rabbi Eliezer and Epicurus? And I think that the, what's at stake is the question of, how did we get here? Rosh Hashanah is an interesting day because we know every Jewish holiday has a historical antecedent, meaning that every Jewish holiday commemorates something in history. Hanukkah was the victory of the Hashmonoyim. And Sukkot marks the fact that when we were going through the desert, we had booths that we lived in these booths. And Passover is our liberation from Egypt. And Shavuot is the receiving of the Torah, right? Purim is our victory over Haman and the Malachites who wanted to destroy us. Every holiday has something that we celebrate. So what is the event of Rosh Hashanah? What is Rosh Hashanah celebrating? And so what we say in our liturgy, in our prayers on Rosh Hashanah, is we say, Hayyom Harat Olam. Today is the birthday of the world. So Rosh Hashanah, if we want to think about what happened on this day, so we believe that it marks the creation of the world. And so I think Rosh Hashanah is based upon this idea that the world was created by God. The world was created by God. And when we speak about creation by a creator, we're assuming that it wasn't just some casual thing that God did or did it accidentally. Our assumption is that creation was a purposeful act, an intentional act, and that everything that was created has a purpose, has a goal, has a plan. And just like there's a plan and a purpose and a goal for creation in general, there's a purpose and a goal for each one of our lives. We're here, each one of us, there is a reason why we're here. Is that some random experience? Each one of us is here for a reason and for a purpose, there's a plan to each one of our lives. And so Rabbi Eliezer basically says, you know what, if we're here for a specific purpose and there should be a goal to our life, doesn't it make sense? It's just sort of reasonable to occasionally stop for a moment and think about, am I really living up to what my life is supposed to be about? If there is a purpose and a goal to my life, the same way any business person, once a year maybe is going to do inventory, every company is going to have a review, I mean to go through your life without ever thinking about your life, right? It was the Greek philosophers, Socrates, who said the unexamined life is not worth living. So it just makes sense that if we're put here for a reason and for a purpose to spend some time during our life thinking about, am I living up to that purpose? I tell a wonderful story that I love sharing about the Alta Rebbe, the first Lubava Alta Rebbe, that like many good rabbis in his time, he was thrown into prison and he had a Russian jailer, a guard that was taking care of him, watching to him. And the jailer would see that, you know, this is not any regular prisoner. He noticed that there were many wondrous, mysterious things going on. He would see the rabbi spending his whole day meditating and praying. He would see the little rats carrying his slippers to him in the morning. He had a sense that he had a very special ward in his prison cell.  He says to the rabbi, you know, rabbi, I also, I like to study the Bible. And the rabbi says, that's great. That's wonderful. He says, I always had a question. I never understood, maybe you can help me answer this question for me. So the rabbi says, ask. So the fellow says to the rabbi, you know, in the beginning of the Bible, God creates Adam and Eve, puts them in the Garden of Eden. He says that there is a special tree, right, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. All the other trees you can eat from this tree of knowledge of good and evil, you can't eat from that tree. Of course, what does Adam and Eve do? That's the first tree they go for. They eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Their eyes are open. They realize that they're, that they're naked. They go and hide. And then the first question that God asks them is, where are you, Ayyaka? So this jailer says to the altar rabbi, he says, I don't understand. God is omnipotent. God is omniscient. God knows everything. God created every Adam in existence. Why does God have to ask them where they are? Like God needs Adam and Eve to say, psst, we're hiding behind the big tree on the left-hand side of the garden. You know, like God invented GPS. We don't need Adam and Eve to clue us, clue me into where they are. So the jailer says, I can't understand. What is this question God is asking them? So the rabbi said, you know what, it's a great question. It's a wonderful question. And he said, Adam and Eve were the first human beings. They represent every man. Adam and Eve is you and Adam and Eve is me.  God says to them, where are you? Meaning, where are you in your life? How are you doing? What have you accomplished in the time that you've been here? Have you grown? Have you fulfilled any of your potential? He's asking them not for a coordinates in the physical realm. He's asking them a spiritual question. Where are you spiritually? Where are you holding? How far have you come in your life? And the rabbi said that question is the first question in the Bible. And therefore it's the most important question in the Bible. It's the question that each one of us has to ask ourselves every single day of our lives. Where am I? Where am I? In my life, where am I? He said to the jailer, you've been here 46 years. He says to the jailer, where are you? The jailer, we're told in the story, freaked out. How does he know how old I am? But the rabbi knew. And the rabbi is saying that this is really the essence of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. To spend the day asking ourselves, where are we? How are we doing? Evaluating our lives. So according to Rabbi Eliezer, who says you should spend the New Year reflecting and meditating and thinking and evaluating and doing stock taking and just measuring how you're doing, that makes sense because if Rosh Hashanah marks the creation of the world with a plan and with a purpose and with an agenda and with goals, so it makes sense on the anniversary of the creation of the world, we should spend the day asking ourselves, how are we doing? On the other hand, January 1st is based upon a radically different assumption. January 1st is based upon the assumption that the world got here through a big bang. And after the big bang, there was a random collision of gases and particles and atomic, subatomic particles. Thinking basically that we see is an accident. It wasn't created on purpose with an intrinsic meaning to it. There is no intrinsic meaning to life. There can't be because everything that we see, everything in existence is random. It's an accident. It's meaningless. So why knock yourself out asking about the meaning of life and how am I doing? There is no real meaning. Of course, we each will create our own meaning out of life.  But there's no intrinsic planned created meaning. And so January 1st, I believe, makes a lot of sense. If there is no ultimate intrinsic planned meaning to life, then according to this view, have a good time. Live it up. It's to me, it's a reasonable philosophy. Everyone enjoys having a good time. So why not? We're not here forever. We are 70, 80, 90 years, maybe. So while you're here, enjoy yourself. Have a great time. Don't overthink life because you're not going to really ever come up with any good answers. There are no answers. Now, I mentioned that Rosh Hashanah is a day of judgment. So the question is this. How often does God really judge us? Think about this. Let's say you're married. How often are you judging your spouse? How often do you judge them? Do you size them up? Do you evaluate them? How often do you think about how they're doing and how you think about them? How often do we think about those we love? The answer is all the time, all the time. No one that's really in love with someone only thinks about them once every year. If we care about people, a parent thinks about their child all the time. How's my child doing? Can they improve? How can I help them correct themselves? So when we think about Rosh Hashanah as a day of judgment, it's a little bit peculiar because the truth is that God is always judging us. Our sages teach us that there are two kinds of judgment. There are actually many more than that, but two that I want to reflect on for a minute. Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, who's a great Mashiach in England, and then he went to Israel, he speaks about the idea that for judgment to be meaningful, we obviously have to have free will. If human beings were not endowed with free will, it would be meaningless for God to judge us. If our lives were programmed and we didn't have the ability to choose, then why could we be judged? How could we be judged? It doesn't make any sense. So the fact is that as human beings, we have free will. And people often assume that free will is absolute. That's an often assumption that people make. That free will is across the board, it's absolute, and it doesn't have any parameters. Rabbi Dessler said it's not really true. According to his view, free will is actually quite limited. It's really quite limited. Why is that? So Rabbi Dessler explained that in life, there are certain things that for us, each one of us, it's a no-brainer, it's a no-brainer. I passed that already. I'll just give you a simple example. So when I was in my first year of university, I decided that I would try out living a Jewish life. And I made a resolution that on my third semester, when I left home to go back to school in Chicago, I got on the plane and I said, I'm going to start keeping kosher. That's the first time in my life, I'm going to start keeping kosher. So I get on the plane and I want to know where's the kosher food? And so maybe I didn't think I had to order it, whatever. Maybe I did order it. But anyway, it turns out there was no food for me, either because I didn't order it or they forgot it or something happened, there's no kosher food. Now the truth is I'm going from Newark Airport to Chicago, so nothing's going to happen. I'm not going from here to Sydney, Australia. But the fact is that at that point in my life, when I heard the news that there's no kosher food for you, do you think there was a possibility? I might have said to myself, okay, I'll start officially when I get to Chicago. I could have said that, I could have said, all right, at first I thought I would start now getting on the plane, but okay, there's no kosher food, I like rather not eat for the whole flight.  I could have said that to myself. I could have said I'll start keeping kosher when I get to Chicago. I didn't. I girded my loins and I had water and put out peanuts for the hour. But imagine now, it's a long time, it's 50-something years later. So now I get on a plane, not to Chicago, now I'm going to fly to England, it's five or six hours, and they tell me the bad news, sorry, no kosher food. Is there any chance in the world I'm going to say, okay, I'll take whatever you have? It's not going to happen now. Meaning that at a certain point in my life, whether I'm going to eat kosher food or not, it was a question, it was a struggle, I had to choose. But at this point in my life, it's no longer an issue, it's been decided I'm beyond that. It's not even a, nothing like a test anymore. So Robert Desler says that for many things in our lives, it's not a question of free will, there is no more free will, right?  I don't think it's part of your repertoire. I don't think it's possible that anyone would think about doing that. There are people in the world that would be a possibility that if someone cuts them off, they would, I remember I was once in a cab going from Brooklyn to Queens and my cabby was aggressive and he cut someone off and this guy zoomed around right in front of my cab, locked the cab, he ran out of his car, he opened up the door or the window, whatever he did, I forget what happened, and he started beating my cabby in the head. I thought he was going to kill him.  But finally I said, leave him alone already, I think he did enough damage. But here was someone who literally could have ripped this guy's head off. For him it was an option, it was on the menu for him. I think for most of us it's not going to happen, we might curse the person, we might, you know, raise our voice, whatever, whatever we're going to do. So Desliff says that for us in life there are things about which there's no longer any free will. We've eliminated many things from our realm of free will. It's not for us an issue anymore because we're past that. That's conquered territory. The analogy he gives is to trench warfare in World War I. He says if you think about how they fought in World War I, so they had the French and the Germans, whatever, they had trenches, right, and they would pop their head up once in a while and take a shot and duck, that's how they fought. The truth is that from the German point of view, right, for the Germans, Berlin, there's no fight in Berlin, Berlin was firmly under their control, right? So there was no fighting there, there was no battle there. The battle was where? Here at the trenches, where the trenches meet. And for the Germans at those trenches, England, right, London, was, there's no fighting going on there. For these people at the trenches, they're far, far away. I mean, they've got to go quite far to be able to be shooting people in London, the streets of London, right? There are things in our lives about which not that we have conquered those areas already. It's not even for us, we're not even playing at that level yet. You know, the villain of going, so they say that he would not waste any time in his life. And at the end of the year, he would somehow calculate how many minutes he wasted during the whole year, it ended up like five minutes in the whole year. Imagine someone, he wrote books about mathematics in the bathroom. That's what he was doing with his time. He didn't waste any time. I would imagine for most of us, if we were to think about how much time we waste over the course of a year, we're not measuring it in increments of minutes. We're not at that level yet. Where for me, I'm fighting on the level of how many minutes did I waste this year? No, for most people, I would imagine they're measuring it in increments of days, weeks, months. That's where we're fighting the battle. So there are things that are just for most of us, not even within the realm of possibility. There are people that are great, great, great righteous people. They're fighting the battle, not here at the trenches. They're already in the streets of Berlin. But for most people, their range of free will is very constricted. It's either stuff that they've already gotten past and it's no longer within the realm of free will, or they're not there yet. They're not even ready to fight those battles yet. Here's where we're fighting. So he says that what happens in the course of the war, so the commander, the sergeant in the trenches, he might give the signal, okay, on the count of ten, everyone's going to get up and take a shot.  But that's the kind of fighting that's going on. He says, however, that aside from the sergeant or whoever, the lieutenant in the trench, there's someone up in a spotter plane. And maybe once in a while, the person in the spotter plane is going to say, you know what? You've got a chance now, for whatever reason, you could actually get out of your trench and you can move. You're going to move the trenches now. You're going to be able to advance a hundred yards. So now you're not fighting within your trench. There are times in the battle where the army is able to actually pick up and move the trenches. So as an example, imagine a gang member, right? Someone in a street gang in Chicago. So for that person in the street gang in Chicago, what are the free will decisions that they're struggling with every day? Like, what is the question that's really on their plate? So it could be that their question is, for them, am I going to participate in the drive-by shooting? Maybe for them, that's their free will issue. Or maybe the question is going to be, when we go out to fight the other gang, am I going to try and kill the other people or just wound them, right? What are the issues they're dealing with? Because those are their trenches. When the person is in that kind of environment, they have a certain kind of struggle that they're facing. And that's what they're going to be dealing with all the time. They have a certain level of engagement in terms of moral choices. But what would happen if one of those gang members decided, you know what?   So do you imagine that their choices are going to change radically, the kinds of choices they're going to have to make? Much different choices. Now their big struggle is going to be, oh, do I go to the party tonight or should I stay home and do my homework? That's very different than the choices they had a few weeks ago. When a person, let's say, is living here in Toronto and they have a certain life here in Toronto and questions that they have to deal with and they decide, you know what, I'm making aliyah. I'm moving to Israel. So the trenches have been moved. It's a radically different life there in Israel. Different questions, different issues, different struggles. And so Robert Desler explains that every day during the year God is judging us based upon what's happening in the trench. I'm in my trench and I've got to deal with certain challenges and certain issues. But there are certain times in life when we have the ability or we are given the opportunity to just move the trenches. Getting married, making aliyah, making a big change in our life. Where all the choices now change dramatically. And that's what happens on Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah is a day and this time of the year in general is when we get a chance to move the trenches. That's the kind of judgment that's taking place. And our sages give a very, very dramatic imagery for this. They say on Rosh Hashanah, the books are opened. There's the book of life and there's the book of death. And there's a pen that's going to be the quill, is going to be writing your name in the book of death. And we tend to think about the idea that God is judging me and God is going to inscribe me next year in the book of life or the book of death. And the Baal Shem Tov explained that that's maybe not really what happens at this time of the year. He says that you know who's holding the pen? You are. Each one of us is holding that quill. And each one of us on Rosh Hashanah is going to decide what book we're going to write ourselves into. Rosh Hashanah, interestingly, we call it Yom Harat Olam. Now, to say a birthday in Hebrew, we say Yom Huledet. We don't call Rosh Hashanah Yom Briyat Olam the day of the creation of the world. We call it Yom Harat Olam. Harayon is pregnancy. It's more conception than birth. So really, Rosh Hashanah is the day of the conception of my world. The day where what happens today, I conceive of what kind of life I would like to live next year. That's how I'm going to be judged. Because what happened last year, we've been judged about already. What's happening today on Rosh Hashanah is how do I imagine my life in the coming year? What kind of life would I like to live? How do I picture my existence in the coming year? And God's going to decide whether or not that plan of action is one that He wants to back. The centerpiece of Rosh Hashanah in terms of, if you want to call it the ritual of Rosh Hashanah, it's the hearing of the shofar. It's very interesting that the Torah itself is very terse when it comes to describing Rosh Hashanah. If you go through the Torah itself, it says virtually nothing about this day. All we're told is that on the first day of the seventh month, it's a Yom trua. And it's not even clear what that means. Yom trua, let's translate it as a day of blasting, of blowing. What are you supposed to blow? And how? It's like very, very, almost nothing is being said. The Torah describes it as a day of zikron trua, of remembrance of the blasting. But it's a mysterious phrase, and it's only understood in the teachings of our sages. So what I'd like to conclude with is just some reflections on the significance of the shofar and how it can help us in this day. Before we blow the shofar, the blessing that's pronounced, the blessing that's said before the blowing of the shofar is lishmoa kol shofar. The blessing is not that the commandment today, we say that God commanded us this day to blow the shofar. That's what you would think that we would say. Blessed are thou, our Lord our God, King of the universe, who commanded us to blow the shofar. To sound that, no. We say the blessing is that that God made us holy with His commandments and commanded us to listen, lishmoa kol shofar, to listen to the sound, to the voice of the shofar, to pay attention to the message of the shofar. It's a day of very deep listening. Rosh Hashanah is a day of very deep listening. What is the message of the shofar? Ruf Hutner explained that the shofar, when we think about how it works, is that we direct our breath into a very narrow part of a hollow vessel. We blow over here, where it's narrow, and we with force produce sounds out of the wider part of the shofar. Ruf Hutner explained that what this recalls is the creation of the first human being. Because how did God create us? We were a lifeless form. Human being was created out of the dust of the ground, and God shaped it into a humanoid, into a physical form. But then God blew into that physical form the breath of life. And so Ruf Hutner says, if on this day of Rosh Hashanah, which marks the creation of the world, we should also think about the fact that it's the creation of the miniature world. Each one of us is a world. Each individual human being is an entire world.  Because only one person was created originally. And so the shofar reminds us of the fact that on this day we were created. We're sort of re-enacting on Rosh Hashanah the creation of the first human being. The word shofar itself comes from the rootless chapere, which means to improve. So the shofar, I mean it could be just a random arbitrary term, but the shofar speaks about the idea of improvement. And it's interesting that there are different notes that are sounded. So basically we're not going to go through all the variations of notes, but basically we blow three sounds. And each of the rounds that we will blow starts off with a tekia, a long straight sound. And then there are two broken sounds, the shwaram and the trua, and it's followed by again the straight tekia. The explanation that's given is that we are created straight. We're created essentially not flawed. The human being is pure, we say in every morning in our prayers, God the soul that you gave me is pure. We're not tainted, we're not broken. We're created whole, complete, pure.  But then we acknowledge that our lives become broken, and then we blow the three broken sounds. Because that's the reality of life that Torah says, the Bible says, there isn't a righteous person in the world who only does good and never sins. Every person makes mistakes, every person sins, every person breaks themselves. And we acknowledge that. And then we blow a sound which the Talmud says sounds like we're weeping. We start to almost weep hysterically. And so we cry. Our souls, when we think about the fact that we've broken our lives, we've turned away from what our lives could be, it should produce tremendous regret and crying. But then the effect of all of that is restoration. And that's why the cycle concludes with the straight sound at the end of Takia. So one of the things that happens on Rosh Hashanah, is we again act this out, we blow the shofar a hundred times on Rosh Hashanah. And throughout the entire day we're just constantly driving home the fact that, you know what, God doesn't make junk. And I came out pretty good. As a matter of fact I came out perfect as far as God's concerned. But then we corrupt our lives. And we sell ourselves short. And we have failures. And that's part of what happens during these 40 days, as we're supposed to get in touch with that. You know they say that Rosh Hashanah only works if you're honest with yourself. Someone once came to the ruptured Serebi and said, you know I have a friend. I've got a friend. And he did something horrible last year. And he wants to know what he should do to get himself back good graces with God.  Because your friend could have come to meet directly by himself and pretended to ask about some other person. So we often are not very honest with ourselves. It's hard to admit the truth. But during these 40 days to think about the fact that I was okay. And that my life was straight. And to think about how we messed it up. And to regret those things. But interestingly, if you look at the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah, go through the whole Mahsur, the whole prayer book for Rosh Hashanah. It's a day that doesn't mention sins. We don't beat our heart and regret. We save that for Yom Kippur. Rosh Hashanah, there's none of that going on. If you look at the Mahsur for Rosh Hashanah. It's very interesting that it focuses almost exclusively on painting a picture of what the world should look like and what the world could look like. We describe in the prayers of Rosh Hashanah a utopian world. We describe the messianic vision of what the planet should look like. Because on Rosh Hashanah, we want to get in touch with the fact that there is a potential for the world. And when we think about that, it should help us plug ourselves into that. If the world can look like a better place, if we can imagine again, Rosh Hashanah is a day of imagining and picturing what could life be like. Our prayer books cannot give us a picture of what each individual life should look like, but our prayer books describe what the world could look like. A world of peace, a world of unity, a world where people get along with each other, a world where everyone acknowledges the kingship of God, a world where God is front and center in the life of every human being.  And then it becomes easier for us to imagine, well, how do I fit into that? Another part about the blowing of the chauffeur is that the chauffeur's sound is a sound of coronation. We're coronating God as king. Now, the interesting thing is that it's very easy for all of us to say, God is Melech Ha'olam. God is the king of the universe. We see that in all of our blessings. Baruch Atah Hashem alokhenu Melech Ha'olam. When we think about God as being the king of the universe, that's easy. Anyone can say that. But the goal of Rosh Hashanah is to make God the king over my life. Is God really the ruler of my life? That's not so simple. Because I'd rather not be bothered all the time. I'd rather not have to always have someone that's cramping my style. I'd rather not always have to be wondering about what does God think about my behavior. It's sometimes very easy to fall into the very sort of tempting thought that no one sees me. No one sees me. I can do whatever I want in life. Rosh Hashanah is a day where we coronate God as the king, not just over the universe, but over my life personally. The truth is that deep down inside, every single one of us has a spiritual core. Each one of us has a spiritual core that is pure and it's holy. And that we tend to forget about it. And the goal of Rosh Hashanah is to really help ignite that spiritual core that is at the center of our beings. Rosh Hashanah helps us get in touch with that spiritual core of our lives. The Gomorrah asks a very interesting question.  So have you fulfilled the commandment of blowing shofar if you do that? So Atelmud says that if you hear the inner shofar, then you have fulfilled the commandment of blowing shofar. If you only heard the outer shofar, you haven't fulfilled the commandment of blowing shofar. The truth is that each one of us hears various voices in our lives. We hear the outer voice, the outer sounds of the street, of the culture, of so many things that are outside of our small little world. And then there's the inner voice that we're supposed to be in touch with. And so what Atelmud says is that if on Rosh Hashanah you're able to get past the outer voice, the outer sound of materialism, of the distractions of this world and you're able to listen to the inner voice, then you've fulfilled the commandment of Rosh Hashanah. I want to end with a story. It's actually my favorite Rosh Hashanah story. And I'll ask you to indulge me. I'm going to just read it to you because Deborah Gordon Zaslow tells it much better than I could. And I think that it really helps us get in touch with, I think, one of the most important aspects of the shofar. So the story is about a king.  They would eat together and walk together and they'd do everything together. But their favorite thing to do was to tell stories. That was the most favorite thing that they would do together. The king would tell the princess stories with witches and fairies and demons and magic and every kind of story imaginable. And the princess would simply say, Papa, tell me a story. And it seemed that almost no matter what the king was doing, he would stop and launch into another tale. The princess's favorite story was about a brother and a sister who each had a shofar from the head of the same ram. And when one shofar was blown, the other shofar would vibrate and hum. She would beg her father over and over, but tell me this shofar story again. And he would tell it to her again and again and again. It happened that one evening the princess and the king were in a royal carriage returning from some occasion. They were riding on a narrow road that round through the forest on the edge of a steep ravine. It began to rain and gusts of wind started to blow. The carriage swayed and the horses winnied. The storm grew heavier and the rain louder and the road muddier. Thunder sounded and lightning streaked across the sky. The horses bolted and the royal carriage toppled over. The king was thrown out and not unconscious, not far from the road. But the princess was thrown far down into the steep ravine. The next day when the king awoke in his bed, he demanded to see the princess immediately, but he was told that she had not been found. The king bellowed, send out all my men. Come every inch of the forest. You've got to find my daughter. And so they searched the forest for days, but the ground was slick and muddy and the rains had washed away any tracks. After two weeks the men returned and the king was told that the princess must surely be dead. The king withdrew into his chambers. He refused to eat. He couldn't sleep and he would speak to no one. But the princess was not dead. She had fallen over the side of the ravine and landed into a crevice between two rocks. She lay unmoving for two days. When she awoke she was stiff, aching, bleeding and hungry. She looked around her and recognized nothing. She wandered through the forest all day crying pitifully. When she could go no further she found an empty cave where she laid down and cried herself to sleep. When she awoke she was staring into the faces of a band of thieves. They peered at her in surprise. Who is this in our hideout? It's a little girl. I've never seen her before. She's bleeding and ragged and she's hurt. Who are you? Where'd you come from? But the princess could not remember who she was or where she had come from. She could only stare back at them and cry. The thieves took pity on her and fed her and cared for her. Eventually they took her in and raised her as one of their own. Time went on and the princess grew strong and healthy. Her adopted family was delighted with her because she was clever and charming. And she entertained them with all kinds of stories. Stories about witches and fairies and demons and magic. They would take her with them into the marketplace and she would engage the shopkeepers in conversation while the thieves stuffed their pockets with fruits and vegetables and anything else they needed. Sometimes the princess would question if it was right to steal. Is this the only way to live? She asked. But the thieves answered, this is all we know. It's good enough for us. So the princess didn't say it anymore. One day she was walking along the same road on the edge of the forest that she had tumbled from so many years before and she happened to see the king's carriage go by. Suddenly she was filled with a longing deep, deep inside of her. She felt that she had to be in the presence of the king. I've got to see the king. She walked all day until she came to the palace and stood in front of the palace gates for hours hoping to catch a glimpse of the king. But he did not come out. When she returned she told her adopted brothers and sisters what she had done. I don't know why I just felt I had to be near the king to be in the palace. They laughed at her. You had to be near the king? In the palace? You're beginning to live in one of your fairy stories. So the princess said no more but every chance she got she would steal away and stand outside the palace. Still she never saw the king. Though years had passed the king had never forgotten over the loss had never gotten over the loss of his daughter. He remained inconsolable. He didn't go out unless he had to and he spoke as little as possible. His advisors had tried everything to cheer him up. They brought in royal magicians and clowns and the best musicians but the king hardly noticed. One of the advisors recalled that long ago the king had loved stories. They decided to hold a storytelling contest. Whoever could tell the best story and gains the king's approval would become the royal storyteller and come to live in the palace. Word traveled fast about the storytelling contest and of course the princess heard about it. She was determined to enter the contest and she went into a frenzy practicing stories over and over. Again the thieves laughed at her. The royal storyteller. You're dreaming of living in the palace again. Why can't you stop living in your dream world but the princess did not care. She went into the forest alone and tried out all of her stories polishing every line until she was exhausted. When the first day of the contest arrived the princess walked all the way to the palace. Her heart raced in her throat as she waited. When her turn came she walked slowly up to the podium. From there she could see the king over in his chair not looking at her. She took a deep breath and began. Once there was but her voice did not ring out. Only a rough whisper emerged. She cleared her throat and began again. Once there was once but try as she might she could not speak. Someone yelled next and she was pulled off the stage. The next day she tried again. Again she walked to the palace and again her heart pounded as she waited her turn. Again she tried once there once once once and again her voice failed her but the princess could not give up. She continued to practice her stories working even harder than before and on the third and last day of the contest she returned and walked up to the podium again.  Her hand shook and her throat burned. She opened her mouth once but only the whisper escaped again.  The king glanced up at the commotion and for an instant the princess met his eyes. Once there was and this time her voice emerged clear and true the guards ran to seize her but the king raised his hand let her speak. The princess continued slowly as if remembering something long forgotten and the crowd was silent. Once there was a brother and a sister who each had a shofar from the head of the same ram. When one of the chauffeurs was blown the other chauffeur would vibrate and hum. The two children would play and the chauffeur was all the time blowing them back and forth. One day the boy was playing in the woods with his friends and it began to get dark. His friends ran back home but the little boy stayed absorbed in his game. Soon it became quite dark and he realized that he was alone and could not find his way home. He wandered for a while but eventually he knew he would have to spend the night in the woods. He was cold and frightened and he sat down under a tree to rest. He opened up his knapsack to see if he had anything to eat and he found that he had his shofar. He knew then he was going to be saved. He picked up his shofar and blew a long low blast. Far away in the house, his sister heard her shofar hum. She knew her brother was in trouble and she picked up her shofar and blew back at him. They blew back and forth through the night until she guided her brother all the way back to her home. When the princess had finished the story the king rose from his throne.  So whenever we hear the sound of the shofar something stirs within us deep and deeper and we longed to return home the home of our soul and we crowd to God even if you don't recognize our faces hear our voices hear our voices