My Conch on the pulpit of Temple Beth Shalom, Vero Beach, on Rosh Hashanah

One of my always on file petitions to the Eternal One is, “Please, God, no deaths in the days before Rosh Hashanah because I am too busy preparing for the Days of Awe, Amen.” 

As has happened several times over the years, God recently gave this prayer a, “No.” It saddened me to learn Gary Hodgkin’s, a congregant at Temple Beth Shalom in Vero Beach, FL, which I am serving this year as Interim Rabbi, had died. 

I met with his widow Megan who shared they were both marine biologists and that they had met and gotten to know one another through their work. I had never met a marine biologist, so I asked, “What specifically do you focus on?”

“Conch,” she answered, a subject about which I knew nothing.

“And what do you do with these ‘conches,’” I asked?

“I grow them,” she answered modestly.

As we continued to talk, I learned that these magnificent shells with the eerily beautiful pink interior are pronounced, “Conk” and the plural is pronounced the same way, “like sheep,” she added. 

A bit of research after I returned home revealed that professionally, Megan Hodgkins was Dr. Megan Davis, the world’s foremost expert on Conch. She is a research Professor at Florida Atlantic University and Principal Investigator at their Queen Conch Lab. She sets up conch aqua farms at several places along the Florida Keys and the Caribbean Islands. In these laboratory farms she and the many scientists she trained cultivate and grow conch embryos.

  When they are sufficiently mature, she introduces them back into the ocean. There they continue to mature and feed on plankton which cleans up the seagrass and helps reverse some of the horrible ways we humans have polluted the ocean waters and grossly overfished Queen Conch for their meat and their beauty.
 
Dr. Davis’s work intrigued me, and I asked if might include some of what she had taught me in the Rosh Hashanah sermon I planned to deliver on how we humans have done a terrible job of fulfilling God’s charge in Genesis’ Creation Story to oversee and exercise prudent responsibility in caring for this planet God has entrusted to our care.

In agreeing, Dr. Davis helped re-steer my sermon from a lament of our failure to a hopeful concrete example of how we can reverse the ravages to the environment we humans have perpetrated.

When we met a second time in my office, Dr. Davis presented me with a gift I shall always cherish: A magnificent Queen Conch shell of my own. I placed it on the Bima in front of the congregation on Rosh Hashanah, and now it sits proudly on display in my office at the Temple. It will always symbolize for me that each of us can do something to make our world a better and more beautiful place.

Of course, I am very sorry for the reason I met Dr. Davis, but I hope it comforts her to know how her sacred life’s work of repairing the oceans eco system inspired the congregation on Rosh Hashanah. 

Personally speaking, it will always inspire me to try to fulfill the essential message of this Holy Day season: to continually strive to do more to improve the world around me.