The world has changed irrevocably since we gathered last Rosh Hashanah.
When I gave my talk then, the holiday seemed to come in its normal time, in a relatively normal world. True, the Jewish world is never completely normal. Even in better times, we have our communal disagreements, our resentments and grudges. Politics, Israel, an off-color joke, a sermon that runs a few minutes over—these and many more pretexts can launch a thousand kvetches. And before October 7, that was our normal, even comforting routine. If we agreed too much, if things became too easy and convivial among us, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. Two Jews, three opinions.
So last year, we spent Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur recounting our sins, asking for forgiveness. We celebrated Sukkot, erecting and decorating our booths, spending time with friends. And then, the atrocity on Shmini Atzeret tore a huge rent in the fabric of our world.
In just four days, the calendar brings us to another October 7. Our hostages are still captive in the terror tunnels, facing unimaginable suffering. The events in Israel feel very close to me and my family. The mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was killed by Hamas before Israel could rescue him, is a beloved colleague of people I work with. A former teacher at my daughter’s school and son’s camp died in battle, as did a nephew of a friend in our neighborhood. Several people in our synagogue have served in the IDF during this war, as have many children of friends. Israelis regularly come to our shul to discuss their experiences since October 7.
How do we understand the significance of Rosh Hashanah today, one year later? What does it mean to take stock of ourselves in the midst of Israel’s ongoing war against Iran and its proxies, and the surge of antisemitism in the US and throughout the world?
The only response, I believe, is for us to redouble our Jewish commitments, in whatever ways we can: by giving of our money, time; by dedicating ourselves to communal and religious needs; by educating ourselves on Jewish subjects. Here are some of my efforts to accomplish this over the past year, and my thoughts on how we can work on this in the year ahead.
Mourning as Reconnecting
One paradigm, I would claim, for this experience washing over all of us is aveilut, the process of mourning that is mandated by Jewish law and tradition. Personally, my mother passed away in early March, so I have been going through the phases of aveilut for her, including saying Kaddish twice daily, often leading services and giving short talks at landmarks along the way. On this journey, I’ve been reflecting upon certain similarities between aveilut as a two-pronged undertaking, of saying goodbye and reconnecting with our loved one in a different way, and the wrenching emotional experience we’ve all endured since October 7.
Indeed, it’s often hard to focus in on my mom in the midst of the raging storm. My mom lived a good, full, long life, while so many young Israelis were brutally killed long before their prime. At shul, we keep the events in Israel at the forefront of our minds. Every morning, we recite the prayer for Israeli soldiers, and a new one written for the welfare and return of the hostages. At both Shacharit and Minchah, we chant Psalms imploring God’s help. In light of so much pain, destruction and hate, the passing of a 96-year-old mother with dementia seems quite trivial, hardly justifying so much attention. Yet even as I spend this time in synagogue grieving for my mom, I am also afforded time to grieve for Israel’s slain heroes, along with our prayers for those soldiers fighting to protect our Jewish homeland.
Despite these challenges, mourning does give me the impetus of becoming a regular shulgoer, of joining with the local minyanaires and my shul community. I’ve found comfort in the routines of our rituals, which serve both to soothe our pain and channel our prayers and longings, all in the company of those devoted to our shared faith and traditions. Previously, I had rarely gone to shul during the week, instead laying tefillin and saying my prayers in my living room, expeditiously, in the early morning before my children arose. Now, as I spend so much more time in synagogue, I view this time not as a burden but as a gift.
Coming to shul every day, I stand in awe of those who make the time to attend services regularly, morning and evening. They come, no doubt, for a mix of personal and overlapping motives; out of a sense of obligation, mitzvah, to God and responsibility to the synagogue, even to the rabbis; dedication to upholding the tradition; enjoyment of the community of the faithful, appreciation of each other; comfort in the familiar Hebrew prayers; and a desire to be there for others in need of a minyan just as people were there for them. Some women are regular attendees along with the men, and women there also come to recite Kaddish. Finally, at both the morning and evening prayers, we receive a short dvar Torah, a thought derived from the parsha or other teachings, that inserts a jolt of inspiration into the noise and humdrum of our lives.
Through all the sameness, the words recited and hours entrusted to prayer, the minyan can reward us with moments of grace, even astonishment. For example, there are some autistic men and women who join the minyan regularly. They have become part of our greater family. One of them greets us by name when entering the sanctuary, regaling people with the details of a recent shul meal or upcoming event. Another gentleman, somewhat less communicative, comes every day with his mother, and paces around the seated daveners, as his own form of participation. These congregants I was familiar with from Shabbat services. What I didn’t know was that one fellow, a grey bearded regular attendee who sits quietly in the back, devotedly helps these men put on tefillin every day and say the brachot as well as the Shema.
Then there are the times when people deliver brief eulogies for departed relatives on the occasion of their yahrzeits. One day, another older man with autism, whom I had seen for years but never spoken to, arose and spoke forcefully of his love for his twin brother, dead more than half his life ago, who was born with severe mental incapacity. Another day, a quiet participant who never misses a service, arose to talk about his father, a composer, and played a recording of his music. One man, a rabbi and long-time leader of a Jewish organization, told us of his father’s tough upbringing in Brownsville, Brooklyn; several of his father’s friends joined the Jewish mafia, but his father turned them down when invited to be their accountant.
Connecting to the Departed
The Jewish year of mourning provides time for us to process the reality of our loved one’s death. We simultaneously say goodbye and reconnect: goodbye to the physical person, to the one who gave us hugs and kisses, whom we know cared for us when we were young and helpless, who fed us, changed diapers, pushed us in strollers; to the person we helped to do the laundry, cook, to unload kosher meat deliveries, move boxes of antiques; to the mother with whom I laughed, argued as a teen, drove for her tasks, partnered in bridge games, attended operas and Broadway shows; and to the one we knew at the end of her life, whose dementia emptied her of her memories and much of her personality, whose powers of speech slowly drained away, yet still managed to remain sweet with her family and caretakers.
Reconnecting with my mom has led me to revisit some of the things she loved when she was in her prime. The first book I read after she passed away was a biography of Cary Grant, her favorite actor and target of a huge, unrequited crush. As portrayed in this book, beneath his famous charm lay genuine warmth, love for friends, generosity, talent, hard work, and dedication to his craft—in short, worthy of my mother’s affection. I showed my family one of his classic movies, Bringing Up Baby, with Kathryn Hepburn as a sly, mischievous ingenue who leads and deceives Grant, a naïve paleontologist, to abandon his fiancée, sidetrack his study of brontosauri and marry her.
I find that I’m assigning myself other books that were hers or remind me of her: books about the Jews of Budapest, the history of bridge (the card game), mystery novels, Jane Austen. My eyes are drawn to some of the artwork now transferred into our home. I contemplate a print wondering how she obtained it, when and where, what she saw when she looked at it in her living room, what about it brought her joy. When on vacation, I think about how she loved the sense of adventure and discovery in travel, of seeing museums, walking down city streets, eating fine food, and especially meeting new people. I recall how my mother made friends serendipitously, in bus shelters, on board ships, that lasted a lifetime.
I am stirred by motives not entirely clear to me; perhaps by returning to her beloved activities and objects, I am keeping her here with me a little longer, spending time with her. I’m looking for ways to be a dutiful son when she is no longer—physically, at any rate—on the receiving end. After adjusting to mom suffering from dementia for many years, this period of mourning allows me a remembrance of my mom at full strength: as a forceful woman, full of love, joy, energy; a consummate professional at work and a devoted balabuste in after hours. All of my mom I knew across the years comes together into one presence lodged in my mind and heart.
Something similar is happening with my relationship to Israel. For years, I saw it struggle under a period of decline, riven by rising extremism, corruption and polarization. After October 7, my feelings completely shifted as I saw an Israel that was vulnerable, under attack by the darkest forces of hatred. Immediately, I felt the return of simple feelings from childhood, feelings of unity, patriotism, a return to a sense of awe and love. I was drawn again magnetically to remember Israel’s history and mission, its unavoidable centrality in our religious and communal lives.
Feelings of mourning and connection flooded me when I visited an exhibition about the Nova Festival, where hundreds of mostly young Israelis were slaughtered, this past summer. While there, I glimpsed a bit of the appeal of this event that drew well over a thousand people. I learned about the culture, the vibe, the music and the people who came to celebrate, to let loose and find joy together. The exhibition humanized them, made them and their lives much more relatable. Beyond mourning their tragic deaths, we now know something of their lives, their character and passions. In a gallery, a picture of each of the people killed was shown with a brief biography that told us who they were, what they did, how they cared for their family, friends, others in need of help. The exhibition enables us to care about these beautiful souls much more deeply, to understand what was lost when their lives were taken, a tragedy that was deeply personal, communal and national at once. They come into our lives not just for their terrible final suffering but for their warmth, intelligence, their spark of life.
For many of us, the divide between Israel and the Diaspora has never felt smaller, almost non-existent. Thanks to cellphones, we are informed of each attack, each death as soon as they are reported. The war feels like it is being fought here, wherever there are Jews, alongside our Israeli family, owing to the rapid spread of information and the global campaign against Jews and Jewish institutions—synagogues, Hillels, schools, community centers, restaurants; on campuses, streets, in subways, bookstores. The Jewish community has deluged the country with donations of money, supplies and manpower. Globally, more than $1.5 billion has gone to Israel, at least 2/3 from the US. As of this April, already 58 thousand people volunteered in Israel, many working on the farms in the kibbutzim that were attacked and with those displaced from their homes.
Rosh Hashanah: A Time to Return
What resources and inspiration can the Holidays bring to us as we continue to grieve, as we prepare to commemorate the unspeakable savagery of October 7?
The theme of return in its multiple dimensions looms even larger than usual for me this year. The month of Elul that just concluded is a time to draw closer to God. The name of the month is seen to represent the first letters of the expression from the Song of Songs Ani ledodi ve-dodi li, I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. We remember the love between God and the Jewish people, a love that was codified at the giving of the Torah like a ring given at a wedding, and we seek to rekindle the fire of that love during these days. In the words of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady, founder of Chabad, at this time the King is in the field, God leaves the palace to go out into the fields and meet people where they are. This too is a time for us to encounter God, to open up our hearts, so full of sorrow and pain, and to seek solace under God’s sheltering wing, in our faith and traditions.
This is a time for us to return to ourselves. The process of teshuvah, of restoring our relationships, leads us to reflect upon who we are, our character and moral standing, and seek to do and be better. The shofar blasts resound in our ears as they reverberate in our kishkes. They call us to reawaken our souls, our conscience, our whole being. The prayer Unetaneh tokef that we are about to recite reminds us of our mortality, our need to take our lives seriously, to believe that we can change for the better and be a force for good.
We return to the people and land of Israel. Everything we read about during the holiday—Isaac’s birth and binding, Hannah’s prayer, Jeremiah’s prophecy of national restoration—takes place in the land of Israel. Indeed, the words of Jeremiah that we read tomorrow feel as relevant today as the day they were first uttered:
So says the Lord: The people escaped from the sword found favor in the wilderness, on Israel’s path to tranquility.
Israel still faces the sword of its enemies, and still seeks a path to its tranquility. For two thousand years, that land for us was largely a barren waste, inaccessible to Jews in the Diaspora; their prayers evoked what was, the Temple, kings, prophets, ancestors, ancient stories. All that was destroyed, remaining only as memories on parchment. Then a miracle occurred: the dry bones of the desert took on nerves and flesh, our nation came back to life as we returned to Zion, our homeland. Whereas a hundred years ago, barely 200,000 Jews lived in Palestine, today half of the Jewish people live in our sovereign nation. At this time, let us return in heart and person to our Israeli family, supporting them in all the ways we can as they fight for their survival, as they have time and again, against implacable foes.
Finally, the Holidays are a time for us to return to our community. We recite the Vidui, the confession, in the plural, atoning for all our sins together, as one. Ashamnu! Bagadnu! We are guilty! We have betrayed! At the Kol Nidrei prayer on Yom Kippur, we welcome the transgressors into our company, because none of us is without a taint of sin; because the community is the sum total of all of us, and none can atone without the helping hands of family and friends. On Sukkot, the four species of the lulav represents the unity in diversity of the Jewish people, our e pluribus unum. We dwell together in our goodly tents and give thanks for our manifold blessings.
Many of us may not have seen each other in the past year, or if we have, we may not have seen each other here, in synagogue. It’s time to rekindle our love for our community, for our tradition, for each other, a time to rededicate ourselves to our people. It’s time to wrap ourselves in the embrace of the tallit, to allow ourselves to ride upon the beautiful waves of our melodies, to plunge into the intellectual and spiritual wonders of our sacred texts. It’s time to be stirred by our awesome history of survival and accomplishments, by our perseverance, our dedication to our faith and our mission, our cultivation of our language through law and philosophy, prayer and poetry, in the face of frequent persecution and displacement.
No matter who we are or how we got here, together in this synagogue today, we know that this is the place where we belong, here is where we need to be. As we sit here today immersed in the poetic prayers of our Machzor, let’s reflect upon our own ties and ask ourselves what we can do in the year ahead that will strengthen our own Jewish identity and bonds with one another, that will spread love and kindness, that will give us succor even as we support our Jewish brothers and sisters, near and far. In the words of Jonah that we will read on Yom Kippur, let us affirm “Ivri Anochi,” I am a Jew, proud to embrace our heritage, our community, our history and our destiny, a proud inheritor of a brilliant tradition and a proud interpreter and conveyor of that tradition to future generations of our people.
Am Yisrael chai!