May We Be Inscribed Together

This year, of all years, I gave myself a profound gift: a year off from spiritual leadership at the helm of Jewish High Holidays. Amidst the world’s shifting tectonic plates, I have taken a year off from trying to make meaning of all that has happened to us in the past year. Fill in your own catastrophe here, there are so many. Mine has been in Israel-Palestine, erupting on October 7 and ongoingly, a rolling tsunami of suffering, innocent lives cut down, families ruptured and spirits broken, the dream of coexistence in freefall, a radically changed Jewish landscape.

This year I will be praying, I have no answers. I will be listening in to the raw, primal blasts of the ram’s horn as we stand between two worlds—one that is on fire, and one that has not yet been born, and so cannot yet be named. “The earliest whispers of birth can often feel like death,” wrote a beloved teacher of mine (David LaChapelle). This Rosh Hashanah, I will be praying for the birth of new life, praying to be utterly gobsmacked by good news springing up everywhere, praying for revelry where now we can only see rubble. And I will be joining you, beloved friends and students, in summoning a willingness to accept and allow the collapsing realities before us, as an act of the highest faith in life itself.

Wherever you find yourself at this threshold season, may you and all of us—including those of us who feel estranged, alienated, or cast aside—be inscribed together in the Book of Life, for a year of sanity, peace, and healing.