Looking to the new year

Time is so very odd.

The High Holidays finally are coming.

While it’s easy to visualize being in shul, with the crowds and all the white on the bimah, it’s not as easy to remember what it looks like outside, because it looks a little different every year.

Sometimes it’s sweltering end-of-summer, with people walking by in shorts and sleeveless tops and frizzy hair. Sometimes, like now, it’s full-on autumn, with leaves starting to turn and pedestrians wearing long sleeves and socks.

But once we’re in shul, the music that we hear only more or less this time of year but absolutely every year at more or less this time, those melodies that bring you back through so very many years, that evoke nearly lifelike dreams of so many much beloved, now-gone dear ones, is potent, year after year after year, decade after decade.

This year also is different.

October 7 happened on Simchat Torah. How can we possibly combine most years’ joy with last year’s horror? How can we forget the horror? How can we give up that joy? Do we have to give it up forever? How do we remember it honestly?

How does all of this work?

Time’s been a blur since covid for many of us. It’s been over for years now, but it left a jumbled mess of days and seasons and holidays jammed together like a messy bird’s nest, with odd twigs sticking out and pricking us. We started pulling out of it, but now we seem somehow plunged back into earlier times, with old hatreds reawakened, old threats looming, now helped along by high tech.

And the upcoming presidential and down-ballot elections don’t help. To pay attention to politics is to be a bundle of nerves, living for the latest poll, emotions mercurial, attention span truncated, sense of hope fading, reviving, fading again.

But the holidays are coming, with their promise of renewal — not without work, true, but with that promise — and maybe this year will be better than last year. Please let it be better.

We hope that all of our readers, all our community and other Jewish communities and other American communities and all Israel and the whole world have a year where we move toward understanding and peace.

We wish all our readers a shanah tovah umetukah. A sweet year.

—JP

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