Shanah tovah

Not that I want to jumble religions here, but during these last few years, and increasingly, writing editorials makes me feel like Cassandra. There is so much bad going on that to ignore it would be playing Pollyanna (who would not have gotten on with Cassandra at all), but to acknowledge it is just too unceasingly grim for words. And editorials are composed of words.

But. There’s always a but, so let’s go for it.

Summer is ending — its last day this year is this weekend — and with it comes the change of light and air and sense of purpose that the fall brings in, and the holidays underscore.

Even in good years, many of us need some time to mourn the end of summer. To me the saddest part is the end of summer fruit. There will be no more cherries this year; all summer they were firm and luscious and spectacularly dark red. And no more good peaches; we can get the mealy kind for a while longer, but not the sweet ones that dribble juice into your mouth, and if you’re not careful down your face and onto your shirt as well.

Rosh Hashanah starts on Monday night. The season intensifies until then, when we all jam into shul together, packed so closely that memories of covid that many of us have managed to pack away most of the time revive and wave long bony fingers at us. We have to figure out what to wear — will we guess wrong and freeze? Guess wrong and roast? It’s hard to get it right.

But it also means that we see friends we haven’t seen all summer, or maybe all year. We get the chance to remember what we love about our own community. We get to hear the music that so powerfully evokes other years, people we’ve lost, innocence we’ve lost, and that also beckons us forward.

We have the chance to think of ourselves as solitary beings and as part of a community; we can think of how we fit into the community and how the community fits into the larger world.

We can think about the future, and decide to at least try to greet it with less anger, less distrust, less cynicism; with more hope, more openness, more love. With less dissatisfaction and more gratitude. With a sense of humor and of intellectual curiosity. With joy in being human in this huge, unpredictable, sometimes terrible, sometimes beautiful world.

We wish all our readers a shanah tovah. A year of goodness. A better year. A sweet and happy and healthy year.

—JP

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