The new year and its blessings

The chaggim finally are over, and the new year has begun. And it has so many challenges.

There’s a famous 13th century piyyut, a liturgical poem, that Sephardim and sometimes Ashkenazim sing during Slichot, the service that ushers in the High Holiday season. The words are powerful and the melody, at least the one that I know, is haunting, incantatory, quick to lodge in your ear and your heart and very slow to leave them.

Achot Ketana — the Little Sister — is about the curses of the year that’s about to end. Each verse ends with the plea “Let the year and its curses conclude!” The last verse, though, looks ahead.

“Be strong and rejoice for the plunder is ended; place hope in the Rock and keep His covenant. You will ascend to Zion and He will say: Pave! Pave her paths. Let the year and its blessings begin!”

In a normal year, we’d have packed away those words for 11 or so months, even if the melody continues to echo distantly. But somehow this year seems different. The year’s curses seem to have continued from last year. Midterms here. Elections in Israel. War and threats of war and unstable leaders and shattering alliances all over. The world feels different now, and not in a good way.

Simchat Torah now carries reminders of October 7; the joy eventually will overcome the remembered horror but it might take decades.

But — and isn’t there always a but? — there are also reasons for hope.

Flydubai! That flight! How did that happen?

I cannot imagine the terror that the passengers must have felt. I don’t want to imagine it, and in that I assume that I’m like everyone else. To be in a metal tube, improbably aloft, barreling down to the ground, everything falling and shaking and everyone screaming all around you, as if this were a horror movie or an amusement park ride but your knowledge that it isn’t taking the physical visceral fear and making it infinitely worse — it’s literally and thankfully unimaginable.

And then to be rescued! By a near-dead pilot whose quick wit and determination to live and to save lives, and then by Israelis who somehow instinctively knew how to do things that a few minutes earlier they would be sure they couldn’t possible do. By a series of coincidences and strokes of wild luck and courage and pluck and brains and the will to live. And then to be treated with humanity and goodness and kindness and generosity by, of all people, Saudi Arabians.

And to have all that happen just before Simchat Torah!

Oh, and back at my shul, on the Upper West Side, UJA Federation of New York and 17 local shuls, including us, combined to dance in the street outside BJ once again. It was just for one hakafah, there wasn’t music, it was mainly people standing around talking, but it was all of us together, and that was a minor miracle.

So maybe the piyyut is right after all. Maybe, somehow, the new year will have some blessings, and they already have begun.

—JP

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