Dear friends,

The High Holidays are a time of returning to ourselves.

That can mean reuniting with our families for holiday meals, and perhaps settling into familiar roles we filled growing up — like picking a fight with a sibling. Or it can mean re-experiencing Jewish traditions that call us back to our roots, from dipping apples in honey to hearing the shofar to saying kaddish at the Yizkor service for the relatives who are no longer here. Or returning to ourselves, at its simplest, can mean  reflecting on another year that has passed.

It’s good to return to ourselves. It can feel stable, and comforting. While we all continuously learn and develop incrementally from year to year, on a deep level, many of us are fully formed and invariable. I know who I am. I know my strengths. I know my weaknesses. I know that I’m an extrovert, and I know that I shouldn’t interact with another human before a morning coffee. 

Yet the High Holidays are also a time when we reflect on who we most want to be. The shofar calls us to action and change. At tashlikh, we symbolically cast off our sins, resolving to let certain actions and habits go. Our holiday prayers stress the possibility, and responsibility, of change; one of the most famous prayers of the season climaxes with the affirmation that “repentance, prayer, and giving charity avert the severe decree.” We don’t just accept who we are and what our fate is; the High Holidays inspire us to become a better version of ourselves.

How do we resolve this contradiction at the heart of the high holidays? Are we supposed to change into someone new, or are we supposed to return to the bedrock of who we are?

The answer, as so often in Judaism, is both. One of the main themes of the season is teshuvah —  repentance, and so suggests that we are resolving to change. But teshuvah also, and most literally, means “return.” The book of Lamentations, in its penultimate verse, prays that God will “renew our days, as of old.” A return to our foundations and a spirit of innovation are seen, by Jewish scriptures, as somehow identical.

The mandate to be ourselves and the mandate to work hard to better ourselves do not add up to a contradiction. We need to do both. We need to return to our deepest selves, but our deepest selves are people capable of radical change. To raise our aspirations is to return to our firmest foundations. This is true for each of us as individuals; it’s true for us as families and communities; and it’s true for Jewish organizations, which enable the Jewish community to thrive as a collective.

Rosh Hashanah is “the birthday of the world,” but that doesn’t need to mean just a commemoration of the past. The world’s birthday can be a rebirth, a chance to create the whole world anew. “In my beginning is my end,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Four Quartets.” But he also wrote there: “The end is where we start from… We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” 

May this holiday season call us all back — and forward — to our best selves. May we know a year of freedom, health, safety, thriving, and a chance to make our highest contributions to the world.

Gali Cooks
President & CEO
Leading Edge