The Jewish New Year is at hand. According to tradition (but certainly not backed up by science!) the world was created just about 5781 years ago.
In fact, one of the core prayers of the Musaf Amidah on Rosh Hashanah says “Hayom harat olam - on this day the world came into being.” An alternate translation says simply, “Today is the birthday of the world.”
What do we do when we celebrate a birthday? We have a cake. For most children, there are candles on the cake representing each year of their lives. (That might be dangerous for the rest of us: beyond a certain age, that number of candles would present a serious fire hazard!)
And what do we do before we blow the candles out? We make a wish, most commonly to ourselves; many of us were taught as children that if we said the wish out loud it wouldn’t come true.
So it stands to reason that on the day which represents the birthday of the world, we should express our wishes for the year ahead. Not resolutions: this isn’t New Year’s Eve! But wishes, expressing our deepest and most heartfelt desires for the year to come.
Of course, the primary wish of every Jew - and it is a major theme of the High Holidays - is that each of us be granted another year of life. Many of the t’filot reference life and the wish that we be worthy of one more year on this earth. Why do we acknowledge and atone for our sins of the prior year on Yom Kippur? To show God that we are sincere in our intentions and so are deserving of God’s compassion of granting us that most precious gift: the gift of life.
But it’s a time as well to express our hopes and dreams, our aspirations and desires for the coming year. Unlike that birthday wish which must be kept secret, our hopes should be shared with those we love and care about.
Let’s face it: this has been a crazy year! And the craziness isn’t over yet. We have a pandemic, which has inalterably changed our lives. We have had - and are still having - wild weather events: hurricanes, tornados, excessive rainfall, uncontrolled fires and more. We have the continuing quest for racial equality in America as represented by the Black Lives Matter movement. We have a presidential campaign which seems to get uglier with each passing day. The list goes on…
However, amid all of the negative headlines are many, many stories of goodness, of kindness, of laughter and smiles, of celebration and of rejoicing. I just read an article entitled “Good News Prevails: 100 positive things that happened in 2020 (so far.)” Here are just a few of those heartwarming stories:
A 103-year-old woman beat COVID-19 and celebrated with a Bud Light.
Restaurants shared their secret recipes so we could make them at home.
Americans rushed to adopt and foster pets in need amid the pandemic.
Puzzles and board games became cool again.
Crayola launched a box of crayons with diverse skin colors for children to “accurately color themselves into the world.”
NASA named its Washington, DC headquarters after Mary W. Jackson, its first Black female engineer.
There are 94 more, but you get the idea!
As the Israeli song Al Kol Eilah says, we have to take the bitter with the sweet. This year, it may be more accurate to say, “we’ll take whatever sweetness we can find among the bitterness which surrounds us.”
It’s with mixed emotions that we approach this New Year. We may not be physically present with our extended family. We probably will “attend” services through the technology of Zoom, Facebook and YouTube as our synagogues remain closed. We wonder if things will ever be the same.
And so it’s a time for wishes. What do I wish for? I wish for very simple things:
I wish for an end to this terrible pandemic.
I wish for a year of good health for all of us.
I wish for a kinder, gentler nation - in ways too numerous to list.
I wish to love and be worthy of being loved in return.
I wish for happiness, in all of its many and varied forms.
I wish for a year of fulfillment through living a life of purpose.
I wish for you all that you wish for yourselves.
L’shana tova tikateivu v’teichateimu - may each of you be written and sealed for another year of life, another year of living that life in a way that brings you joy and contentment.