I am pleased to share with you Fear and Wonder: Reflections on Uncertainty, Hope, and Renewal for the Days of Awe 5787.

This year鈥檚 essays鈥攚ritten by 91快播 faculty, leadership, and students鈥攅ngage with the current moment we are living in: a time marked by fear and uncertainty, from rising antisemitism and the ongoing war in Israel to the profound questions raised by artificial intelligence. Drawing on our collective past and shared memories, personal stories, timeless Jewish texts, and the liturgy of the High Holidays, our contributors wrestle with these challenges and offer insight for navigating the present moment. They call upon us to transform what could be Days of Fear into Days of Awe, reminding us that teshuvah is always possible and that new beginnings and repair are always within reach.

I am deeply grateful to all of the contributors who bring their wisdom, creativity, vulnerability, and distinct voices to this collection. The variety of forms represented here鈥攆rom scholarly reflection and personal essays to poetry, music, and images drawn from The 91快播 Library鈥攔eflects the extraordinary breadth and vitality of the 91快播 community. Together, these voices invite us to encounter the Days of Awe with renewed purpose: to sharpen our sense of what truly matters, and to connect more deeply鈥攁nd more joyfully鈥攖o these sacred days and to one another in community.

I am especially thankful to Shelly and Larry Gross for their generous support of this initiative, which allows us to share these reflections with you.

May Fear and Wonder accompany you through the Days of Awe, offering moments of reflection, connection, and inspiration鈥攁nd may it help us all move from uncertainty toward hope and renewal in the year ahead.

Shanah Tovah,

Rabbi Mike Uram, Chancellor, 91快播

The Talmud in Masekhet Yoma 86a makes an extraordinary statement:

讗指诪址专 专址讘执旨讬 讞指诪指讗 (讘址旨专) 讞植谞执讬谞指讗: 讙职旨讚讜止诇指讛 转职旨砖讈讜旨讘指讛 砖侄讈诪职旨讘执讬讗指讛 专执驻职讗讜旨转 诇职注讜止诇指诐, 砖侄讈谞侄旨讗直诪址专: “讗侄专职驻指旨讗 诪职砖讈讜旨讘指转指诐 讗讜止讛植讘值诐 谞职讚指讘指讛

Rabbi Hama bar Hanina said: Great is teshuvah, as it brings healing to the world, as it is stated: 鈥淚 will heal their backsliding. I will love them freely鈥� (Hosea 14:5).

While possibly an example of rabbinic hyperbole intended simply to emphasize the significance of teshuvah, nevertheless the connection of teshuvah (the central spiritual task of the High Holy Days) with refuah (healing) is intriguing and inviting of inquiry.

For one thing, what kind of healing is being referred to? Perhaps it is spiritual healing only, and specifically the costly residue of sin. But the text itself neither defines nor limits healing, and the reference seems quite broad. Commentators have understood it to encompass healing of bodily illness or injury, as well as emotional or spiritual woundedness and, indeed, suffering or brokenness of all kinds: whether personal or societal, in the world as we know it, and in mystical realms regarding which we may only sense an inkling.

If so, what exactly is the connection that the Talmud is making here between the spiritual work of teshuvah and such a broad understanding of healing?

The Rabbis may be imagining healing as a Divine reward for the spiritual work of teshuvah. Personally, that鈥檚 not a theology I can accept, and it doesn鈥檛 ring true to experience. I do not believe that illness or suffering is a punishment for wrongdoing, and I do not believe that health or healing is a reward for goodness.

Alternatively, the Rabbis may be suggesting a direct causal connection: healing comes simply as a consequence of improved character and behavior arising out of teshuvah. Certainly we can identify circumstances in which this seems true. There are clear and direct causational links between many of the world鈥檚 woes and human evil or overreach. If we turned from evil and began doing good, many of those woes would resolve, society would function better, and much pain and suffering would be healed. On a personal level, too, this makes sense. Our teshuvah may involve changing ways of living that have been harming our bodies. And holding onto guilt, shame, anger, or regret may sometimes manifest in emotional stress and disease and physical symptoms. As we do teshuvah, we may experience healing as a result. But it鈥檚 equally clear that not everything would be healed, because not all pain and suffering鈥攃ollective or individual, physical or emotional鈥攁re directly caused by human behavior in this way.

So I want to suggest that the Rabbis may be suggesting a more intimate connection between teshuvah and refuah: not that healing comes as a result of teshuvah, but that teshuvah is itself a healing, and teshuvah and refuah describe significantly overlapping processes or experiences involving the whole person.

This reading, I believe, opens a more generative and profound understanding of the nature of both teshuvah and refuah.

There are many translations and connotations of the word teshuvah. Translated as 鈥渞epentance鈥� or 鈥減enitence,鈥� it may conjure something judgmental and punitive: We have sinned, and we must repent, making amends concretely, verbally, and relationally. We must pay the price of error, failure, and wrongdoing.

The teshuvah the Rabbis envisioned as healing certainly includes taking responsibility for harm we鈥檝e caused. But more than that, it is, by definition, the process that responds to the injurious experience of lost or compromised integrity鈥攏ot only from specific wrongful actions, but the larger ways in which we are not living in accordance with our deepest held values or perhaps not even aware of them. It involves shedding ways of being or self-images that have never been truly who we are and reclaiming aspects of the self we have lost touch with or banished. This is less about self-flagellating recounting of sin and more about relocating inner truth, inviting us into gentler, more forward-looking understandings of teshuvah. Instead of 鈥渞epentance,鈥� teshuvah may refer to an 鈥渁nswer鈥� or 鈥渞esponse鈥� (as to respond to a sense of call or mission, something God or the moment demands of us), or to a process of turning or returning (changing our ways and our direction, turning away from one path toward a new one).

Similarly, envisioning refuah as intertwined with this work of teshuvah moves us to expand our conception of what healing might entail and especially to distinguish healing from cure. The spiritual work of teshuvah may or may not have the power to change the concrete life challenges we face, whether it be a devastating illness, heartbreaking loss, or shocking violation of our values or trust. But teshuvah always has the potential to change the meaning we make of those challenges; it can alter our suffering, if not our circumstances. The recently published Siddur Lev Shalem for Weekdays includes the following note by John Clayton next to our daily prayer for healing:

What does it mean to speak of healing? Simply to ask the question, to struggle with the question, is to step beyond the curing of disease or undoing of incapacity. Suppose the self that prays simply for healing of flesh finds something different, more important: an opportunity for deepening. A wholeness. May it be so with me. Open my lips and my mouth will declare Your praise.

The same can be said of teshuvah鈥攕tepping beyond atonement for specific sins and asking and receiving forgiveness, the self that engages in teshuvah may also find something different and more important: that very same opportunity for deepening. A wholeness.

This is so because both teshuvah and refuah demand an honest reckoning with what is true鈥攂y their very nature they demand that we abandon fantasies of human invulnerability, immortality, immutability, or perfection. They move us toward a wholeness that does not need to deny failure, deterioration, loss, pain, and even sin, but which instead allows all of us to be the full human beings we are.

In this sense, both teshuvah and refuah partake of a certain paradox: both are processes of returning not back but forward鈥攏ot to who we used to be, but to an integral, truer and more whole self we have always and never yet been.

In times of illness, loss, or brokenness, it鈥檚 only natural to wish for a restoration of what was, a return to who we once were, or to the life or world we once knew. But, except in the most trivial situations (like the common cold), that return is impossible, and from a spiritual perspective, it is undesirable.

Healing changes us. So does teshuvah. Learning to live with serious illness or significant loss, confronting our own inadequacies, failures, and wrongdoing, we will likely encounter previously unknown depths of our vulnerability, as well as our strength and resilience. We may attain new clarity about what matters to us鈥攑rioritizing certain values whose significance we previously underrated and freeing ourselves of pressures and stresses once seemingly important but now revealed to be trivial. Often, our capacity for compassion and connection grows wider and deeper. Inevitably, we emerge with an altered sense of self. This is not to say there aren鈥檛 losses to be grieved鈥攖here are, including the loss of who we used to be. But in both teshuvah and refuah, we鈥檙e likely to discover that the self we have become is truer and more whole than the one we used to be.  The Talmud (Berakhot 34b) famously quotes Rabbi Abbahu:

讚职旨讗指诪址专 专址讘执旨讬 讗植讘指讛讜旨: 诪指拽讜止诐 砖侄讈讘址旨注植诇值讬 转职砖讈讜旨讘指讛 注讜止诪职讚执讬谉 – 爪址讚执旨讬拽执讬诐 讙职旨诪讜旨专执讬诐 讗值讬谞指诐 注讜止诪职讚执讬谉

鈥淚n the place where those who engage in teshuvah stand, even the fully righteous do not stand鈥�

Great is teshuvah, as it brings healing to the world. Teshuvah and refuah on the personal level are microcosms of what can happen societally and globally. There is no going back to what was鈥攆or a people, a country, or humanity鈥攅ver. But if a critical mass of humans have the courage to do the deep work of teshuvah, we can be healed forward into a societal vision that is more whole, more conducive to the flourishing of all of us, and truer to the fullness of the human condition.

奥补迟肠丑听videoof Rabbi Kalish sharing her thoughts on this topic.

Amid gatherings with family and friends, festive meals, blessings for a good year, and expressions of gratitude, the Days of Awe are often accompanied by unsettling feelings. Our liturgy and customs encourage us to reflect on the year that has passed and imagine what may come in our future. Over the centuries, the haunting prayer of Unetaneh Tokef has prompted us to wonder who will die in the year ahead and who will live. We pray to be written and sealed in the Book of Life for the year to come, but the uncertainty of what this means and how it happens can leave some people feeling agitated. In addition to the personal difficulties we may be experiencing and reflecting upon, our feeling of being ill at ease may be intensified by the rise in antisemitism and hate speech and crimes in general.

The story of the Akedah, traditionally read on Rosh Hashanah, is one of our tradition鈥檚 most powerful and troubling stories of fear, threat, and survival. We often read it as the story of Abraham鈥檚 test: Will he obey God鈥檚 command to sacrifice his beloved son? But what happens when we shift our focus from Abraham to Isaac, the child at the center of the story? Through Isaac鈥檚 eyes, the Akedah becomes not only a story about faith and obedience, but a story about responding to threat, managing fear, and finding the will to survive and heal.

While the text is rich in its description of Abraham agreeing to God鈥檚 command and preparing to sacrifice his son, little attention is given to Isaac who is portrayed as passive and silent. After three days of quiet traveling, in a startling moment and disruption to the narrative, Isaac breaks the silence and speaks directly to Abraham: 鈥淭hen Isaac said to Abraham his father: he said, 鈥楩ather?鈥� and he [Abraham] said, 鈥業 am here, my son鈥�’ (Gen. 22:7).

Some commentaries imagine that Isaac understood Abraham鈥檚 intention to sacrifice him and specifically called to him as father to prompt him to show the mercy he imagined a father would have for a child (Keli Yakar, Gen. 22:7). Charlie Buchholtz and Tova Hartman describe the tension between Abraham and Isaac at this moment as one between a 鈥渟piritual-sacrificial ethic鈥� and an 鈥渆thic of love, memory, and relationship鈥� (Are You Not a Man of God?: Devotion, Betrayal, and Social Criticism in Jewish Tradition, Tova Hartman and Charlie Buckholtz).

In Isaac鈥檚 next utterance, he challenges his father: 鈥淗ere are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?鈥� Abraham responds, 鈥淚t is God who will see to the sheep for this burnt offering, my son.鈥� And the two of them walked on together. Abraham has evaded the question. The two walk off together, but, we may wonder, are they together? Is Isaac鈥檚 silence one of comfort, reassurance, resignation, or terror?

Isaac remains silent for the rest of the story of the Akedah. The sacrificer and the intended sacrifice arrive at the place that God had designated. Abraham builds an altar, lays out the wood, binds his son Isaac, places him on the altar on top of the wood, and raises his knife to slaughter him. Isaac is silent. At this crucial moment, the Messenger of God intervenes, calling out, 鈥淎braham! Abraham!鈥� As with Isaac, Abraham responds, 鈥淗ere I am.鈥� The plan is disrupted. The Messenger redirects Abraham to offer an animal sacrifice instead. The text lets us know that Isaac has survived. Learning the outcome of a story, especially a harrowing one, can collapse the telling of how the characters lived through it, moment by moment, uncertainty by uncertainty, and how they managed their fear in the face of threat. The scarcity of language regarding Isaac鈥檚 thoughts, feelings, and language may prompt us to wonder how people have found ways to persevere in harrowing and terrorizing situations.

In our post鈥揙ctober 7 reality, we are learning more and more from those who were abducted and held hostage in Gaza about strategies they used to survive. One story of survival is told by Rachel Goldberg-Polin about her son, Hersh, who was abducted on October 7 and murdered in captivity. As reported by others who were captive with him, Hersh frequently gave voice to how he was carrying with him a central message from a book that he had read. Rachel writes:

Or [one of the other hostages] explained that Hersh had repeated, like a mantra, a line from Frankl鈥檚 Man鈥檚 Search for Meaning . . . Frankl riffs on Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that when a person has a reason to live, he can deal with any challenge. Frankl said, 鈥淗e who has a     WHY can bear any how.鈥� Or said Hersh repeated that specific line of wisdom to everyone in    that tunnel. 鈥淲hat is your WHY?鈥� he kept asking over and over, prompting them to consider what was of utmost importance to them and to formulate their sense of purpose. (Rachel Goldberg-Polin, When We See You Again)

The story is told that before deportation to Theresienstadt, Frankl鈥檚 wife, Tilly, had sewn his manuscript into his coat. But, at Auschwitz the coat was confiscated, along with the manuscript he had just completed on his theory of logotherapy. It was his life鈥檚 work at that time and a manifestation of his sense of purpose. Bereft, Frankl wrote that his deep desire to rewrite the manuscript helped him survive. At one point he became ill with typhus fever and began to write down notes on scraps of paper to help him reconstruct the work. He wrote, 鈥淚 am sure that this reconstruction of my lost manuscript in the dark barracks of a concentration camp assisted me in overcoming the danger of cardiovascular collapse.鈥�

Both Frankl and Goldberg-Polin found ways to stay connected to who they were as unique people with a sense of purpose amid the most horrific and dehumanizing experiences.

Psychologists differentiate between fear as a physiological and often unconscious and reflexive response to real danger in the moment, and fear that is relived from the past after an imminent threat has concluded. After the Akedah, Isaac鈥檚 story continues as that of a trauma survivor.

Following the Akedah, Abraham returned to his servants, making no mention of Isaac returning (Gen. 22:19). The next we hear of Isaac is when Abraham鈥檚 servant Eliezer has arranged a marriage for him. When he finds Isaac, the text tells us:

讜址讬值旨爪值芝讗 讬执爪职讞指譀拽 诇指砖讉芝讜旨讞址 讘址旨砖指旨讉讚侄謻讛 诇执驻职谞郑讜止转 注指謶专侄讘

 鈥淚saac went out walking in the field toward evening.鈥� (Gen. 24:63)

Rabbinic commentators estimate that three years had passed since the Akedah. What did Isaac do during that time?

Genesis Rabbah imagines Shem and Ever (Noah鈥檚 son and great-grandson) establishing a yeshiva at which numerous subsequent ancestors studied. My teacher Rabbi Morton Leifman, of blessed memory, used to emphasize the special power of the classic midrash that suggests that after the Akedah, Isaac went to this yeshiva to study with his ancestors (Genesis Rabbah 56:11). Rabbi Leifman suggested that Isaac went there following his experience of trauma to grapple with existential questions and to seek healing.

The commentators imagine numerous other ways this verse could be understood. Some envision Isaac seeking solace in the natural world, understanding the Hebrew lasuah as connected to siah (“vegetation”) and picturing him gardening or walking in nature (Rashbam and Ibn Ezra on Gen. 24:63). Still others understand lasuah to mean prayer, linking it with the phrase yishpokh siho鈥�”pour out his plea” (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 26b; Ps. 102:1). Still others imagine Isaac turning to study in the yeshiva of Shem and Ever (Genesis Rabbah, see above).

Instead of reading these commentaries as a debate for what the text means, we can understand them as offering different ways one might seek to heal from a terrifying experience.

This year, as we reflect on our joy and gratitude from the past year, may we also find and affirm our own sense of purpose, perseverance, and healing.

Dr. Marcus Mordecai Schwartz, Ripps Schnitzer Librarian for Special Collections

Watch video of Dr. Schwartz sharing his thoughts on this topic

The Hebrew word mahzor literally means “cycle.” Today it usually refers to the prayer book for the High Holidays, but in the Middle Ages a mahzor contained the entire yearly cycle of prayers. This magnificent manuscript was completed in Bamberg, Germany, in 1279 and preserves the liturgy of the medieval Ashkenazi rite. Beyond its beauty, it is a witness to centuries of Jewish prayer.

The page opens a yotzer (liturgical poem) for Rosh Hashanah attributed to Rabbi Eleazar ha-Qallir. The poem begins with a single monumental word: Melekh(鈥淜ing鈥�). The scribe enlarged the word until it filled the top of the page, making God’s Kingship visible before a single line of the poem is read. Beneath it, an elaborate architectural arch frames the text like the entrance to a palace or throne room. Yet the arch itself seems almost clothed. One column is covered in flowing vines, another in a patterned lattice, while the curved bands above are wrapped in different decorative designs. The architecture appears to wear garments, echoing the poem’s repeated meditation on the divine King who 鈥減uts on鈥� majesty, strength, righteousness, vengeance, and salvation.

This imagery draws on an ancient midrash in Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer, which describes God as possessing 10 royal garments, each revealing a different aspect of divine rule. Some garments express justice, and others, mercy; some proclaim glory, while others are worn in moments of war or judgment. Ha-Qallir’s poem develops this tradition line by line, presenting God as a sovereign who clothes Himself differently according to the needs of history and the moral condition of the world.

Rosh Hashanah confronts worshippers with both fear and love. The repeated cry of Melekh reminds us that the future is uncertain, that judgment is real, and that human beings stand before a power greater than themselves. Yet this manuscript also tells another story. The margins are filled with notes added by generations of cantors and readers, preserving musical traditions, local customs, and practical directions for worship. Far from being a museum piece, this is a living prayer book, handled, studied, sung from, and cherished for centuries. It bears not only the fear of those who prayed for a favorable judgment, but also the love of generations who returned to these pages year after year, trusting that the same King who judges the world also sustains it with enduring mercy.

Learn more about this and other treasures from The 91快播 Library in the new digital museum, .

Artificial Intelligence. What emotions do those words evoke? When I ask my AI-training groups, inevitably, the word 鈥渇ear鈥� comes up. Some people go further and speak of feeling terror and helplessness.

This is not surprising. The organizational psychologist David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, explains that the brain responds to change as it does to physical danger, activating the same neural circuitry. As an example, even a simple question like “May I offer you some feedback?” can generate a threat response, the kind we feel when hearing footsteps behind us at night. If a single moment of feedback can do that, imagine what AI is doing to our nervous systems. Feedback is something that happens occasionally. It鈥檚 a threat that will pass. AI, on the other hand, is continuously present. Every day brings the launch of a new tool and the news of another field disrupted. The alarm we feel about AI has become part of the texture of daily life, exhausting us.

The scale and speed of AI are staggering. Since late 2022, consumer AI tools have grown from a handful to more than 50,000, with new ones added every day鈥攆ar more than any person could try or even name. The speed of change has been just as fast. When the telephone was first invented, it took 50 years to reach 50 million users. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months.

The sheer pace is only part of what wears us down; underneath it lies something more specific. Rock found that when we cannot predict what will happen next, the brain must spend dramatically more resources just to process each passing moment. Uncertainty is not only emotionally uncomfortable but neurologically expensive. The brain is working overtime just to get through the day. And this is not a modern affliction. Long before anyone imagined a machine that could write or reason, people were undone by the very same thing: not knowing what was coming.

The Israelites, wandering in the desert, knew this despair intimately. Their discomfort with the unknown grew so great that they longed for the years of their slavery. At least in Egypt, they said, they had fish and melons and garlic to eat (Num.11:5). They were ready to turn on Moses and appoint a new leader who would take them back to slavery and a life they could predict. Certainty, even the certainty of suffering, felt safer than an open and unknown future.

Rock’s remedy is deceptively simple: reduce the number of unknowns, even slightly. The whole uncertainty does not have to be resolved. A single piece of clarity鈥攌nowing what will happen next week or naming one thing that is not going to change鈥攊s enough to give the brain a moment’s reprieve and to let it stop burning itself out anticipating every threat.

In the Exodus story, the Israelites are led by a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night that signaled when to move and when to remain in place. They were given no map or view of the distant future鈥攖hat remained hidden, as the future by necessity always is. What they were given was one visible signal about the very next step. The Torah’s wisdom is that this was enough: not certainty about the destination, but a small, steady sign, given again and again.

These are desert lessons, and they carry over directly to the fear so many of us feel about AI. Three stand out.

The first is that we cannot take it all on. No one can learn, or even track, the full sweep of AI; the volume and pace defeat any attempt at mastery. That is not a personal failure but the nature of the terrain. And freed from the impossible task of keeping up with everything, we can do the one thing actually available to us: choose, deliberately, the few tools worth engaging with meaningfully. That is enough.

The second lesson comes from the pillar itself. We are not going to be handed a map of where AI leads. No one has one, and anyone who claims to is merely guessing. But we do not need to resolve the whole uncertainty to function within it. What steadies us is not certainty about the destination, but a few fixed points along the way: the values that will not change no matter where the technology goes and the questions we will keep asking of it.

The third lesson is that boycotting AI is not a neutral act. It is tempting to treat any engagement with AI as an endorsement of it, to keep our distance in order to keep our hands clean. But the shape of this technology has not yet been settled. What it becomes, what guardrails it carries or lacks, whom it serves and whom it harms鈥攖hese things are being decided right now, and they will be decided with us or without us. To opt out is not to stay neutral. It is to hand the decision to someone else.

We do not know whether AI will bring remarkable discoveries, genuine harm, or some combination of both. What we do know is that it is already here. We are already in the desert. The question before us, as individuals and as a community, is not whether to make the journey but how: with what values, what vigilance, what willingness to stop when stopping is right and to say so when it matters.

So, too, on the High Holidays, when we stand before a future we cannot control, we are reminded of the opportunity for teshuvah鈥攖o choose, again and again, who we will be in the face of what we cannot know. Judaism’s answer to uncertainty has never been to eliminate it. It has been to cultivate the kind of people capable of meeting whatever comes.

The decisions that will shape AI are being made right now. We need to make sure the people who care about human dignity and who ask about those who are left behind are among those influencing these decisions. Not because any one of us can steer the whole of it, but because the desert is crossed together, one step at a time, and the direction is set by those who show up.

Cantor Rabbi Shoshi Levin Goldberg, Director, H. L. Miller Cantorial School

At their best, familiar melodies on the High Holidays serve as a time machine, transporting us to our earliest memories of sitting beside our parents in synagogue or causing us to flash forward to a later life stage, imagining what it might be like to attend services with our own grandchildren. We can feel a sense of profound welcome when we enter an unfamiliar prayer space or encounter a different cantor and still hear our most beloved tunes, enabling us to sing along immediately and effortlessly. Transition and uncertainty are a given, and familiar melodies offer us comfort, stability, and a sense of belonging. New melodies, at their best, are refreshing and breathe new life into familiar words. Yet, new tunes might also feel jarring, robbing us of nostalgia and community, especially in overwhelming times.

Cantors are particularly concerned with this tension during the High Holidays as we balance traditional melodies with new ones. At one extreme, changing the tune for Kol Nidre or Avinu Malkeinu would certainly be unwise. Furthermore, it is far easier to sing along with familiar melodies. Creating favorable circumstances for engagement and communal participation benefits us all.

However, introducing new melodies in a sensitive way has the potential to enliven different generations within our communities. Using new or unexpected tunes strategically and thoughtfully can deepen spiritual reflection, causing us to experience a prayer in a new way and offering us new insights into our liturgy. New tunes keep our prayer lives vibrant and reflect our living tradition, especially when we expand our services to include melodies from different communities and cultures. Additionally, some of today’s new melodies will surely become our next generation’s standard tunes.

At 91快播, our cantorial students learn how to facilitate communal singing in a way that is engaging and uplifting, whether the melodies are new or old. It is my pleasure to share this musical compilation featuring four seasoned cantorial students leading our 91快播 community in melodies for the High Holidays: Kelsey Bailey, Toby Banks, Ruth Engel and Brittany Stern. These clips are taken from the students’ Nusah presentations, all of which are available on

You can hear Ve-ye’etayu, a beloved liturgical poem (piyyut) from the Musaf service as well as selections from the 狈别鈥檌濒补丑 service at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, including El Nora Alilah, a Sephardic and Mizrahi piyyut that has been adopted by many Ashkenazic communities. And, of course, Avinu Malkeinu. Please sing along!

This summer my dad turned 81 years old. He was born in Russia and raised in Poland right after the end of the Sho鈥檃h, in which most of his family was murdered. Facing intense antisemitism in Poland when he was growing up, he and his mother traveled by boat to Canada to escape when he was a teenager. That is the extent of what I knew about his childhood for most of my life. He simply did not talk about it. It was too painful. So I grew up feeling unmoored in the world. I couldn鈥檛 figure out how to move forward when so much of my past was shrouded in mystery and tinged with pain. For years I’ve asked him to tell me stories from his childhood. His answer is always the same: “We’ll see.” Or, “I need to find the photo albums.” The albums, of course, remain unfound. Beyond wanting to preserve family history for future generations, I have another reason for asking. I began noticing my own reactivity. Antisemitism took not only the lives of my ancestors but also my ability to know them. Their stories and even their names remain hidden. So every headline, every hateful comment, every careless remark lands with disproportionate force. I am not just responding to the present. I am reacting to a past I have never been able to fully grieve.

Reactivity is not born in the moment. It is the activation of something much older and deeper. The work of Elul invites us to trace these activations through heshbon hanefesh (spiritual accounting). We often imagine this accounting as a record of our actions: Whom have I hurt? Where did I stray from my values? Where do I need to make repairs? But before we can answer these questions, we need to ask another: Who is the person answering them? What are the stories that have shaped my soul? The goal is not to remain trapped in the past, but to give it enough time and attention that it no longer unconsciously determines the present.

If Elul is asking us to take inventory of the stories that shape our souls, the Torah offers us a model of how to do it. In Deuteronomy 26, the Israelites receive instructions on what to do when they first enter the Promised Land, beginning with the ritual of the first fruits. They are to take some of each of the first fruits of the land, bring them to the kohen (the priest), and recite a declaration that is familiar to many of us.

讗植专址诪执旨讬謾 讗止讘值郑讚 讗指讘执謹讬 讜址讬值旨郑专侄讚 诪执爪职专址謹讬职诪指讛 讜址讬指旨芝讙讎专 砖指讈謻诐 讘执旨诪职转值郑讬 诪职注指謶讟 讜址纸讬职讛执讬志砖指讈謺诐 诇职讙芝讜止讬 讙指旨讚謻讜止诇 注指爪芝讜旨诐 讜指专指纸讘 

鈥淢y father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation.鈥� (Deut. 26:5)

This declaration, which we also read each year in the Haggadah during Pesah, continues on to tell the history of the Israelites and their journey: their slavery in Egypt, their crying out to the Holy One, their freedom by God鈥檚 hand, and their arrival to this land flowing with milk and honey. The juxtaposition is striking: The Israelites have harvested the first fruits, these symbols of the future emerging from the land that they have been searching for for 40 years. But before they can enjoy these fruits, they must acknowledge the journey that has brought them there. Yet our traumas, like the generational experience of antisemitism, have made this examination increasingly difficult. Our experience of antisemitism, when we let it, disrupts the transmission of Jewish memory, leaving us with inherited grief instead of inherited stories. Many people, like my dad, survive by containing these painful memories and hoping they never surface. But what鈥檚 kept hidden rarely disappears. Instead, it quietly shapes the way we encounter the present.

Mishnah Bikkurim 3:7 describes the recitation of 讗植专址诪执旨讬謾 讗止讘值郑讚 讗指讘执謹讬, explaining that those who knew the declaration would recite it themselves. Those who did not know it would first hear it recited by another, then repeat it out loud. When I imagine this scene, I see myself and my father in both of these roles. In one sense, I am the one who does not know how to recite, because I literally do not know the story of my family. I need him to recite it first, so I can learn it and begin to recite it on my own. And in another sense, he is the one who does not know how to recite. After a lifetime of repressing his memories, he does not know how to begin reopening them. It breaks my heart to know how much he has carried alone, and that the weight of that pain has also become a barrier between me and my family鈥檚 history. So I will keep gently nudging him. Every Sunday evening when we FaceTime, no matter what his answer was the week before, I will ask again for a story. I will ask in the hopes that I can tell a story each day as I bring forth my own offerings that include all the pieces that have shaped my soul. Perhaps the work of Elul is this: to give our stories the time and attention they need so they no longer dictate our reactions but instead become sources of wisdom. Only then can we step into our promised land.

In 1973, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was stranded on the Greek island of Hydra, drowning in a deep existential crisis. Profoundly depressed and creatively empty, he believed he had nothing left to say to a fractured world. Cohen would sit staring at his typewriter for hours, completely unable to write, telling his partner that his creative voice was entirely gone, and he had nothing left to say. He felt like a ghost, paralyzed by internal darkness and isolated from humanity. 

Today, many individuals find themselves trapped in a similar sense of paralysis, navigating an era marked by existential anxiety, worry, and fear.  For Jews鈥攁nd Jewish university students, in particular鈥攖his anxiety is amplified by an alarming surge in global antisemitism. This escalating hostility leaves many feeling isolated, targeted, and deeply fearful within the very spaces and institutions meant to foster safety, belonging, and personal growth. 

In clinical psychology, this type of anxiety and fear is often treated as a pathology, an emotional dysregulation to be managed and minimized to restore personal autonomy. In stark contrast, Jewish tradition during the High Holidays reframes fear (yirah) not as an affliction to be cured, but as a sacred instrument for spiritual awakening.  During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, fear is deliberately cultivated as a complex emotion鈥攐ne that holds together the visceral terror of our own fragility with a profound sense of awe before the Divine. The liturgy prompts the community to face mortality together, aiming to remove earthly illusions, foster deep responsibility, and ultimately turn intense fear into a powerful force for personal and communal transformation (teshuvah).

A similar terror occurred in October 1973 when Israel suffered a massive surprise attack on Yom Kippur by multiple Arab armies. The nation faced the raw, immediate threat of being completely overrun, which sent shockwaves of existential concern and dread through the global Jewish community. It was in the depths of this geopolitical and spiritual nightmare that Cohen felt an irrepressible impulse. He left his self-imposed isolation on Hydra and flew directly into the dust-choked desert sands of the Sinai, drawn by an immense desire to connect with and comfort his people. 

Upon arrival, Cohen chose proximity over detachment. Travelling from one chaotic army outpost to another, he refused special treatment, ate basic army rations, and slept on the desert sands alongside the troops. Looking into the eyes of young tank crews facing imminent death, Cohen spoke to the Israeli soldiers, reminding them, “We are brothers.”

Through singing, caring, and connecting with the soldiers, Cohen emerged from his personal crisis. His immersion in the collective vulnerability of war resurrected his shattered creativity, serving as the birthplace of his masterpiece 鈥淲ho by Fire.鈥� The song directly channels both the soldier’s battlefield fears and the High Holiday liturgy of the Unetaneh Tokef, which explicitly asks who will live and who will die in the coming year: 

Who by fire, who by water, 

Who in the sunshine, who in the night,

Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,

And who shall I say is calling?” 

Cohen showed thatfacing uncertainty and fear can strengthen rather than break us. His experience together with the soldiers in the desert sands revealed that meaning and renewal come from helping others rather than dwelling on personal concerns.

Ultimately, we must arrive at the conclusion that turning inward and isolating鈥攁s Cohen initially did on Hydra鈥攐nly serves to increase our despair and amplify our anxiety. When hatred and division loom large, the temptation is to pull away; but like Cohen found in 1973,it is precisely when we feel the most anguish and fear that we must come together. Reconnecting with our Jewish roots, strengthening our community, and deepening our caring offers a pathway through the dark. It is this radical solidarity that turns us from dread toward meaning, hope, and renewal.