Hoping for Better Days (delivered Erev Rosh Hashanah 2019/5780)

Every year around Rosh Hashanah, there’s a song I find myself listening to on the way to synagogue.  Written by John Rzeznick, it begins:

“You ask me what I want this year

I’ll try to make this kind and clear

Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days.”

I find this lyric to be the perfect backdrop for Rosh Hashanah, as we begin the new year.  When January 1 rolls around, we often think of the things we’d like to accomplish in the coming year, whether it’s things we’d like to do, places we’d like to go, people we’d like to reconnect with, or parts of our lives we resolve to change.  But Rosh Hashanah is different.  We don’t look to the future, we look to the past.  We engage in heshbon hanefesh, self-reflection, to look at the lives we’ve led to this point.  We don’t think of the things we’d like to do, we think of the things we’ve done; we don’t think of the people we’d like to reconnect with, we think of the people we’ve hurt; we don’t think of what we need to change our lives, we think of how we can find better days.

But more than highlighting this process, it’s the vision of hope which the song has which I want to hold on to each Rosh Hashanah.  It’s the simple wish not for “boxes wrapped in string,” as the next line says, or for anything specific, “just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days.”  As much as I often focus my sermons and writings on the aspects of judgment and teshuvah that are central to this holiday (and the liturgy of the mahzor doesn’t always help), at its core, all the work, reflection, apologies, and forgiveness are all there to provide us hope—hope that, as my teacher, Rabbi Sharon Brous, wrote, “You don’t have to be a static, stagnant being, dwelling perpetually in the mistakes of years past.”  Perhaps even greater than the gift of reconciliation that the High Holidays brings is the gift of hope that this year may be better than the last.

As the chorus of Rzeznick’s song goes, “Tonight’s the night the world begins again.”  Or, as our mahzor states, Hayom harat olam—today, the world is born.  Like every parent experiences holding their new baby in their arms, there is hope, possibility, faith, love, and dreams.  On the anniversary of the world’s creation, God holds the world out to us, as if it were newly born with all the hopefulness that comes with it.  And, if we allow it, God holds each of us as if we were a newborn, too, reminding us the same optimism applies for us.  We can be forgiven because the world is starting over; we can start a new life, the one we always dreamt of, but it needs to start today—not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, but now.

Let us take Rzeznick’s advice to, “Take these words/And sing out loud.”  Over the next month as we celebrate this holiday season, let’s embrace the hope and possibility this year can bring for us.  Let’s take advantage of the times we are together to take the words of our tradition, sing them, and let them inspire us to do the work of heshbon hanefesh and teshuvah.  And then, just maybe, each of us may have a chance to find better days.