By Rabbi Josh Beraha
I love this time of year.
The High Holiday season opens before us as a season of possibility, a moment when Jewish tradition invites us back to basics. We speak of cheshbon hanefesh—an accounting of the soul. It is the work of honest return. We ask not only who we are, but who we might become. What choices marked the past year? Which words and deeds wore us down, and which made us stronger?
The poet Marge Piercy captures this spirit well: “Now is the time to let the mind search backwards like the raven loosed to see what can feed us. Now, the time to cast the mind forward to chart an aerial map of the months.” The question is both practical and moral: what do we need in order to step wisely into the future?
At the same time, as a Micah community that insists on turning outward, we cannot close our eyes to the world in which these questions must be asked. This season of reflection arrives amid deep anxiety and fear in our city. Public life feels increasingly chaotic—divisive politics, violence, and old hatreds in new guises. Each day seems to deliver another cause for concern about what’s happening in our city, the United States, and Israel.
There is a different kind of turbulence within our own congregational life: the unease of transition. We’ve entered a new chapter that raises hard questions and presses us to define who we are.
In times like these, personal reflection might feel like indulgence. But it’s not. It is sustenance—strength for shaken times, a return to the freedom of choosing and changing.
The philosopher William James, father of American pragmatism, offered a radical hope: “free will pragmatically means novelties in the world, the right to expect that…the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past.” In other words: the past is not destiny. Human imagination has the right to expect difference, and the obligation to insist upon change.
But freedom alone can sound like wishful thinking.
The philosopher Hans Jonas sharpens the claim: the world is ours “to complete, to save, or to spoil.” Torah had already said as much: “Be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). To live is to create. We do not choose the conditions of our birth, but through the exercise of will we may be reborn.
Still, honesty demands humility. The British literary critic and cultural theorist, Terry Eagleton, reminds us that we are “self-determining but only on the basis of a deeper dependency upon nature, the world, and each other.” Freedom is real but not boundless.
We are bound to the context in which we live. (And because we at Micah love a bit of humor, I’ll give the last word here to Carl Sagan, who put it more playfully: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”)
So we live between two truths: we are neither powerless nor all-powerful. Our agency is situated, our freedom written into a story we did not begin. And this is Judaism at its core. The Torah does not ask us to master the universe. It asks us to choose—life or death, blessing or curse—and to choose life. In choosing, we return not only to resilience, but to the beauty and holiness seeded within us from the beginning.
To remind us of this power of renewal, the rabbis taught that the moon’s renewal each month is a sign for our own. It disappears into darkness, only to return with light. Even when life feels unsteady, we are held within a larger rhythm that calls us back to renewal.
As we venture into 5786, the earth’s nearly completed orbit may be cosmically insignificant. But for us, it means everything. This turning is an invitation: to seek renewal over despair, to summon courage over repetition, to embrace life over resignation. The year ahead will not write itself. We must write it, together. That is why we mark Elul so carefully at Micah—through our Elul Project practicing, like the moon, how to begin again.
So let us return to the basics of our faith: to turn inward and awaken our hearts to the year ahead. Shanah tovah.
This article was originally published in the Sep-Oct-Nov 2025 issue of the Vine.