Shabbat Shuvah arrives this year with the weight of the days of awe pressing close.

We stand on the precipice of Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar, preparing to confront questions of life and death, forgiveness, responsibility and whether we have become the people we hoped to be.

Those questions feel less theoretical to me than they once did.

During Rosh Hashanah, a woman was tragically killed just outside the doors of my synagogue, a single mother by choice who leaves behind a seventeen year old son. I did not know her, but something about learning her story stayed with me.

Maybe because I am a parent.

Maybe because I am 48.

Maybe because the older I get, the harder it becomes to pretend that time is an unlimited resource.

And maybe because of where we find ourselves as Jews.

Almost three years after October 7th, the world feels louder, more frenzied and less safe. The noise of the public square has become increasingly difficult to separate from the mainstreaming of antisemitism. The old questions of these days feel newly urgent in a post-October 7th world: What do we owe one another? What does it mean to remain human when so much around us seems intent on making that harder? What kind........

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