Back to the Future
Rosh Hashanah gives us something that is increasingly difficult to find in modern life: a sacred pause. We spend much of the year moving forward at a remarkable pace. We work, care for our families, fulfill our responsibilities, answer messages, make plans, and move from one obligation to the next. We can become so accustomed to being busy that we forget to ask where we are going and why we are going there. Then Rosh Hashanah arrives and, for a moment, the Jewish calendar asks us to stop.
That pause is not an interruption of Jewish life. It is one of the purposes of Jewish life. Rosh Hashanah is Rosh Hashanah, the “head of the year,” and the head does more than come first; it directs the rest of the body. In the same way, the way we enter the year can shape the way we live it. Rosh Hashanah gives us the opportunity to look backward and consider where we have been, while at the same time looking forward and asking where we want to go.
In that sense, Rosh Hashanah invites us to go “back to the future.” The past cannot be changed, but it can be understood. The future cannot be known, but it can be approached with intention. The quality of the questions we ask ourselves can profoundly affect the quality of our lives, and these days invite us to consider some important questions.
What Have I Learned During the Past Year?
A year can pass so quickly that we remember only its major events: the celebrations, the losses, the changes, and the milestones. Yet beneath those events are quieter lessons that have shaped us. What did we learn from our successes? What did we learn from our failures? What did a disappointment teach us? What did a difficult relationship reveal about ourselves? Where did we discover a strength we did not know we possessed?
Jewish tradition gives great importance to learning from the past. Teshuvah is often translated as repentance, but its deeper meaning is return. It is the possibility of turning around and coming back to the person we were created to be. The past, therefore, is not merely something we leave behind. It can become material for transformation.
The Rambam captures this spirit in his famous explanation of the shofar. Its sound is a summons to awaken from our spiritual sleep, to review our deeds, remember our Creator, and examine the direction of our lives. We are often very good at moving on without learning. We experience something painful and try to forget it, make the same mistake again because we never considered what it was teaching us, or experience something wonderful without pausing to appreciate it. Rosh Hashanah asks us to remember, but more importantly, to learn from what we remember.
What Do I Want for the Coming Year?
Once we have looked backward, we can begin to look forward. This question is more important than simply asking what we want to accomplish. We all have lists of things we would like to accomplish, but perhaps the deeper question is, “What kind of person do I want to become?”
What would I like to do more of? What should I do less often? What deserves more of my time? What has occupied too much of my attention? Are there things I have allowed to become priorities simply because they are urgent, even though they are not truly important?
Most of us spend much of our lives responding to whatever is immediately in front of us. Rosh Hashanah allows us to step back and ask whether the life we are living is actually the life we want to be living. Perhaps we need fewer resolutions about what we will accomplish and more reflection about the qualities we want to cultivate. Perhaps we want to become more patient, generous, attentive, courageous, or willing to listen. Perhaps we want to become more deeply connected to our Jewish tradition and more conscious of God’s presence in our lives.
This is where the rabbinic understanding of Rosh Hashanah becomes especially important. The Mishnah identifies three great themes of the day: malchuyot, zichronot, and shofarot, God’s kingship, God’s remembrance, and the shofar. Malchuyot reminds us that God is King. Before asking what we want from the coming year, we should ask what God wants from us. We do not create our lives entirely according to our own desires. We are part of a larger story, accountable to a King whose purposes are greater than our own.
Where Is God in My Life?
This may be the most difficult question we ask during these days. For some people, the answer comes easily. For others, God feels distant, uncertain, or difficult to define. Some pray easily; others struggle with prayer. Some experience God’s presence in synagogue, while others find God more readily in nature, relationships, moments of silence, or acts of kindness.
Yet Jewish tradition reminds us that there are moments when God is especially near. The Talmud, commenting on the words of Isaiah, “Seek the Lord while He may be found; call upon Him while He is near,” identifies the Ten Days of Repentance as a particularly favorable time for seeking God. The Hasidic tradition develops this idea through the beautiful image of Melech ba-sadeh, “the King is in the field.” The King is not inaccessible in some distant palace. He has come out to where His people are.
Perhaps the challenge is not that God has moved farther away from us, but that we have become too distracted to notice that God is near. There are remarkably simple ways to begin again. The first words of the traditional morning prayer, Modeh Ani, express gratitude for the return of our soul. Before we have accomplished anything, we acknowledge that life itself is a gift. At the end of the day, the Shema places us once again within the great declaration that God is One. A relationship with God does not necessarily begin with an extraordinary spiritual experience. It can begin with attention, gratitude, and making a little more room for God in an otherwise crowded day.
What Am I Most Grateful For?
Gratitude changes what we see. The circumstances of our lives may not change, but our perception of them can. We are often so accustomed to our blessings that we no longer notice them. We are grateful when something extraordinary happens, but easily overlook the ordinary gifts that sustain us every day: the people who love us, the food we eat, the homes in which we live, the opportunity to learn, the friend who calls, and the simple fact that we have awakened to another morning.
Sometimes we forget how much we have precisely because we have so much.
This is one reason Jewish tradition has filled ordinary life with blessings. We are repeatedly taught to notice. We bless God when we eat, drink, experience something beautiful, hear good news, and encounter something new. Judaism turns ordinary moments into opportunities for awareness.
Rosh Hashanah asks us to do the same thing with the year that has passed. Before asking what we want God to give us, perhaps we should take time to acknowledge what God has already given us. Gratitude does not require us to deny the difficult things in our lives. It allows us to see them within a larger landscape in which loss and blessing, disappointment and joy, uncertainty and hope can exist together.
Which Relationships in My Life Need My Attention?
The High Holy Days are not simply about our private relationship with God. They are also about the people around us. Judaism does not allow us to imagine that we can repair our relationship with God while ignoring the people whom we have hurt.
Is there someone to whom we need to apologize? Is there someone we need to forgive? Is there a friendship that has faded because we became too busy to maintain it? Is there a child who needs more of our time, a parent who needs our attention, a spouse who needs us to listen, or a friend who has been waiting for us to call?
Some relationships end because of dramatic events. Many others simply become neglected. We tell ourselves that we will call tomorrow, have the conversation next week, or make time when things calm down. But the High Holy Days remind us that there may not always be another opportunity.
This is why teshuvah is so demanding. It is not simply feeling sorry for what we have done. It is the willingness to change, to turn around, and to take the first step toward another person. Jewish tradition therefore connects our relationship with God to our relationship with other human beings. There are wrongs that only another person can forgive, and there are relationships that can be restored only when someone is willing to take the first step.
The Sound of the Shofar and the Hope of Redemption
All of these questions ultimately bring us back to the shofar. The rabbis understood its sound in many ways. It is a coronation trumpet announcing God’s kingship. It is a wake-up call demanding that we examine our lives. It recalls Sinai, when Israel encountered God. It evokes judgment and repentance, but it also points beyond the present moment toward redemption.
Saadia Gaon, in his classic enumeration of the meanings of the shofar, connects its sound not only with repentance and God’s kingship but also with the future redemption and the coming of the Messiah. This gives Rosh Hashanah a remarkable forward-looking dimension. We do not sound the shofar merely to remember the past. We sound it because we believe that history is going somewhere.
The prophets spoke of a day when a great shofar would be sounded and the scattered people of Israel would return. Isaiah describes that future gathering: “And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great shofar shall be blown.” The shofar therefore points beyond our present reality toward the redemption God has promised.
For those of us who understand that promise through the Messiah, there is an additional dimension to the sound of the shofar. The Brit Hadasha itself takes up this ancient Jewish imagery when it speaks of the resurrection and the return of Messiah in connection with the sounding of the trumpet. The shofar therefore becomes more than a reminder of what has been. It reminds us that what God has promised has not yet reached its fulfillment. We live between memory and hope, remembering what God has done while anticipating what God will yet do.
That is why looking backward can actually be an act of faith in the future. We remember God’s faithfulness in order to strengthen our confidence in God’s promises. We examine our failures not to become trapped in guilt, but so that we can turn and walk in a new direction. We give thanks for what we have received so that we can enter the future with greater trust. Rosh Hashanah calls us to look honestly at the year that has passed, to consider what it has taught us, and then to decide how we want to live the year that lies ahead.
The year that has passed is finished. We cannot rewrite it, but we can learn from it. The year ahead is unknown. We cannot control it, but we can enter it with intention, faith, gratitude, and hope. Perhaps that is the real gift of Rosh Hashanah. It gives us permission to stop long enough to consider where we have been, who we have become, and who we still have the possibility of becoming.
The shofar calls us to awaken, but it also calls us to hope. It reminds us that we are not simply drifting through another year. We are living within God’s story, a story that began long before us and will continue beyond us. As we enter this New Year, may we have the courage to look honestly at the year that has passed, the wisdom to learn from it, and the faith to believe that the year ahead can be different. May we enter it with greater gratitude, deeper relationships, a renewed awareness of God, and a clearer understanding of the people we hope to become. And may the sound of the shofar awaken within us not only the desire to become better people, but the faith to believe that God’s purposes for His people, His world, and His creation are moving toward their fulfillment.
Shanah tovah u’metukah.