Shanah Tovah U'Mitukah - A Happy, Good and Sweet Year in 5775

Shalom,

Faye Moskowitz wrote, "So there is nothing new under the sun.  I accept that.  That is my challenge.  There is beauty enough and ugliness enough and love enough and hate enough for any one of us to select from and shape our own absolutely personal combinations.  But this shaping must be a conscious thing:  a reaching back and forward for those details that create patterns and form and motif in a life.  To see living as connection is to bevel the rough edges, miter the corners, blur the divisions so that time becomes a chain of always accessible segments, no fragments, of knowledge and experience." 

As we feel this moment, being on the precipice of a New Year, we live Moskowitz's words.  We reach back through the year we are concluding and we reach forward to create a new year with our best intentions, our highest hopes and most sincere promises.  Then, after we stand on that peak, looking off into the distance of 5775, reality begins to set in as Yom Kippur approaches, we adjust those intentions, we temper our hopes and compromise on our promises - that is life, our human reality. 

But, this season invites us, no charges us, to hold as tight as possible, though, to those intentions, hopes and promises.  It teaches us to recognize that all of this is about being our own potential.  Rosh Hashanah comes on the New Moon.  It comes not when the moon is full, but halfway between waxing and waning, between growth and contraction.  The moon reminds us of our own waxing and waning, our own growth and contraction.  Let this Rosh Hashanah be an invitation to growth, a charge to not just hope and yearn for that potential, but take active steps to reach it.

Shanah Tovah U'Mitukah,

Evon