Each year at this season Jews mark the start of a new year on the lunar Hebrew calendar. It’s a happy, hopeful time. The custom is to eat apples and honey as a symbol of wishes for a sweet year.
This past Jewish year has been anything but sweet.
On Oct. 7 a year ago, Jewish communities around the world were rocked by a Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and led to the abduction of hundreds more. The invasion occurred on Simchat Torah, one of the most joyous Jewish festivals of the year and the last in a series of holidays surrounding new year observances.
This year the anniversary of the attack falls right in the middle of the Days of Awe, the period between the Rosh Hashana new year’s observance (Oct. 2-4 this year) and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement (Oct. 11 and 12). This is a period of reflection and repentance during which Jews confess to their errors of the past year and seek forgiveness from God and their fellow man.
Now Jews are trying to meet their spiritual obligations while reflecting on a year filled with trying times dominated by a war that continues to this day.
There has been a surge in antisemitic incidents. College campuses were wracked by protests that left many Jewish students feeling vulnerable and unwelcome. Jews grieved for Israelis killed or taken hostage by Hamas and for the tens of thousands of Palestinians subsequently killed during Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
“It’s been a very difficult time, the most difficult time for a Jew in America that I’ve been alive,” Gayle Pomerantz, senior rabbi at Miami Beach’s Temple Beth Sholom told The Associated Press. “I’m hoping that the holidays will help to contextualize our suffering and not let it overtake us.”
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, noted that the liturgy for the new year includes the question, “Who will live and who will die” in the coming year?
“That’s going to resonate in a different way this year, for certain,” Jacobs said.
The good news is that Pomerantz and Jacobs are seeing signs of a resurgence of Jewish pride and solidarity.
Yet there is pervasive anxiety about a rise in antisemitic incidents over the past year, part of a trend that started long before Oct. 7.
The FBI’s 2023 Hate Crime Report found that the Jewish community was the most-targeted religious group, with 1,832 anti-Jewish incidents accounting for 67% of all religiously motivated hate crimes recorded by the FBI. That was up from 1,124 incidents the prior year. The incidents include vandalism, harassment, assault and bomb hoaxes, the AP reported.
For a long time American Jews were convinced that the United States is a place where they can worship freely and without fear. That notion has been shattered.
“I travel around the country all the time,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the AP. “Any synagogue, any Jewish community center, any Jewish home for the elderly has armed guards in it — people with firearms, in uniforms.
“If we’re not safe on the campuses where we learn, in the places where we work, in the synagogues where we pray, where are we actually safe?”
We pray that Jews are able to take solace in the comfort of community during these days and find a way to focus on the spiritually fulfilling work of establishing a clean slate for the coming year. It’s a practice worth emulating no matter what your religious beliefs are.
The Jewish new year observance includes taking the opportunity to seek healing in interpersonal relationships. That is particularly applicable to all of us at this time of sharp division in communities and even families.
Let us all take the opportunity to resolve to treat our family, friends and neighbors better in the coming days, weeks and months. Let’s put aside the bitterness and negativity that has infected so much of our society and share our views with respect toward those with whom we disagree.
We urge people of all faiths, races and backgrounds to show solidarity with their Jewish neighbors and to join us in expressing wishes for a happy, healthy 5785 filled with better times for them and their neighbors of all faiths and beliefs, here and around the world.
