By Rabbi Betsy Forester

Our tradition teaches that God created many worlds before this one. The cycle of destroying and recreating is older than time itself. As we stand on the brink of a new year, our hearts reach for hope and joy, even as we know that the world around us is aching for care and healing.

This season calls us inward, to ask the most important questions of our lives: What matters most? Are we living our values? Are we offering the best of ourselves? What is our purpose? Which habits and attitudes have clouded our vision or narrowed our generosity? What qualities can we nurture so that we can give our most life-giving truth to our families, friends, and communities? How will we use what we’ve learned to renew our lives?

In complicated times, such questions serve a critical purpose. They remind us that we are not helpless. They show us that each of us can make a difference, and that we are never powerless if we commit to the internal work that makes renewal possible. This work prepares us to step into the year ahead with our better selves in hand, ready to help repair what is broken.

Hope is one of the most essential spiritual practices of this season—and it is precisely what our country and world need most urgently.

Hope demands that we believe in the possibility of change. It calls us to see ourselves and our communities as agents of that change. Practicing hope means putting our values on the line, taking risks, and using our resources—our time, our relationships, our skills, and our money—for the sake of a better world.

False hope is wishing things were different but doing nothing to make them so; it offers the comfort of illusion without the substance of transformation. Real hope is more than faith—it is a covenant, a promise backed by commitment and action.

As Rosh HaShanah nears, we lean into the tension between the world as it is and the world as it could be. We ready ourselves for the sacred work ahead as if we were rebuilding creation itself upon the ruins of what was. And we find the courage to trust that we were made for this very purpose.

On behalf of the entire Beth Israel Center family, I wish the Madison Jewish community a Shanah Tovah Um’tukah—a good and sweet year. Together, may we bring new light into our shared world, and may we help make it so.

L’shanah tovah tikateivu,
Rabbi Betsy Forester