Rosh Hashanah 5787

Rosh Hashanah Morning 5787 (2026)

There is something strange about Rosh Hashanah.

We call it the New Year, and we speak about renewal, beginnings and possibility. We dip apples in honey and wish one another a good and sweet year, and there is something wonderfully physical about that ritual. We do not merely talk about sweetness; we put it into our mouths. We taste the prayer that we are making.

For me, and for The Jewish Renewal Movement, this is one of the places where what I think of as earth based Judaism becomes most tangible. The apple and the honey are not decorative symbols pointing us away from this world towards something supposedly more spiritual. They are this world. They come from trees and flowers, from soil, rain, insects and human hands, and through them we make a prayer with our bodies: may this coming year actually contain sweetness. May there be sweetness for those we love, sweetness for those whose lives have contained far too much bitterness, and sweetness for those parts of our world which are still waiting for healing and repair.

A small ritual carries an enormous hope. Holiness becomes something we can taste.

And then, almost immediately, Rosh Hashanah refuses to let us remain comfortably in that sweetness, because the shofar sounds.

Its voice is ancient, rough and startling: it is quite difficult to make the shofar polite. However beautifully it is sounded, something wild, something savage, remains within it. Maimonides famously imagined its message as a cry to those who are spiritually asleep: wake up from your sleep, examine your deeds, remember your Creator and return.

I personally find that image particularly powerful because Jewish renewal has never meant simply wiping the slate clean and pretending that the past has disappeared. Renewal requires an awakening to what is already there. Before we can become different, we have to become attentive.

That is the work traditionally called cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul. At this time of year we look back and ask ourselves difficult questions. Where did I become more fully alive during the year that has passed? Where did I become diminished? Whom have I hurt? What did I neglect? What have I learnt to ignore because noticing it would have required something of me?

But within the Earthbound Judaism that I am trying to articulate and live, I think our cheshbon hanefesh has to become wider still. I want us also to ask: how have I lived upon this earth during the year that has passed? What have I received without gratitude? What relationships have I treated as inexhaustible? Which people, places, creatures, or communities have I encountered primarily in terms of what they could provide for me rather than as presences with their own integrity and their own claim upon my attention?

These questions are not meant to leave us paralysed by guilt, that is not the purpose of cheshbon hanefesh, we take account because return is possible. We look honestly because something can still be repaired.

The Chassidic tradition gives Jewish Renewal a particularly rich language for this. Again and again, Chassidic teachers insist that holiness is not confined to obviously religious places or moments. Divine vitality can be encountered within the ordinary world, within eating, and breathing, within relationship and song, and literally within the material texture of life itself. Jewish Renewal inherited that radical instinct from Chassidism, even if we understand its metaphysics differently.

I do not think that that teaching requires us to imagine that the physical world is merely a veil concealing some more authentic spiritual reality behind it. I would almost turn the emphasis around. If the world is alive with holiness, then we are called to become more attentive to the world in front of us: this body, this person, this tree, this season, this patch of earth, this particular moment which will never exist in precisely this way again.

Maybe that is why the shofar has come to matter so much to me.

The central sound of Rosh Hashanah does not come from an elegant musical instrument, nor does it begin as words written on a page. It comes from human breath passing through the horn of an animal. Human body, animal body, breath and air meet, and something happens between them which none could produce alone.

That feels profoundly Jewish to me, and profoundly earthbound.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to explain ourselves, but first, it asks us to listen.

Chassidic teaching often understands the shofar as a cry from a place deeper than articulate speech. In Chabad thought, that depth is sometimes described as the etzem haneshamah, the essence or innermost depth of the soul. It is the part of us that cannot be reduced to our explanations, our roles, our achievements, or even the stories we tell about ourselves.

I do not think we have to accept a fixed metaphysical map of the soul in order to understand the spiritual truth of that teaching. All of us know something of those moments when words fail, when what we most deeply need or regret or long for cannot yet be turned into coherent language. The shofar gives sound to that place.

Its cry comes before explanation.

Before apology has found the right words, before resolve has become a plan, before we know exactly how to repair what has been broken, there can still be the simple recognition that something in us longs to return.

That is how I hear the Chassidic idea of etzem haneshamah: not as a hidden spiritual substance separate from the body or the world, but as the depth at which our lives can still be called back into relationship. It is the place beneath performance, beneath defensiveness, beneath habit, the place where we can still be moved.

And perhaps that is why the shofar requires breath. The cry of the soul is not disembodied. It passes through lungs and throat, through an animal horn, through the air between us. Even the most inward call to return is carried by the material world.

And the shofar carries us, inevitably, towards one of the most difficult stories in our tradition: the Akeidah, the binding of Isaac.

Abraham takes Isaac up the mountain. He builds the altar. He binds his son. He raises the knife.

And then something interrupts him.

“Abraham, Abraham.”

He stops.

Only then does Abraham lift his eyes and notice the ram caught by its horns in the thicket.

I keep returning to that moment. Was the ram there all along? Had Abraham simply been unable to see it? Does the possibility of another future become visible only when the movement towards sacrifice is interrupted?

I do not want to make the Akeidah comfortable. I think we lose something when we try too quickly to explain away the horror of a father raising a knife over his child. A truly Progressive Judaism should be able to argue with its sacred texts as seriously as it learns from them. Indeed, our tradition has always survived partly because Jews have refused to stop arguing with Torah.

It is precisely because the story is disturbing, I think it can place a powerful question before us at Rosh Hashanah: what are we carrying towards the altar that should never have been sacrificed?

What have we persuaded ourselves must be given up because this is simply how the world works?

Our relationships? Our health? Our compassion? The wellbeing of strangers? The flourishing of future generations? The living earth itself?

We live in cultures remarkably skilled at presenting destructive choices as inevitable. We are told that this is simply the price of prosperity, the price of security, the price of convenience, the price of the lives we have become accustomed to living.

And then the voice calls:

“Abraham. Abraham.”

Stop.

Look again.

That’s where teshuvah begins.

The Hebrew word teshuvah means return, and I think there is something deeply Chassidic, deeply Renewal, and deeply ecological in taking that meaning seriously. Return does not mean travelling backwards into an imagined perfect past. It means finding our way back into right relationship: with ourselves, with one another, with the Holy, and with the more-than-human world which sustains every one of us.

In nature, renewal is almost never a clean beginning. A forest does not begin the year by erasing what came before. Fallen leaves become soil, dead wood becomes habitat, and seeds wait underground through seasons in which, from the surface, nothing appears to be happening. What has been becomes material for what may yet grow.

Our spiritual lives are more like that than we sometimes allow ourselves to admit.

We cannot erase the year that has passed, and I do not think that Rosh Hashanah asks us to. Instead, perhaps we are invited to compost it: to take our failures, our grief, our mistakes, our joys, our acts of courage, our love, our disappointments and everything that remains unfinished, and allow them to become the soil from which another way of living might grow.

That is renewal as I understand it. It is not novelty. It is the rediscovery of life within what we already possess. It is becoming attentive enough to recognise possibilities that were previously hidden from us.

And this, perhaps, is where the Neo-Chassidic heart of Jewish Renewal matters most. Chassidism teaches us to search for the spark of holiness even in places where it has become obscured. I do not need to understand those sparks as literal fragments of a supernatural cosmology to find the teaching compelling. I hear in it an ethical and spiritual discipline: do not assume that because something appears exhausted, ordinary or broken, that there is no life left within it. Look again. Listen more carefully. Attend to what has been overlooked.

Sometimes the work of teshuvah is precisely that act of attention.

And so when we hear the shofar this Rosh Hashanah, I want us to hear within it a call to wake up, but also a call to come back down into the world.

Come back into you body.

Come back into relationship.

Come back into the places that sustain you.

Come back to the people whom habit has allowed you to stop seeing properly.

Come back to the earth beneath your feet.

Come back to the place within you that is deeper than excuse or performance, the place the Chassidic tradition calls etzem haneshamah, and listen for what it is still asking of you.

Come back to the possibility that another way remains available, even when you have not yet learned how to see it.

The year ahead will not be entirely sweet. No year ever is, and Judaism has never required us to pretend otherwise. But sweetness is still something we can cultivate. Repair is still something we can participate in. Teshuvah remains possible because the future has not yet been entirely determined by the past.

Somewhere beyond the limits of what we have allowed ourselves to imagine, there may still be a ram caught in the thicket.

There may still be another possibility.

My hope is that the sound of the shofar awakens us enough to notice it. That our cheshbon hanefesh gives us the courage to see ourselves clearly without surrendering the possibility of change. That we loosen what we have bound too tightly and refuse sacrifices that should never have been demanded.

And, that this new year roots us more deeply: in Torah, in one another, in the places we inhabit, and in the living earth of which we have always been a part.

When we taste the apple and honey, may we taste the world itself as blessing and responsibility. When we hear the shofar, may we hear human breath, animal horn and living air calling us home.

Shanah tovah u'metukah.

May it truly be a good, and sweet year.