The summer is waning, and it is time to get back to business. Isn't September is a great month in which to start a new year? Summertime is vacations and camp; baseball games and theme parks; irregular meals, late hours, and occasionally sleeping in. Day to day work doesn't stop exactly, but it often slows down, and loses much of the urgency that characterizes it and challenges us to keep up. I always have thought that the summer was a fitting season in which to bid the old year good-bye, and to rest up, take stock and gird up for the new year which is coming.
Children seem to do a lot of growing in the summer. With the approach of the new school year they seem to shed another particle of their precious innocence and are suddenly… older. The approaching Rosh HaShanah tells us that the wheels of our life have made another revolution, the total allotment diminished by one more. Lazy hazy summer, when we sometimes have to stop and think a moment to figure out what day of the week it is, goes away and is replaced by real life with its calendars and its appointments once again.
I think this cycle is a good thing. Different perspectives allow us refreshment and growth, and then Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur come along to lessen the trauma that accompanies this growth. These two old friends tell us that new adventures await us, that somehow there is order and constancy in a changing universe that it is OK to make an error, to make a resolution, to move on and improve. Sh'ma Koleinu (hear our voice), oh God, and hold our hand as we enter this New Year.
L’Shana Tovah Tikatevu! (May you be inscribed for a good year)
Cantor Margulis
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