Maayan Schoen’s Rosh Hashanah Message for 2024

The past 100 years have seen the convergence of some of the most significant historical, biblical, and national forces for the Jewish people. The Holocaust, the Farhud and extended dispossession and exile from Arab and Muslim lands, the establishment of the modern State of Israel, the miraculous return of Yemenite Jewry to Israel, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Refusenik movement, the momentous return of Ethiopian Jewry to Israel, the flourishing of American Jewry, the Abraham Accords… Oct. 7. Prophecies crash into us, and we into each other, as the lives and fates of our long-dispersed people become more and more closely entwined, until we are so connected that when a hostage is killed under Gaza, his mother’s tears leak from our own eyes.

What did Rosh Hashana look like in those years of upheaval in the 20th century? How did we celebrate when we couldn’t gather to pray or feast? Did they bother imagining and petitioning for better days to come? Given our experience over the past year since Oct. 7, we can almost answer this ourselves. Some will feel the weight of life and death in our mouths when we pray, some will turn to God in anger, and others may approach the whole thing with a newfound skepticism. And what about in the years following triumph? Was the honey extra sweet? For me, as I write this, I’m holding out a hope that by the time this is published, we will have achieved some triumphant victory, such as the return of the remaining hostages, that will turn the honey sweet in my mouth. The tension that we feel in approaching the holidays this year, while we are still in national mourning, is inherent in the Days of Awe. While they are meant to be celebrated with feasting and family and communal gathering, they are also solemn, serious, and weighty as days of judgment and atonement.

At this time last year, we never could have imagined what was to come just a few days later. Now we know exactly what we mean when we ask God to reverse the evil decree: Put an end to this somehow; take away our sorrow. I will put my faith in the hope that something so good that it’s almost impossible to imagine will come to be: the return of the hostages, an end to the war, political stability, peace, redemption. Some of our losses are so great that they can never be made whole, but I believe that the power of our prayers and sacrifices, accumulated over the past year, will shake the heavens this Rosh Hashana and influence the decree for the good.

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Maayan Schoen studied in the Migdal Oz Beit Midrash for Women in Israel and recently graduated from Yale University. She now lives in Jerusalem and is chief of staff for Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem and Special Envoy for Innovation Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.