Rabbi Daniel Dorsch’s Rosh Hashanah Message for 2026

It’s hard to believe that this coming November, my son is going to celebrate his bar mitzvah. It feels like the entire Jewish community of Winnipeg, Canada, along with a good chunk of Jewish New Jersey and Philadelphia, is going to converge on Marietta, Ga., for the occasion.
Lately, it dawned on me that there is something remarkable about all of this.
We’ll be celebrating 782 miles from where I grew up. Very few of the people who attended my bar mitzvah will be there. It will be an entirely different congregation, an entirely different community, in an entirely different chapter of our family’s life.
And yet, 30 years after I stood on the bimah, the ceremony itself will be almost exactly the same.
The same Torah. The same prayers. I assume his cheeks will ache from nearly the same amount of pinching.
There is something profoundly reassuring about that.
The Torah continues to speak to us because it was never meant for one generation alone. It has always been handed from parent to child, teacher to student, community to community. The world changes, but the Torah endures.
A colleague of mine recently pointed out that for all the attention paid to the growing number of Jews of “no religion” in demographic studies, we rarely stop to notice how many Jews still identify as “Jews by religion.” For millions of Jews, whether they attend synagogue every week or only occasionally, our traditions still speak with astonishing power.
A bar or bat mitzvah. Lighting Shabbat candles. Hearing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. These are not simply customs. They are moments that remind us who we are.
I tell my b’nei mitzvah students that when they chant their Haftarah, they are never doing it alone. On that very Shabbat, young Jews around the world will be standing at a bimah just as they are. Maybe with a different accent. Maybe with a different nusach. But they will be reading the same words from the same tradition.
The same is true during the High Holy Days. Over the coming weeks, Jews in Atlanta, Israel, and throughout the world will gather to mark the Yamim Noraim. We will open a machzor. We will read from the same Torah. We will be moved by the shofar.
That has always been one of Judaism’s greatest gifts. Long before the first shofar is sounded, we are already connected across generations, countries, and across every difference that might otherwise divide us.
As I prepare for the bar mitzvah, I am reminded that this has always been the hallmark of Jewish life. We inherit something precious from those who came before us, and then, l’dor v’dor, we place it into the hands of those who come after us.
May this High Holy Day season remind each of us that wherever our lives take us, we remain part of a larger story. May this same story always continue to unite us across communities and generations for eons to come.

Rabbi Daniel Dorsch is the Senior Rabbi at Congregation Etz Chaim in Marietta.