Rabbi Michael Bernstein's Rosh Hashanah Message for 2024

A lot changes in a century and some things don’t. The sound of the shofar in 1924 fell on the ears of a Jewish community just seeking to establish itself as a permanent part of the American melting pot. Many immigrants were simultaneously looking to become more like the rest of America and stick together to strengthen the Jewish community, especially as the doors of opportunity for Jews and other immigrants began to be closed. Would this country continue to echo fellow Jewish poet Emma Lazarus’s call for those in need to come to the shores of a new world? Would the rise of hatred here, in the streets of Europe and the Middle East continue to loom over us? Would Jews create an alternative in Zion, building what would become the State of Israel?

Today as we blow the shofar, we know that Jews have indeed made it in America and helped make America what it is today and that how we welcome or deter others to our shores remains a central question at the heart of the United States. Many of us are more removed from the immigrant experience even though we continue to carry it with us along with the scars of a century of destruction and upheaval of once vibrant Jewish communities around the world. We are a more diverse community in Jewish origins and in inclusion of our larger families that bring in other faith traditions. The State of Israel is an indelible part of our Jewish world and yet a point of passionate division as well.

Still, we greet the New Year as always knowing that this anniversary of the creation of humanity promises new opportunities to renew ourselves as individuals and as communities. We will celebrate and contemplate, reflect and rejoice with family and friends, dipping apples in honey and gathering to hear the same sounds of the shofar as were heard a century ago and centuries before that.

What will Rosh Hashana be in the future will of course depend on who we are in the future. Yet, no matter when the shofar sounds again it will call us to gather and awaken us to a New Year to face the ever-changing landscape of what it means to be a Jew.

May the shofar echo for you this year with sweetness, blessing and joy.

Michael Bernstein is the Rabbi of Congregation Gesher L’ Torah.