They're coming home!

Shana tovah, moadim l’simha!

This time, I can say it with a heart that feels fuller- perhaps for the first time in two years.

moadim l’simha — may our moadim, our appointed times with the Divine, be in joy I opened the year with an open, blood-red pomegranate, which once again illustrated the way I tried to make sense of brokenness.

As I was painting the fruit broken open on my wooden table, I was holding on, with all my strength, to the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe that ‘There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.’

For the second year in a row, I wished for us that — since we were already broken — that may it at least be in order to reveal the good within. To be broken open, this was all I could wish us.

And then, a few days ago, the day after the first day of Sukkot — on a deeply meaningful October 7 — my world, perhaps yours too, was turned upside down overnight.

This time, toward joy.

We are waiting for our brothers, held hostage for two years now, to come home — and with them, for this war to end.

I had written, for Tenoua, before receiving the good news, for these Tishri holidays, about the Hasidic principle of descending in order to rise higher. And for this Sukkot of October 7, I wrote about my hope for return — and the possibility of carrying within me both a heart in despair and a heart that still believes.

I want to share something personal with you. Before Rosh Hashanah, during Elul, I took a neder — a vow — I vowed to forbid myself something dear to me, a food that was part of my daily life, for a time. I wanted to take on something tangible, something involving my own body — more than a prayer. Something that would cost me in my flesh, something that I would feel as a lack in my daily life, so that the merit (zechut) of this physical deprivation, the merit of this very concrete effort I was taking upon myself, might rise upward, that the "decrees might soften" as we say in Chasidic language, so that our prayers might be heard, so that our brothers might return and this crual war could, at last, come to an end.

I am of course not imagining this is connected to the good news we received. But what if it was? What if it contributed, even a drop? I do know- even if it had 'failed', that it is always worth doing what we can — each in our own life — to help reality shift, so that the hope for peace to triumph over war may be rewarded.

I don’t yet dare to rejoice.

I wait, with a prudent hope, a hope which I entrust to the double holiness of Shabbat and the festival of Sukkot. Shabbat shalom