People Can Change

Rosh Hashanah’s greatest faith statement is not that God is supreme ruler who writes us into the book of life but instead that people can change.  The Unetanah Tokef prayer concludes by proclaiming, “Repentance, prayer and tzedakah can overcome the harshness of the decree.” In a world where people have become increasingly fatalistic, Judaism insists that we can change.  Rosh Hashanah reminds us that there is still time to correct our wrongs.

That is this holiday’s core belief.  It restores our hope. 

Sometimes as we are reading the paper, or watching the news, or scrolling through Instagram stories we can become depressed and think, “All is lost.  They all hate us.  The planet is heating up.  The oceans are rising.  The price of gasoline is skyrocketing.”   We start believing that there is no way we can correct these problems.  They appear insurmountable.  We forget that all problems can be repaired by us, they can be addressed by human beings.

All we have to do is change course.  And that is what Rosh Hashanah offers. 

It reminds us that we can change.  It also promises us that others can change.  This is the essence of teshuvah, repentance.  Human beings can turn.  They can change and make a difference.  They can correct their wrongs.  This is what we believe.  Truth be told it may be harder to affirm that others can change.  It is one thing to say that we can change—as hard as that sometimes is—but it is another thing entirely to affirm that others can change.

This is what Rosh Hashanah gives us.  It insists that human beings are capable of change.  And we must take this affirmation to heart and allow it to carry us forward through the coming year.   

Rather than spending a day doom scrolling through the latest catastrophes, rather than reading about the most recent mistakes world leaders have made, we spend the day in synagogue affirming our belief that people can change.  There is still time to repair ourselves and our world.  We wrap our arms around each other, we embrace our community, and we emerge with our hope our restored.

The larger task is making sure this hope carries us through the new year.