2025 Rosh Hashanah Evening: Gotta Go Through It

We’re going on a bear hunt.
We’re gonna catch a big one.
We’re not scared.

Uh-oh — a dark cave.
Can’t go over it.
Can’t go under it.
Gotta go through it.

Life is remarkably similar to this seemingly silly call-and-response story.

Judaism does not get us to avoid the dark cave or to pretend that it’s not there. I think of the powerful line from Psalm 23: Even though I walk through the valley of death, you are with me. We don’t move away from the valley of the shadow, skipping its dark and somewhat foreboding presence — no, we walk right through it. Similarly, remember the teaching of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: The world is a very narrow bridge. The important part is not to be afraid.

For the next ten days, we will be saying a lot of prayers together. The High Holidays are brimming with potent themes, liturgy, songs, and silence. Even so, I think I can distill the entirety of the High Holidays into one word. And yes, before you ask, we are still going to have all of our services as scheduled… We’re not getting off that easy…

The word (pause) is tikkun.

You may know that word from our oft-repeated mandate of tikkun haolam, healing the world. Tikkun can mean repair, building, improving, apologizing, or growing.

Put succinctly, tikkun is hope.

But it’s not a naive hope that’s utopian in scope but impossible in practice. Quoting the late, great Leonard Cohen: It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah. And as Rebecca Solnit writes in the book of the same name, it is Hope in the Dark.

Rosh Hashanah forces us to look into a kind of truth mirror. We see our mistakes, our regrets, our weaknesses. And that’s not all — we must also come to grips with our mortality and the utter uncertainties of our fragile lives. We recite words from Unetaneh Tokef, citing Who shall live and who shall die. During the vidui, we beat our chests in confession. We fast, making ourselves feel hunger and fragility. Kol Nidrei reminds us that we have broken promises. And yet, through all of it, we stand directly facing that mirror and say hineni — here I am.

And we hope for a better life and a better world: we eat apples and honey hoping for a sweet new year, and during tashlich, we cast our sins away as we take pieces of bread and place them into water.

But these aren’t magic. Apples and honey are sweet, but they don’t guarantee a sweet year. And as much as we might wish otherwise, tossing bread away only gets rid of bread. These rituals aren’t about optimism; they bring about the beautiful and real hope that Judaism prescribes.

Optimism presumes a guaranteed outcome, a script already written in our favor. Hope, by contrast, lives in the space where we don’t know what’s going to happen — and we choose to act anyway. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that we can make things better. No, the High Holiday rituals are not magic. They are practices of responsibility, practices of tikkun.

The world and its problems are in front of us. Our fragility, fear, and finitude are inside us. The path of our lives stretches out ahead of us. We can see just a bit of the vast road that stretches out before us, but beyond that, it’s a dark cave. We can’t go over it with hyperbolic platitudes that simply wish away the difficulties and pain of the world. And we can’t go under it, burying our heads in the sand, pretending things aren’t as they are. No, we have to go through it.

In the Book of Joshua, we meet Rahab, who shelters the Israelite spies. As a sign of protection, they tell her to hang a scarlet cord from her window so that her household will be spared when Jericho falls. In Hebrew, it is called קְוַת חוּט הַשָּׁנִי, tikvat chut ha-shani — literally, “the cord of scarlet thread.”

The word for cord shares its Hebrew root with the word for hope, tikvah. The wordplay of this verse teaches us that hope is not a prognostication or a wish; it is an intentional practice. Rahab must do something to bring about a more positive outcome.

During these High Holidays, we remind ourselves that some of us will die — who by fire and who by water, who by plague and who by thirst… And there are, of course, no guarantees. Toward the end of the prayer, we say that repentance, prayer, and acts of kindness temper the severe decree. In other words, tie a cord to the window.

The commentator Luzzatto deepens the link, playing on the word’s imagery. He teaches that hope is like a cord — it’s something we can grasp, first for stability and then to lift ourselves just a little bit higher.

The Book of Jeremiah has another concept of hope. He describes God as mikveh Israel, the hope of Israel. It should come as no surprise that our sages linked this word to the purifying waters of a mikveh. Hope can be a thin line that we grab onto for courage and discipline, but it can also be a comforting well of solace and peace.

We don’t dip apples in honey in order to wish for a sweet new year. We don’t pray fervently, yearning that God will metaphorically snap God’s fingers and allow us to live another year. The Jewish concept of hope isn’t just about wishing for a better life or a better world — it’s about creating them.

Everywhere we look, there are thin threads and there are deep pools. Even in these difficult times, even with all the antisemitism and political violence, even with the fear of eroding democracy and civil liberties, and even with our own fragility and pain, we are here together, and we have hope. We do hope. Hineni.

Grab hold of the thread, and take comfort in the pool. We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, but we can absolutely go through it.