Sermon for Rosh haShana Day 1 5787 ~ September 12, 2026

I don’t know about you, but it still feels like summer. Either that, or I am having difficulty accepting that the summer is over. Part of it is that the High Holidays are so early this year. But another piece, for me, is that I turned 50 last month, and somehow every summer vacation and celebration was related to that—from Josh and my first vacation without kids to Costa Rica, to the wonderful Hoedown my dad led at Kol Emet.

Turning 50 has also come with a certain amount of reckoning, which has become part of the writing and reflection I do as the New Year approaches.

And I have also been preparing for my upcoming sabbatical, which, as many of you know, begins in November and continues through May. It is customary for clergy and people in other professions to take a sabbatical every seven years. This practice is based on the biblical concept of Shabbat: that every seventh day, or every seventh year, we need to step away from cultivating and creating in order to rest and renew. Even the land gets a sabbatical. This is called shmitah.

And wouldn’t you know it, the seventh year and the fiftieth year are very much linked in the Torah and in our tradition. Fifty is seven times seven, plus one. After seven cycles of shmitah, or 49 years, the Torah describes a fiftieth year called yovel, the Jubilee.  

The Jubilee is an almost magical, idyllic period: debts are released, land returns to its original holders, and people return to their families.  The Jubilee is a powerful reminder that all that we have achieved, and all that we consider ours, ultimately belongs to God. 

At 50, I feel profoundly blessed: to have my health, a worthy and meaningful profession, strong-minded children and energetic parents, a great sibling, eighteen years of marriage that grounds me, thoughtful friends. I am awed by these blessings, but when I reflect on my experiences, accomplishments, life knowledge, and everything in my possession, my grasp on it all is not so tight – I know this life is what I have been loaned, and whatever I have been blessed with I need to share and spread around.

Fifty is an interesting age. I am no longer young, but neither am I old. I stretch to keep up with my kids while at the same time keeping up with my aging parents in new ways. It is also the age when we start getting those AARP notices. Midlife reaps its benefits and its consequences. I keep thinking of the Bon Jovi song (a GenX classic!) “Woah, we’re halfway there, woah living on a prayer!”

No longer do I take my health and my body for granted. On the one hand, I live in fear that I could hurt my back putting on a sock.  On the other hand, I am physically fit to the point where I can do headstands again!  I took a ballet class this summer and marveled at my muscle memory as poses came back to me after 30 or 40 years since my last ballet class.

It is an age when life experience has dealt us a fair share of curveballs, and we begin to understand that our successes have as much to do with luck and blessing as with hard work and effort.

We are carried by God in ways we don’t always recognize. We enjoy our milestones because we know they aren’t guaranteed to anyone. And 50 is also an age when you realize that you still have so much more to do and to give.

At 50, one has experience, skills, and perspective developed over decades of work and education. At 50 we have proven ourselves professionally and we still have a lot to give.  But, there is an urgency now, to leave things better for the next generation while it is still possible to do so.  But, at 50, we are not robots with limitless energy, and so one begins to understand the wisdom in resting.

I have been blessed with a six-month sabbatical, which is humbling because I know not everyone gets that chance. Many people ask me, “How will you use that time?” I never quite know how to answer. Partly because I don’t fully know yet.  Partly because up until now I have been mostly focused on making sure Kol Emet is set up well for when I am away.  But mostly, it is because the notion of sabbatical is fundamentally not about how one uses time.

We tend to think of time as something we should use well. We schedule it, organize it, fill it. We talk about “making the most of our time.” We measure productivity by how much we can accomplish in a day, a week, a year.

But the Torah asks us to imagine time in a very different way.

The Torah doesn’t simply divide time into days, weeks, months, and years. It sanctifies them. The very first chapter of Genesis culminates not with another act of creation but with Shabbat. God stops creating and blesses the seventh day:  “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation.” (Genesis 2:3)

The implication is profound: the purpose of time is not simply to accomplish things. Just as God did, so too humans have six days of work, and then one day of rest, in order to honor the work, to bless the time and to make a separation for what might come next.  And the land rests too: there are six years where it is cultivated followed by one year of shmita, which means “a letting go,” or literally, “to let fall.”  

A sabbatical is an intentional letting go— it is a chance to step outside our normal roles and routines so that one can listen, learn, reflect, rest, and perhaps become different people than we were before.  It is shmita.

Another way that the Torah imagines time differently, is as something that is cyclical.  Time isn’t simply moving us forward toward “more.” It cycles us back to a place of rest, reflection, release, and renewal, every seventh year. The biblical calendar is built around recurring cycles, often around the number seven.  Shabbat is the seventh day, the head of the year and Yom Kippur, the Shabbat of all Shabbats, begins at the seventh month, the shmita is the seventh year, and the Jubilee comes after seven shmita cycles.

The concept of sabbatical is a small-scale version of the Torah’s great idea of Jubilee, in which we release all that we’ve accumulated over time – all the clutter, all the ego and self-important notions of ourselves, and try to return to our original borders, as it were. It is a time to stop cultivating the field and ask: What kind of field are we cultivating in the first place? A time to stop producing and ask: What is actually worth producing? A time to step away and see more clearly what we are stepping toward.

So hopefully you can understand the importance of a sabbatical.  A rabbi’s work is deeply relational. We are called witness and sanctify holy time throughout the year cycle and life cycle.  We accompany people through births and deaths, celebrations and crises, weddings and funerals, illness and healing, doubt and faith.  We are called to be present, and to bring the necessary perspective to bear on a trying situation or new challenge.

One might think that to be a good rabbi one must always be available and always answer whenever there is a need. But the Torah doesn’t actually ask us to live that way. Even the land needs a sabbatical. Perhaps people do, too.

This will be a chance to learn – for my own growth and edification.  A chance to write – for myself, not for a sermon or dvar torah or a deadline.  A chance to pray from the pews as a private citizen and not as a leader of the congregation.  A change to explore my creativity in ways that have nothing to do with Judaism or being a rabbi.  (Is that even possible?)

I will return to Kol Emet being a better rabbi, able to extend myself once again because I will be regrounded and rerooted in my own soil. And, I will have had a chance to miss you!

But I also know that this sabbatical will be good, even important, for this congregation as well. A healthy community should not be overly dependent on one person. This is wisdom we already embody, as a very engaged and participatory congregation.  But as much as you may have come to rely upon my particular strengths, skills, and spirit, you know that a congregation’s strength, its identity, and its vision does not reside in one person.  It shines in all of us.  

Gloria Steinem, of blessed memory, gave an interview in 2017 about challenges facing activists in which she said, “People keep asking me ‘who are you going to give your torch to?’ And I always say to them, I am not giving up my torch, thank you very much, I’m keeping my torch and I’m using it to light other people’s torches. Because the whole idea that there’s only one torch is the problem. No wonder we don’t know where we’re going. Everybody has to have a torch.”

Gloria Steinem was not just a remarkable activist and leader, she was a mentor and a friend to so many across the generations. She recognized that a movement isn’t just about principles, goals, and actions, it’s about people.  She believed that people are what makes a movement move.  So as she aged, she was about sharing her torch as much as she was about sparking and honoring and appreciating the torches of others.  One torch in itself is not sustainable; we have to nurture and spark one another’s torches.  

So whenever one person has to step back, other people have the opportunity to step forward.  Lay leaders discover capacities they didn’t know they had.  Members take greater ownership. New voices emerge. Sparks fly.

But that doesn’t happen overnight.  We have been preparing for this shift now for several months, through service leading classes and opportunities, people offering to give divrei torah, lead Torah study, and teach classes.  We have an extremely robust and organized calendar of Limmud/Adult education offerings this year, much more than in previous years. Longtime members are stepping up in new ways, and new members are jumping in with both feet. And of course, we are blessed to have Michelle Katz, a rabbinical student in her final year at RRC, who will be providing pastoral support, rabbinic guidance and spiritual leadership this whole year, even before my sabbatical begins.  

Sometimes we think good leadership means being indispensable.  But perhaps the opposite is true.  Perhaps one measure of good leadership is whether we can create a community that doesn’t need us every minute. A rabbi who does everything might unintentionally teach: You need me. A rabbi who steps away can teach: You can do this. That is not abandonment. It is trust.  And trust is one of the foundations of building sacred community.

This is why I don’t think a sabbatical should be understood as an absence. It is a form of presence. Presence to learning. Presence to reflection and listening. Presence to family. Presence to God and to the faith that there is something larger than what we can see. Presence to questions that are difficult to hear when our lives are constantly filled with noise.  Presence to the combined light and vision of our community.

A sabbatical asks me: What kind of rabbi do I want to become?  But it also asks this congregation: What kind of community do we want to become?  Those questions belong together.

Every year, Rosh Hashanah gives us the opportunity to examine the past and imagine a different future. Yom Kippur allows us to release what we have carried. And this is another piece of wisdom of Jewish time.  Jewish time is not simply linear, going from past → present → future.  It is also recursive: we return. Time allows for beginning again

In Leviticus 25:10, when the Torah discusses the Jubilee, it says, “You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.” The key word is return. The Torah’s idea of renewal isn’t necessarily to become someone entirely new. It can be return to who you were meant to be.

Part of that verse, by the way, is famously inscribed on the Liberty Bell.  It is an interesting coincidence that we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, its fifth Jubilee cycle. Perhaps we too, as a nation, can return and recover our light, and rediscover what we are meant to be, for ourselves and for the world in this new day and age.

There is one final reason the Jubilee speaks so powerfully to me this year.  According to Leviticus, when the Jubilee is proclaimed, it is done on Yom Kippur, through the sound of the shofar. Yom Kippur is the day when we strip away the things we use to define ourselves: our accomplishments, our possessions, our status, our titles, even, for a brief time, our ordinary physical needs. It is called Shabbat Shabbaton – the Sabbath of all Sabbaths.

And then, at the end of this most holy day, we hear the shofar. It is the sound of release. It is the sound of a new beginning.

So when we hear the shofar this year, perhaps we can hear it in two ways.  We can hear it as a call to wake up.  And we can hear it as a call to let go. To wake up to the possibilities of who we might become.  And to let go of the assumption that we have to keep doing everything the way we have always done it.

The shofar says:  Make room. Make room for rest. Make room for renewal. Make room for other people to get involved. Make room for new ideas and possibilities. Make room for God and new manifestations of holiness.  Make room for yourself.  And make room for the future.

At 50, I am beginning to understand that we don’t own our lives any more than the ancient Israelites owned the land.  They were entrusted with the land.  I have been entrusted with this life.  And perhaps the best way we can honor the gift of our lives is not always to hold on more tightly. Sometimes it is to release. To trust. To have faith. To make space. To listen. And then, when the shofar sounds, to return.

May we all hear the shofar as a call to return—to our best selves, to our families, to our community and the movements we are building, to our purpose, and to what matters most.

Shabbat shalom.  Shmita tova. Shanah tovah.