Another Lap Around The Sun: On T’Shuvah & Legacy

Shabbat Shuvah arrives this year with the weight of the days of awe pressing close.

We stand on the precipice of Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar, preparing to confront questions of life and death, forgiveness, responsibility and whether we have become the people we hoped to be.

Those questions feel less theoretical to me than they once did.

During Rosh Hashanah, a woman was tragically killed just outside the doors of my synagogue, a single mother by choice who leaves behind a seventeen year old son. I did not know her, but something about learning her story stayed with me.

Maybe because I am a parent.

Maybe because I am 48.

Maybe because the older I get, the harder it becomes to pretend that time is an unlimited resource.

And maybe because of where we find ourselves as Jews.

Almost three years after October 7th, the world feels louder, more frenzied and less safe. The noise of the public square has become increasingly difficult to separate from the mainstreaming of antisemitism. The old questions of these days feel newly urgent in a post-October 7th world: What do we owe one another? What does it mean to remain human when so much around us seems intent on making that harder? What kind of people will we choose to be?

I am extraordinarily happy to be alive today. I am grateful for my wife, my children, my family, my friends, and for the privilege of doing work that I believe matters. I am beginning a new professional chapter. I am writing. I am building. I am still imagining things I would like to do and places I would like to go.

But gratitude feels different when you understand that none of it is guaranteed.

I have been spending a great deal of time lately thinking and writing about legacy. Not legacy in the sense of buildings carrying our names or plaques recording that we once occupied a particular corner of the world. I have been thinking about the much quieter legacy created by how we behave while we are here.

Did I listen?

Did I show up?

Did I tell people I loved them?

Was I present for my children, or merely in the room?

Did I allow fear, anger, pride or busyness to make decisions for me?

Was I an active participant in my own life, or did I sometimes become a bystander to it?

Jewish tradition gives us a word that feels especially appropriate in these days: teshuvah.

It is usually translated as repentance, but its literal meaning is closer to return.

I love that.

Return suggests that getting lost is not the end of the story.

We can notice where we are. We can look at where we intended to go. And we can turn.

For someone deeply religious, that might mean returning to God or to a particular path of observance.

For someone less religious, I think the idea remains just as powerful.

Return to your values.

Return to your family.

Return to the promise you once made yourself.

Return to the person you are still trying to become.

And importantly, returning does not always mean going backward.

Sometimes the old path no longer exists. Sometimes we have changed. Sometimes the world has changed. Sometimes wisdom comes precisely from understanding that the road ahead cannot look exactly like the road behind us.

Teshuvah, then, is not nostalgia.

It is course correction.

At 38, I probably thought about birthdays mostly as another year added to my life.

At 48, I find myself thinking more about attention.

Where am I placing it?

Who receives it?

What am I building with it?

There are things I have done well in these first 48 years. There are things I would do differently. There are moments I wish I could replay with greater patience, courage or kindness.

I cannot.

But one of the great gifts of being alive is that the next moment has not happened yet.

I can choose how I speak to my children today.

I can choose how I love my wife today.

I can choose whether I call the friend I have been meaning to call.

I can choose whether my work reflects my values.

I can choose whether I walk past something that requires me to stop.

Maybe that is what another lap around the sun really offers us.

Not a clean slate.

A next step.

And so, somewhere inside all of this, I am also celebrating.

Today I am 48. I am enormously grateful to be here, and grateful for the selfishly happy fact of another birthday. But this year, that celebration feels less like the point than a reminder: another year is not simply something to receive. It is something to inhabit, with attention and responsibility, in a world that needs both.

As Yom Kippur approaches, my hope is not only to be written in the Book of Life, but to live as though that life is a gift entrusted to me.

To return where I have wandered.

To show up where I am needed.

To remain awake to the people and the values that matter most.

Gmar Chatima Tova to those who observe.

And, yes, selfishly, happy birthday to me. Shabbat Shuvah arrives this year with the weight of the days of awe pressing close.