Hayom: It’s Time
There’s a question I find myself returning to, over and over again, during the chagim.
What time is it????
Literally, what time is it…
I can tell you what day it is. I can tell you which service we’re in from the nusach, which section of the Amidah we’ve reached, which piyyut is coming up next. But I seem to always lose track of the minutes and the hours.
I remember one Simchat Torah, in the middle of all the dancing and singing, I checked my watch a few times and noticed that the hour and minute hands were moving backwards.
At first I thought I was reading it wrong. But every time I checked, sure enough, the hour was getting earlier and earlier.
Maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe the spiritual energy of our hakafot had opened up some kind of portal, and we were going to keep dancing and dancing like this without end.
The most likely culprit is that I had been banging the shulchan so hard during the singing that I threw the gears off and the watch started running in reverse.
But whatever happened, the feeling of being completely out of sync with the clock was… delightful.
I know the yekkes in the room might be uncomfortable right now… And I want to be clear, it’s good to be on time. Being prompt is a great Jewish value. It is also something I need to work on.
But my hope, for all of us, is that at some point this season, on Rosh Hashanah, on Yom Kippur, on Sukkot, we lose all sense of the precise hour and minute. That we lose complete track of what o’clock it is. And gain a sense of what time it is.
Because there is a time, a special time, that began on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah and stretches all the way through Yom Kippur.
On that Shabbat we read Parshat Nitzavim. Moshe stands the whole people up and says: Re’eh, natati lefanecha hayom et ha-chayim v’et ha-tov, v’et ha-mavet v’et ha-ra… u’vacharta ba-chayim. “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil… therefore choose life.” (Devarim 30:15, 19)
Of all the enormous words in that verse (life, death, good, evil, blessing, curse) the most important one might be the smallest. Hayom. Today. Atem nitzavim hayom. You are standing here. Today.
Then comes Rosh Hashanah, and then Yom Kippur. How does Mussaf end on both of them?
Hayom. Hayom. Hayom.
It’s so important that we don’t just say it. We sing it. Some of our niggunim take that one word and repeat it over and over like a mantra.
Which, by the way, you’re not really supposed to do. You don’t repeat words in davening.
But this word? This word is so important, we let it slide.
It’s now. It’s today. It’s time. Hayom.
And it’s a weird time.
It’s a weird time for our world. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program counted sixty-five armed conflicts burning around the world last year, including eight wars between actual nation-states, the most since the Second World War. NOAA just announced that this was the hottest summer in American history. And then there is whatever it is we’re living through with AI, where in the very same week you’ll hear one person promise it’s going to usher in a near-messianic age and another swear it’s going to end the world.
It’s a weird time.
And it’s a weird time to be a Jew.
Rosh Hashana falls out on a strange time:
תִּקְעוּ בַחֹדֶשׁ שׁוֹפָר בַּכֵּסֶה לְיוֹם חַגֵּנוּ
“Sound the shofar at the new moon, bakeseh, on the day of our festival.” (Tehillim 81:4)
Pesach and Sukkot begin on the fifteenth of the month, under a full moon. Rosh Hashanah is the only holiday in our entire calendar that falls on Rosh Chodesh, the new moon. On Rosh Hashanah the moon is at its smallest. Bakeseh, the Gemara says, means covered: the day the moon is hidden (Rosh Hashanah 8b).
In some ways this is resonant.
The Midrash says that we, Am Yisrael, are like the moon. We wax and we wane. We shrink down to almost nothing, a sliver, a thread. And then we come back.
In recent memory. Am Yisrael felt full, waxing.
And then in more recent years, our moon has felt smaller, waning. We’ve just been through three years of loss, pain, and struggle.
My hope, my prayer, is that we are near the end of the waning. That we are turning back toward the waxing.
But I have to be honest. I don’t know. None of us do. You can predict the moon’s cycles. You can’t predict ours.
We spend too much of our energy trying to predict what will happen. When will it change? When will it get better? Is it going to get worse? You can burn a whole year asking that question, podcasting that question, doom-scrolling that question, and get no answer. Because the answer doesn’t lie with some pundit or some social media commentary.
The answer lies with us.
Today asks a different question. Not: when will things change? But: hayom, what does this moment call me to do?
This moment calls us to see the moment we’re actually in. And to act.
It calls us to deepen our Jewish commitment and connection at exactly the moment the world is making that harder. It’s time to strengthen our people, and the bonds between our people, here and in Israel. Time to go to Israel.
Time to face what’s in front of us with clear eyes and open hearts. To take off the blindfolds of self-righteousness, or hate, or fear.
It’s time to learn more Torah. It’s time to read more Jewish books. It’s time to fund our schools, and to fund the programs that let a family keep a kid in a Jewish school when the tuition, or the special needs, are impossible. It’s time to be mekadesh shem shamayim, to sanctify the name of God, by being the most ethically excellent and humane שומרי תורה ומצוות that we can be.
It’s time to stop settling for being merely anti-antisemitism, and to become pro-Semitic. Not to put up billboards begging the world to like us more. Not to sit around waiting for 2022 to come back and for people to start liking us again.
Time to be pro the things that make our people and our faith so beautiful. Learning. Argument. Tefillah. Shira. Time to affirm the eternal, unbreakable, covenantal bond with our land, our Torah, our God.
Hayom, Am Yisrael. It’s time.
It’s time for us.
And it’s time for you.
It’s time for you.
It’s time to stop saying: I know this is important, and I would do it, if only I had the time.
God has given you the time. The time is right now.
It’s time to make the change.
Maybe it’s time to leave. Maybe it’s time to say I’m sorry. Maybe it’s time to get some help. Maybe it’s time to try again. Maybe it’s time to come home.
There is no other time.
This year Rosh Hashanah began on the evening of the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th.
That morning, I stood with our local firefighters in Evanston and Skokie at their remembrance ceremonies. A reminder of how much we lost. And how much we learned.
We learned about heroism, and sacrifice. We learned about evil. We learned about the unbreakable resilience of the human spirit.
But one of the greatest spiritual teachings of that day is how precious our time is with the people we love.
Whenever I read about 9/11, what hits hardest are the phone calls. The calls people made from the towers. From the planes. People who knew exactly what was happening, and knew they had minutes.
Julie Sweeney Roth got a voicemail from her husband, Brian, who was on Flight 175: “Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have good times. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and I’ll see you when you get there.”
CeeCee Lyles, a flight attendant on Flight 93 and a former police officer, left a message for her husband, Lorne: “They’ve hijacked the plane. I’m trying to be calm. I hope to be able to see your face again, baby. I love you.” She managed to call back and reach him. They prayed together. She told him what she and the others were about to do. And she ended the call: “Tell the boys I love them.”
Tom Burnett, also on Flight 93, knowing the plane was going down, knowing what he and a few others were about to do, called his wife, Deena. “I know we’re all going to die. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey.”
The tragic gift of those phone calls is that they show us exactly what matters.
I know we’re all going to die. We’re going to do something about it. I love you.
That’s Rosh Hashanah. That’s Yom Kippur.
The whole point of this season is to try to live with that clarity, without needing to be on the hijacked plane.
Hayom. Hayom. Hayom.
Every year in this season, I take out a list. It comes from Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse who spent years caring for people in the last weeks of their lives and wrote down the regrets she heard again and again. She called it The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.
It’s not a Jewish source. But there is such deep Torah in it. Three of the five feel like they were written for these days.
Regret One. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Rosh Hashanah is the day we celebrate the creation of Adam HaRishon, humanity’s single, shared ancestor. The Mishnah in Sanhedrin (4:5) marvels at this. A person stamps many coins from one seal and they all come out alike. But when the Holy One stamps every human being from the seal of Adam, ein echad meihen domeh lachaveiro: not a single one comes out the same as any other. No two impressions alike. Which means no two missions alike.
Rosh Hashanah should be a celebration of our uniqueness. And so many of us are living a life defined by somebody else’s expectations, somebody else’s disappointments, somebody else’s fears.
There’s the famous story of Reb Zusha of Anipoli, weeping on his deathbed. He said he wasn’t afraid that God would ask him why he wasn’t Moshe. He was afraid God would ask: Zusha, why weren’t you Zusha?
Hayom. Live your life so that you aren’t afraid God will ask: why weren’t you you?
Regret Two. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
At some point in these days, at shul, at a meal, at the break-fast, you’re going to see someone and say: so good to see you, we should get together. Follow up with them. Invite them for lunch. Go axe-throwing. Make quilts. Whatever. The activity doesn’t matter. Friends, community, relationships aren’t just about fun. They are the deep connections that teach us and hold us up through a whole life.
My friend Rabbi Nissan Antine shared a piece of Rosh Hashanah Torah with me the other day. The women whose barrenness we read about on Rosh Hashanah are Sarah, Chana, and Rachel. Who’s missing from that list? Rivka. And maybe it’s because Rivka and Yitzchak were in it together. Yitzchak, the Torah says, prayed lenochach ishto, right there across from his wife (Bereishit 25:21). They had each other. Sarah, Rachel, and Chana each carried it more alone, because each of their husbands had another wife. I love this pshat.
Regret Three. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”
This is all pretty intense.
But in Judaism, intensity doesn’t mean gloom and doom.
The very first communal Rosh Hashanah on record in all of Tanach is in Nechemiah (8:9-12). The people gather on the first day of the seventh month. They hear the Torah read aloud for the first time in generations, and they start to weep. And Ezra and the Levi’im stop them. Al tit’abelu: do not mourn. Go. Eat rich food. Drink sweet drinks. Send portions to whoever has nothing prepared. Ki chedvat Hashem hi ma’uzchem: the joy of God is your strength.
A big part of that joy, and that strength, is that you can change. You can grow. Things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been. You can choose. And you have the gift of today.
Maybe one of those three landed on you.
Or maybe you’re thinking: I don’t know what time it is. I don’t know what I need to change. This is a lot.
That’s okay too. You’ve been busy. You’ve been running around. Maybe you just need to slow down and sink into hayom. To ask: what is the thing that only I can do? What is the change only I can make?
There is a gift built into this holiday. Yoma arichta: one long day that is really two. This year the first of those days fell on Shabbat, which means no shofar. A whole day to rest in the question.
And then, the next morning, the shofar. That magnificent spiritual alarm clock. It will sound one more time, one long blast, as Yom Kippur ends. And when it goes off, you will know what time it is.
It’s the dawning of a new age. It’s the dawning of a new day.
It’s scary.
It’s amazing.
It’s great.
It’s yours.
May this year be good, and healthy, and sweet.
And may it be a year when, whatever the hour, whatever the season, whatever the challenge, whatever the loss, whatever the joy, we can still hear that voice, crying out like the shofar. That eternal present. The gift that is this very moment, from the first day of creation out into a future we cannot yet see.
Calling us back. Again and again. To the sweet urgency of what is ours to do.
And I promise, when we hear it, watch or no watch, we will know.
It’s Hayom.
It’s today.
It’s right now.
It’s time.
Shana Tova.
