We remember those who were murdered, those who were wounded, those who were taken from their homes, and those whose lives were changed forever. We remember families who still carry an empty chair, communities whose sense of safety was shattered, and a Jewish people for whom this date now carries a weight it did not carry before.
And we recognize, too, the terrible suffering that has followed—the grief of Israelis and Palestinians, the lives lost, the families displaced, and the wounds that continue to deepen across the region.
Jewish tradition offers a beautiful phrase to mourners: HaMakom yenachem etchem—“May HaMakom comfort you.” HaMakom literally means “The Place,” an ancient rabbinic name for God. For some, that language speaks of a divine presence that surrounds us in grief. For others, HaMakom can name something more human and immediate: the place we make for one another when sorrow is too heavy to carry alone.
Comfort does not always arrive as an answer. Sometimes comfort is simply a place—a place where grief may be spoken, where tears need no explanation, where memory is allowed to remain.
And perhaps we can become such a place for one another.
The Psalmist writes, “Karov Adonai l’nishberei lev”—“The Eternal is near to the brokenhearted” (Psalm 34:19). Some may hear those words as a promise about God. Others may hear in them a call to human responsibility: when hearts are broken, we draw near. We sit beside one another. We listen. We remember. We refuse to let suffering become invisible.
That, too, is a deeply Jewish response.
Our tradition teaches that memory is not passive. To remember is also to ask what we will do with what we remember. We honor the dead not only with words, but with the lives we choose to build—with compassion, with courage, with justice, and with the stubborn insistence that every human life has worth.
For anyone carrying this day heavily, may you be gentle with yourself. May those who find comfort in God find it. May those who find comfort in community, memory, love, or simple human presence find it there. And may all of us help create a world in which grief is met with tenderness rather than indifference.
Zichronam livracha. May the memories of those we have lost be for a blessing.
And may we become part of that blessing through the way we live.
With you in life's moments,
Rabbi Jerid
Sometimes the body knows something before the mind is willing to admit it.
For the past several weeks, I have been moving from one thing to another: long workweeks, responsibilities on weekends, chaplaincy, study, writing, people I care about, things I genuinely want to do. Much of it has been meaningful. Much of it has even been joyful.
And I was tired.
I knew I was tired, of course. But knowing something and listening to it are not always the same thing.
Eventually, my body stopped asking.
It simply said, Enough.
I got sick.
There is something almost amusing about the timing, because this Shabbat is Shemini Atzeret. The word atzeret comes from a Hebrew root associated with stopping or holding back. After the building of sukkot, the waving of lulav and etrog, the meals, the gatherings, the prayers, and all the movement of the festival season, Jewish tradition gives us one more day.
Stay.
Stop.
Be here.
And this year, I find myself hearing that differently.
Ecclesiastes, traditionally read at this time, famously reminds us:
Lakol z'man v'et l'chol chefetz tachat hashamayim —
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”
We tend to remember the dramatic parts: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to weep and a time to laugh. But perhaps there is also a time to accomplish—and a time to stop accomplishing.
Anne Lamott once wrote, “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
Apparently, I needed a slightly less subtle version of that message.
Judaism has been trying to teach us this for thousands of years. Shabbat interrupts us every seven days. The festivals interrupt ordinary time. Shemini Atzeret arrives after an already-full season of holy days and seems almost extravagant in its insistence: one more day.
Different religious traditions create these pauses differently—Sabbath, prayer, meditation, retreat, silence. And many people who claim no religious tradition at all have discovered the same human truth: we cannot endlessly pour ourselves out without sometimes becoming still enough to be filled again.
For me, that does not require believing that illness was sent to teach me something. I don't believe that.
But I can choose to learn something from it.
I can listen when my body whispers instead of waiting until it shouts.
I can remember that caring for others does not require disappearing from my own circle of care.
And I can remember that rest is not the absence of meaningful living. Sometimes rest is what makes meaningful living possible.
Perhaps that is the invitation of Shemini Atzeret this year.
Stay.
Breathe.
Be here.
The world will still need us tomorrow.
May we learn to recognize the sacredness of stopping before our bodies have to stop us.
May we give ourselves some of the compassion we so readily offer to others.
And may we remember that sometimes the most human thing we can do is simply rest.
Shabbat shalom.
With you in life's moments,
Rabbi Jerid
Over the past several weeks, I have been listening to stories.
As part of my clinical pastoral education, each of us has been asked to share something of the journey that brought us here—not simply our résumés or accomplishments, but our lives.
We have talked about childhoods and families. About spiritual experiences and changing beliefs. About people who shaped us and experiences that left marks upon us. We have spoken about accomplishments of which we are proud, but also about questions we still carry, places where we have been hurt, and parts of ourselves we are still learning to understand.
I have shared my story. And now I have had the privilege of hearing the stories of others.
There is something sacred about being trusted with another person’s story.
One of my peers used a Hebrew word that has stayed with me:
Hineni.
Here I am.
It appears at significant moments throughout the Hebrew Bible. Abraham says it. Jacob says it. Moses says it. Samuel says it. Each time, hineni is more than an announcement of location. It is an expression of presence: I am here. I am listening. I am available.
Perhaps that is also one of the simplest descriptions of chaplaincy I know.
Hineni. Here I am.
Not: Here I am because I have all the answers.
Not: Here I am because I have resolved every uncertainty in my own life.
Not even: Here I am because I know exactly what you need.
Just:
Here I am.
This Shabbat is also the beginning of Sukkot. Torah asks our ancestors to leave the solidity of their houses and dwell for a time in a sukkah—a temporary shelter, intentionally more vulnerable than the structures in which we ordinarily live.
I find something deeply human in that image this year.
We spend so much of our lives building walls. We construct identities, careers, credentials, theologies, explanations—all the things that help us feel secure and tell the world who we are.
And then, every year, Jewish tradition says: Come outside.
Sit somewhere less certain.
Let the wind come through.
Look through the branches and remember that you can see the sky.
Perhaps sharing our stories with one another is a little like entering a sukkah. For a few moments, we lower some of the walls. We allow another person to see something of what is underneath. We discover that vulnerability does not necessarily make the space less safe. Sometimes it is precisely what allows another human being to enter.
I hear echoes of this beyond Judaism as well. Christian scripture tells of Jesus repeatedly becoming present to people others overlooked. Buddhist practice places extraordinary importance on simply being present to what is. Humanism reminds me that whatever we believe about what may exist beyond us, there is profound responsibility in what happens between us—in one human being choosing to be fully present to another.
Perhaps that is where these traditions touch.
Presence.
Listening.
Showing up.
And perhaps that is why the stories I have heard these past weeks have moved me so deeply. Every person in that room carries a history. Every person carries accomplishments and disappointments, confidence and insecurity, strength and vulnerability. And somehow, each has arrived at the same remarkable decision:
I will bring this life of mine into the presence of another person who may be hurting.
Not because I am finished.
Not because I am certain.
Not because I am invulnerable.
But because I am here.
That may be one of the great lessons of the sukkah as well. We do not have to wait until the walls are stronger or the roof is finished before life can happen inside.
We enter as we are.
I happen to be writing these words on September 25—Dolly Parton Day. And perhaps Dolly understood something about hineni too. She showed up unmistakably as herself—with humor, generosity, vulnerability, sparkle, and very little interest in becoming what someone else thought she ought to be. In doing so, she made room for others to be more fully themselves as well: Here I am. This is who I am. And I have something of myself to give.
And when another human being needs someone to sit beside them—in grief, in fear, in loneliness, in uncertainty, or sometimes simply in silence—we may discover that the most important thing we bring is not an answer at all.
We bring ourselves.
Hineni.
Here I am.
As I am.
And I am here with you.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sukkot Sameach.
With you through life's moments,
Rabbi Jerid
Yom Kippur is a strange kind of gift.
For one day, Judaism asks us to stop pretending.
We put aside the ordinary rhythms of life. We step away from food, work, distraction, and routine. We hear melodies that have carried generations before us. We repeat words of confession—sometimes words that fit us uncomfortably well, and sometimes words we are quite certain belong to somebody else.
And again and again, we say:
Ashamnu. Bagadnu.
We have done wrong.
We have betrayed.
Not they have.
We have.
There is something both unsettling and beautiful about the vidui, the confessional prayers of Yom Kippur, being written in the plural. Judaism does not allow us the luxury of standing outside the human community and pointing toward everyone else.
We confess together.
That does not mean that every wrong belongs equally to every person. Nor does collective confession erase individual responsibility. Quite the opposite. It reminds us that none of us lives entirely alone. Our choices ripple outward. Our silence can ripple outward too.
We shape families, communities, institutions, and cultures.
And they shape us.
Perhaps that is why one of the most challenging readings of Yom Kippur comes from the prophet Isaiah.
The people have fasted. They have bowed their heads. They have performed the rituals expected of them.
And Isaiah essentially asks: So what?
What difference has your fasting made?
The prophet imagines a very different kind of fast: loosening the bonds of injustice, freeing the oppressed, feeding the hungry, welcoming the vulnerable, refusing to turn away from another human being.
It is an extraordinary interruption in the middle of Judaism's most solemn ritual day.
Because Isaiah reminds us that ritual is not the destination.
It is preparation.
From a Humanistic Jewish perspective, I do not need to believe that somewhere beyond us a supernatural judge is recording our successes and failures in a celestial ledger for Yom Kippur to matter deeply.
The accounting happens here.
In relationships.
In communities.
In the lives affected by what we say, what we do, what we tolerate, what we repair—and what we leave unrepaired.
Yom Kippur gives us language for looking honestly at that accounting.
The Hebrew word teshuvah is usually translated as repentance, but more literally it means return.
I love that.
We are not commanded to become flawless.
We are invited to turn.
To return.
Perhaps to return to the person we know we can be when fear, ego, anger, exhaustion, and certainty are not making the decisions for us.
And turning does not require us to hate the person we were yesterday.
Shame can leave us staring backward.
Teshuvah asks us to face forward.
That distinction matters.
An apology may begin the process, but apology alone is not repair. Regret may awaken us, but regret alone changes nothing. Even the most beautiful Yom Kippur service becomes hollow if we walk out exactly as we walked in.
The real test comes tomorrow.
And the day after that.
When the same irritation appears.
When the same prejudice whispers.
When the same person pushes exactly the same button they pushed last year—and, remarkably, it still works.
That is where teshuvah becomes real.
We live in a world where contempt can be rewarded, where cruelty can masquerade as strength, and where people are too easily reduced to categories rather than encountered as human beings.
Yom Kippur asks us to resist that.
Not only in dramatic moments.
In ordinary ones.
When we are tempted to speak about someone rather than to them.
When we encounter information that confirms exactly what we already wanted to believe.
When remaining silent would be easier than naming harm.
When another person's suffering becomes inconvenient.
When we are so convinced of our own righteousness that curiosity disappears.
This year, my work in chaplaincy has repeatedly reminded me how quickly much of what seems important can fall away.
At life's tender edges, people rarely ask whether they won every disagreement.
They remember who showed up.
Who listened.
Who loved.
Who said the words that needed saying while there was still time to say them.
Perhaps Yom Kippur asks us not to wait for those edges.
There are words we can say now.
There are relationships we can tend now.
There are injustices we can confront now.
There are habits we can change now.
There are people we can see more fully now.
The fast will end.
The melodies will fade.
The books will close.
And then comes the part of Yom Kippur that matters most:
What we do next.
May we have the courage to tell the truth about ourselves without being crushed by it.
May we have the courage to make repair where repair is possible.
And may we have the courage to turn—to return, again and again and again—toward the people we hope to become.
G'mar chatimah tovah.
May the year ahead be shaped not merely by the promises we make today, but by the lives we build from them.
With you through life's moments,
Rabbi Jerid
Ha’azinu — “Give ear.”
“Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak;
let the earth hear the words of my mouth.”
— Deuteronomy 32:1
Moses begins his great final poem with a remarkably simple instruction:
Listen.
Not believe. Not obey. Not agree.
Listen.
It is an interesting command for an age in which almost everyone seems to be talking. We have news, podcasts, social media, text messages, email, notifications, commentary—and commentary about the commentary.
We have become very good at producing sound.
Listening may be another matter.
Anyone who has ever been married, taught children, led a meeting, or typed the words “as I said in my previous email” already knows that hearing and listening are not necessarily the same thing.
This Shabbat makes Moses’ instruction particularly meaningful. It is Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The name comes from the opening of the haftarah from Hosea:
Shuvah Yisrael — Return, Israel.
Return.
Teshuvah, one of the central practices of these Days of Awe, literally suggests turning or returning. For some, that return is understood in relationship with God. For me, it is a return to our values, our responsibilities, one another, and sometimes ourselves.
But perhaps before we can return, we have to listen.
We cannot repair what we refuse to hear.
We cannot change what we refuse to acknowledge.
We cannot return from a path we are unwilling to recognize we have taken.
My work as a chaplain has been teaching me this in ways I did not anticipate. I once thought spiritual care depended largely upon finding the right words—a comforting thought, a meaningful reading, perhaps the perfect prayer.
Increasingly, I am learning that sometimes the most meaningful thing I can offer is silence.
To sit.
To remain.
To listen long enough for another person to discover what they need to say.
When one human being communicates to another, Your story matters enough for me to stop and hear it, something profoundly meaningful happens.
Other traditions recognize this too. The Christian Letter of James counsels us to be “quick to listen, slow
to speak.” Quaker spirituality has long made silence and attentive listening central to communal practice. Different traditions, different theologies, yet a remarkably similar wisdom: understanding often begins when we become quiet enough to receive something beyond ourselves.
And our world is speaking loudly.
This week, researchers reported that human-caused climate change likely contributed to the conditions behind last month’s catastrophic glacier collapse in Nepal. Moses calls upon heaven and earth to listen. Today, perhaps we might reverse the question:
What are heaven and earth asking us to hear?
The warming planet. The cries of people caught in war. The loneliness of a neighbor. The frustration beneath a child’s behavior. The person whose perspective differs so much from ours that we begin preparing our response before they finish speaking.
We cannot listen to everything. No human being can.
But we can listen more carefully to what matters.
Perhaps that is where teshuvah begins.
Before the apology, listen.
Before the judgment, listen.
Before the answer, listen.
Ha’azinu.
Give ear.
Shuvah.
Return.
May we have the humility to listen,
the courage to return,
and the strength to begin again.
Shabbat Shalom.
With you through life's moments,
Rabbi Jerid
This was not how I expected to spend the first day of Rosh Hashanah.
There was no long morning service. No extended meditation on the sound of the shofar. No festive holiday meal waiting for me afterward.
Instead, I spent part of this Rosh Hashanah helping lead a memorial service at Bayview for a woman whose life had come to an end only days before.
The service was Christian. I shared leadership with an Episcopal priest. There were Christian prayers, hymns, scripture, and words of grace.
And there was one rabbi.
Me.
At first glance, it seemed almost the opposite of Rosh Hashanah.
Rosh Hashanah celebrates beginnings.
A memorial marks an ending.
Rosh Hashanah turns toward a year not yet lived.
A memorial turns toward a life already completed.
One says, Here we go again.
The other says, We have come as far as we can go together.
And yet, somewhere in the middle of the service, I began to realize that the distance between those two moments was not nearly as great as I had imagined.
Perhaps they were asking many of the same questions.
During my remembrance, I shared something I have come to believe increasingly deeply:
Grief is the outline of what mattered.
The shape of absence tells us something about the shape of love.
When someone dies, we begin noticing all the places where that person remains.
A phrase.
A gesture.
A way of laughing.
A story told so often that everyone knows exactly where it is going—and still wants to hear it again.
A particular expression that suddenly emerges from the mouth of a daughter or grandson, and for half a second someone who is gone seems extraordinarily close.
Jewish tradition gives us a simple phrase for this:
Zichronah livrachah.
May her memory be for a blessing.
I offered those wordsthis morning in a room whose religious language was primarily Christian. I did not offer them to make the service more Jewish or to blur the distinctions between our traditions.
I offered them because they were true.
And everyone in that room understood what they meant.
A life becomes a blessing when what was best within it continues through those who remain.
That is Jewish.
It is Christian.
And perhaps before either of those things, it is profoundly human.
The traditional Torah reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah comes from Genesis 21.
It begins:
“The Eternal took note of Sarah as had been promised.”
And Sarah gives birth to Isaac.
A birth story.
A beginning.
Laughter where there had been disappointment.
Possibility where possibility had seemed exhausted.
There is something almost too perfect about reading a birth story at the beginning of a new year.
Except Genesis 21 is not actually a tidy story of happiness.
Very quickly, celebration gives way to conflict. Hagar and Ishmael are sent away. A mother wanders through the wilderness believing that her child may die. Joy and sorrow occupy the same chapter.
Which, come to think of it, sounds very much like life.
And perhaps very much like Rosh Hashanah.
We sometimes speak about a new year as though crossing from one number to another somehow wipes the slate clean.
But none of us enters 5787 untouched by 5786.
We bring people with us.
We bring losses.
We bring accomplishments.
We bring disappointments.
We bring wounds that have healed and wounds that have not.
We bring things for which we are enormously grateful and things we would give almost anything to change.
The new year does not ask us to pretend those things did not happen.
It asks us what we will do with them.
One of the great traditional themes of Rosh Hashanah is Zikhronot—Remembrances.
Traditional liturgy speaks of God remembering creation and remembering every human life.
As a Humanistic Jew, I understand that language differently than many Jews do. I do not imagine a supernatural record keeper reviewing my file somewhere in the heavens.
But I find enormous wisdom in the insistence that, at least once each year, a life should be remembered.
Including our own.
The Mishnah imagines that on Rosh Hashanah all humanity passes in review, each life considered one by one.
I do not need a divine courtroom to understand the power of that image.
What if I allowed my own life to pass before me?
Not to condemn it.
Not to excuse it.
Simply to see it.
What did I do with the year I was given?
Whom did I love well?
Whom did I overlook?
Where was I generous?
Where was I afraid?
When did I speak when I should have remained quiet?
When did I remain quiet when I should have spoken?
What did I postpone because I assumed there would always be more time?
And perhaps most importantly:
What mattered?
Today, surrounded by a grieving family, that question felt less theoretical than usual.
There is another line in the traditional Rosh Hashanah liturgy that I have always found difficult.
Mi yichyeh, umi yamut.
Who shall live and who shall die.
Those words appear in Unetaneh Tokef, one of the most emotionally powerful—and theologically challenging—texts of the High Holidays.
I cannot believe that during these days some divine authority decides who will receive cancer, who will die in an accident, who will survive another year, or whose family will receive an unexpected telephone call.
That is not my Judaism.
But beneath the theology is an uncomfortable human truth I cannot dismiss.
We do not know.
Last Rosh Hashanah, some of us stood beside people we assumed would be standing beside us again this year.
Some are not.
And next Rosh Hashanah, the circle will have changed again.
Mortality is not a punishment.
It is the condition under which all human meaning becomes possible.
Because time is limited, this moment matters.
Because relationships do not last forever, love matters.
Because there may not always be another opportunity, the words we speak today matter.
That is not morbid.
It may be one of the most life-affirming truths Rosh Hashanah offers us.
The shofar does not whisper.
It wakes us up.
Tekiah.
Pay attention.
You are alive.
Now what will you do with that?
I have always loved the High Holiday image of the Sefer Chayim—the Book of Life—even though I do not imagine an actual celestial book in which our names are written.
Perhaps the Book of Life is not somewhere above us.
Perhaps we are writing it.
Every day.
In relationships.
In choices.
In kindness offered when nobody is watching.
In apologies finally made.
In boundaries finally drawn.
In meals shared.
In children taught.
In justice pursued.
In hands held beside hospital beds.
In stories repeated after someone has died.
Today, I watched a family begin the work of carrying someone they loved differently.
No longer through physical presence.
Now through memory.
Through habits.
Through stories.
Through values.
Through all those small pieces of one life that become woven into another.
That, too, is a kind of inscription in the Book of Life.
The person dies.
The influence does not.
The High Holidays call us toward teshuvah.
Usually translated as repentance, the Hebrew literally carries the sense of returning.
Returning to who we want to be.
Returning to our values.
Returning to relationships we have neglected.
Returning to the work that is ours to do.
The traditional liturgy gives us three practices:
Teshuvah. Tefillah. Tzedakah.
Return.
Prayer.
Justice and generosity.
For me, tefillah is not asking a supernatural being to change the world on my behalf. It is the intentional articulation of what I hope might become possible—and the examination of what I must do to help make it so.
And tzedakah reminds me that reflection without action remains incomplete.
We remember.
We examine.
And then we act.
Perhaps that is another connection between the memorial service and Rosh Hashanah.
A meaningful memorial does more than tell us who someone was.
It quietly asks:
What will you carry forward because this person lived?
Rosh Hashanah asks almost exactly the same question:
What will you carry forward because you are still living?
That question followed me home this afternoon.
Not the Rosh Hashanah I Planned
No, this was not how I would have planned my first day of Rosh Hashanah.
But perhaps there was something remarkably appropriate about beginning 5787 beside a family remembering someone they loved.
Today brought me into a space where Christian language and Jewish language stood comfortably beside one another without either needing to become the other.
An Episcopal priest spoke from her tradition.
I spoke from mine.
A family remembered from theirs.
And beneath all of those words was something that required no translation:
We loved this person.
She mattered.
We will miss her.
We are grateful she was here.
And somehow we will carry her with us.
Maybe that is where our traditions most beautifully meet—not in pretending we believe the same things, but in recognizing the human experiences to which our different traditions respond.
Birth.
Death.
Love.
Loss.
Hope.
Memory.
Beginning again.
This morning I entered a memorial service thinking it seemed almost opposite to Rosh Hashanah.
I came home thinking perhaps it had brought me directly into the heart of it.
Because if grief really is the outline of what mattered, then Rosh Hashanah gives those of us who are still living a remarkable invitation:
Decide what you want to matter.
Love accordingly.
Live accordingly.
Speak accordingly.
Repair what needs repairing.
Say what needs saying.
Do not wait indefinitely to become the person you already know you want to be.
The year is new.
The page is open.
And we are still here.
May you enter 5787 awake to the fragile and extraordinary gift of being alive.
May you remember with tenderness those whose lives continue within yours.
May you have the courage to examine the year behind you without becoming imprisoned by it.
May you return to the people, values, and purposes that call you toward your best self.
And when another year has passed, may the life you have lived leave behind an outline unmistakably
shaped by love, compassion, courage, justice, and joy.
Shanah Tovah.
With you through life’s moments,
Rabbi Jerid