Shanah tovah! Welcome to Rosh Hashanah, our Jewish New Year. Thank you for being here as we begin this holy time together. I’m grateful for this opportunity to share thoughts from our tradition with you tonight.
Our services are made possible by many hands and hearts: Cantor Re’ut, volunteer prayer leaders and shofar blowers, Leah Adler and all of the ritual committee, the board, Joanna Schnurman, Julio Ramos and Honor Edmands. Each person has played a vital role in bringing us together for tonight’s service and for the days ahead.
My dear friends, welcome home. Welcome to our yearly reminder of transformation, to a spiritual homecoming that reminds us of something fundamental about being human: we can change. There is a miraculous possibility of transforming who we are at the deepest level.
I want to share with you a story that captures the essence of what this moment wisely require of us. There was once a person who looked in the mirror every morning for seventy years. One day, his grandchild asked him, “Grandfather, don’t you ever get tired of seeing the same person?” The grandfather smiled and replied, “Bubaleh, I’ve never seen the same person twice. Each day, I see someone who has learned something new, who has the chance to be better than he was yesterday.”
This story embodies a profound teaching that Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczna, the holy Rebbe who continued to teach Torah even in the darkness of the Warsaw Ghetto. He challenges us with these words: “If it is your desire to be spiritually close to God and to elevate your consciousness, then don’t show up in the 70th year of your life as you did on the day of your bar mitzvah!”
The Piaseczna Rebbe lived this teaching in the most extraordinary way. Here was a man who could have frozen in his pre-war identity as a respected rebbe with a large community of followers and never change his Torah. But when the Nazi persecution began, when he was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, when his world literally crumbled around him, when his only son was killed —he reinvented himself. He continued to guide people, observant or not, through a darkness so deep we can only imagine. His weekly sermons in the ghetto, later published as Esh Kodesh (Holy Fire), show us a man who refused to be the same person he was before the catastrophe struck. He evolved, he grew, he found new depths of wisdom and spirituality precisely because he understood that each moment demands a new version of ourselves. The war demanded of him a complete renewal of everything he had taken for granted.
The Rebbe’s challenge continues, in a tone that is both simple and revolutionary: “Every year, set a goal for yourself. Picture it in your imagination. If your name is Reuben — for example — which Reuben will you be in the coming year?”
This is not mere self-improvement advice. This is a fundamental reorienting of how we understand time, growth, and identity itself.
Think about this deeply. Kalonymus Kalman is telling us that we have to use the power of our own imagination to author a new version of ourselves. Imagination is not a part of us to be relegated to our childhood. Every time we worry, we imagine. Every time we plan, we imagine. Imagination is part of being human, and we are to use all that we are in the service of God, however you understand that word today.
Being comfortable with who we are and have always been, remaining prisoners of gilded cages of our past patterns, the invisible shackles of our self-imposed limitations, the constraints of our routines makes us no different than a violinist who owns a Stradivarius but plays only “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” for her entire life. The instrument is magnificent, the potential breathtaking, but the music never evolves beyond its simplest form. We become like trees that stop growing while still alive, taking up space in the forest but no longer reaching toward the light, no longer deepening their roots, no longer offering new shade or bearing fresh fruit. Or perhaps we’re like actors who memorized one role decades ago and continue performing the same lines, the same gestures, the same character night after night, year after year, even as the world around us changes and calls for new stories, new depths, new expressions of the human experience. Or like a teacher who, once having the teaching plan for a class, continues to use the same exact strategies and words throughout his twenty five years in the same school, never changing.
The tragedy isn’t that we’re broken or worthless—it’s that we’re magnificent instruments settling for playing elementary scales when we could be creating symphonies. We have to embrace change, as change is thrown around us with increased speeds every day. And with change, we have to embrace growth.
The Piazeczna rebbe, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, wants us to imagine our best, work on our selves through the year, and assess this “new me” against that best imaginary “us” every year. Don’t show up at age 70 as who you were at age 13.
Now, showing up as if we were 12 or 13 on the High Holy Days is more common than we care to admit. This is because our deepest encounter with our tradition, with our thoughts about God and our first experience of public speaking and leadership, all happens during that year. We all know how formative the teen years of our lives are, and how impactful the experience of going through the year of bar, bat or b-mitzvah is. But we can’t stop there.
Just as the types of books that move us today are more mature than the ones that moved us in our teens, just as our knowledge of science is more advanced today than it was then, just as our understanding of history has changed since our teens, so too our relationship with God and tradition needs to evolve. We need to grow spiritually as well – but that growth, says Rosh Hashanah, has to be mindful, conscious, or it may not happen.
The Rebbe of Piaczeczna, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, continues: “If, when next year comes and you assess yourself, and you see that you haven’t even reached the ankles of Reuben-of-the-coming-year, look at it as though — God forbid — you haven’t really lived another year.”
What a powerful image! To live without growth is not to have lived at all. It is to have occupied time without inhabiting it, to have existed without truly being present to the possibilities that each moment offers.
This connects beautifully to Reb Nachman of Bratzlav’s insight about the power of consciousness and intention. He says: “You are where your mind is. Make sure that your mind is where you want to be.” Rosh Hashanah is precisely the time when we get time to relocate our minds, to consciously choose where we want to direct our spiritual GPS for the year ahead.
Here’s the essential core of both teachings: the reinvention of the self, the recreation that Rosh Hashanah is asking us, is not about becoming someone else — it’s about becoming more fully who we are meant to be. When the Torah says “Abraham was old, advanced in years,” the Piaseczna Rebbe explains this to mean that “the Abraham of today would show up, not the Abraham of yesterday.” Abraham didn’t become someone other than Abraham; he became a more complete, more developed, more spiritually mature Abraham.
The same is true for us. The question is not “Who should I become that I’m not?” but rather “What is the fullest expression of who I am that I haven’t yet accessed?” What aspects of my soul have been waiting patiently for me to develop them? What spiritual muscles have I left unused? What capacity for kindness, for wisdom, for courage, for joy, lies dormant within me?
This year, as we hear the shofar’s call to awakening, let us not just resolve to fix our mistakes or improve our behavior — these are important but belong to the superficial world of actions. The Piaczezna rebbe is asking all of us to go deeper, beyond, higher: let us commit to the deeper work of conscious self-creation. Let us envision who we want to be twelve months from now and then ask ourselves: What would that person think about each day? How would that person treat others? What would that person prioritize? What would that person let go of? With what words and images would that person surround him or herself or themselves? How would that person spend their time in this earth?
And then, with the inner strength that sustained the Piaseczno Rebbe even in his darkest hour, let us trust that we have within us the power to become that person. Not through force or harsh self-discipline, but through the gentle, persistent work of aligning our daily choices with our highest vision of ourselves.
As we enter this new year, may we have the courage to meet ourselves fresh each morning, to show up as the person we are becoming rather than the person we have always been. May we follow Reb Nachman’s guidance and ensure our minds are where we want them to be — focused on growth, on possibility, on the sacred work of becoming, consciously turning away from the infinite distractions that surround us. And may we heed the Piaseczna Rebbe’s call to spiritual evolution, creating new versions of ourselves that honor both our deepest essence and our unlimited potential.
Shanah tovah u’metukah – May this be for all of us a year of sweetness and transformation.