Rabbi Alex Braver offers a blessing for renewal in all its forms. Some of us enter the new year amid exciting changes; others face new challenges, losses, or absences; and some may feel stuck, longing for change that seems far away.

However we arrive at these Days of Awe, may we meet change with courage, recognize the possibility of newness within ourselves, and make 5787 a year of “good newness.”

In a world increasingly shaped by despair, polarization, and binary thinking, Rabbi Alex Braver asks what Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of humanity, can teach us about reclaiming the fullness of being human.

Drawing on 2,000 years of Jewish teachings about creation, Alex retells the creation story of humanity as a creature intended to be both earthly and heavenly, expansive and contradictory, uniquely created in God’s image and capable of transformation. When the world tries to narrow our choices and flatten us into categories of right and wrong, friend and enemy, our tradition calls us toward something more spacious: imagination, possibility, and the faith that another path can emerge.

Rosh Hashanah invites us to resist “narrow lives” and recover the glorious, complicated mess of what it means to be human.

On Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Becca Weintraub reflected on the Jewish experience of time not as a straight line or an endless circle, but as a spiral. Each year we return to the same holidays, prayers, rituals, and sacred moments, but we do not return as exactly the same people.

Drawing on Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s teaching that we “remember deliberately, anticipate responsibly, and act precisely,” Becca invites us to bring the lessons of our past and our hopes for the future into the choices we make now. Even the round Rosh Hashanah challah can become an image of this spiritual journey: not simply circling back, but spiraling upward.

As we enter 5787, may we return to the places we have been before as people who have changed, and who are still becoming.