Rosh Hashanah 2026 Reflections: Draft

What We Heard This Rosh Hashanah

Reflections from services, on our way toward Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur

This year, Rosh Hashanah services were beautiful and meaningful. Kol HaKahal, the voice of the congregation, filled the sanctuary like never before, carried by real improvements to our sound system, and the ruach, the spirit, of those moments stayed with us long after each service ended.

Across the sanctuary, a few threads kept surfacing: creation made new out of chaos, the practice of staying present, and the strength we find in showing up for each other. Together, they form a kind of map for the Ten Days of Teshuvah ahead, as we walk from Rosh Hashanah toward Yom Kippur.

Service Introductions: Nishmat Kol Chai & Ha-Melech

Creation, Renewed, and Letting Go of False Kings

Rosh Hashanah is often called the birthday of the world, but our tradition tells it less as a story of something from nothing, and more as one of re-creation: the world emerging out of tohu va'vohu, chaos and darkness, into something new. On this day, we're invited to realign with that same spark within each of us, joining in with the breath of every living thing in praise.

That same invitation carried into the liturgy's Ha-Melech language, God as sovereign, enthroned, which for many in the room sits uneasily. Rather than asking everyone to accept kingship imagery literally, the offer was to hear it differently: a reminder that we're not actually in control, that no human authority should override what we know to be right, and that the parts of us ruled by habit and desire aren't the whole story. Realigning with the spark within, once again, means remembering we're not the king either.

Chevruta Corner On Ha-Melech, kingship, and who's really in charge + Expand Chevruta: the practice of studying in pairs. This is where we share the thinking behind what you're reading.

A personal reflection, not from services

In many ancient societies, kings and pharaohs presented their rule as divinely sanctioned. Rival rulers could disagree about nearly everything else while sharing the same basic structure: God, then king, then everyone else. That hierarchy could make resistance to the king appear to be resistance to God.

Naming God, and only God, as Melech pushes back against exactly that. It is not a neutral image; it can become an anti-establishment claim that no human ruler is absolute.

Reflect: If calling God "King" was meant to unseat every human claim to that title, what claims to authority in our own lives, political, institutional, even personal, might deserve the same unseating?

Rabbi Aliza's Dvar Torah

Hayom: The Practice of Presence

Rabbi Aliza traced the word hayom, "today," as it echoes through our High Holy Day liturgy: today the world was created, today we stand in judgment, today calls for the courage to listen.

She named this as a through-line for HBT's whole High Holy Day season: in times this hard, our ability to be present is what's under threat. So many of us are stuck in the past, grasping at what's already lost, held in fear and regret rather than curiosity for what could still be built. Just as many of us live in fear of the future, anxious or already so despairing that we stop actually living in the present at all. Either way the cost is the same: we lose the one place any of us can actually act from.

Moshe served as an unlikely model in Rabbi Aliza's dvar, a "prophet of presence" who, at the burning bush, asked God to spare the people news of future suffering, insisting that today's trouble is enough for today. That same word, hayom, appears again and again in Deuteronomy as Moshe's final teachings to the Israelites, always pointing forward to whichever day we happen to be standing in.

The charge to the congregation, repeated for emphasis: "The only moment in which we can act is the present moment. We can't act in the future. We can't act in the past." Presence isn't passive: it's the only place any of us can actually act from, and it takes real practice to return to it.

Ben Park's Dvar Torah: Rosh Hashanah Day 2

Abraham and Isaac: Not Withheld, Not Owned

Ben Park introduced the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, the Torah reading for Rosh Hashanah Day 2, where God tests Abraham by commanding him to offer up his son. He pointed out something easy to miss: the text never actually says Abraham "passed." Instead, when the angel stops him and Abraham is blessed in the story's final verses, the reason given is specific: not that he was willing to sacrifice his son, but that he did not withhold him.

He also unpacked the original Hebrew instruction to "bring Isaac up," which shares its root with aliyah, the word for being called up to the Torah, a detail commentators like Rashi read as a sign that the offering was never meant to be literal. Drawing on the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ben framed the story as part of the Torah's broader pushback against ancient norms that treated children as their parents' property: none of the Patriarchs are firstborn sons, and the Akedah itself establishes that a child belongs to no one but themselves.

He closed by naming the day, the second of the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance, as an invitation to examine which "common practices" we've inherited without questioning, and to remember that every person, our own children included, stands as an individual in their own right.

Chevruta Corner Connecting Ha-Melech to the Akedah + Expand Chevruta: the practice of studying in pairs. This is where we share the thinking behind what you're reading.

A personal reflection, not from services

Seen alongside Ben's reading of the Akedah, this becomes more than a parallel. In the ancient world, authority was often arranged through nested hierarchies: the king over his subjects, the patriarch over his household. Ha-Melech places a limit on the first claim; Ben's reading places a limit on the second. No human ruler is absolute, and no parent owns a child. In both cases, Jewish tradition challenges the assumption that power becomes legitimate simply because it is inherited, customary, or declared sacred.

Human beings may exercise authority, but they do not possess one another.

Jason's Bima Appeal

Building Together

Speaking on behalf of his co-president, Mark Wilen, and the entire board, Jason opened with thanks: to Rabbi Aliza, to the clergy and band, to the Avodah Committee, and to every volunteer who made the morning happen. He named where HBT stands right now: membership at its highest in five years and still growing, Chaverim thriving, and 126 new solar panels on a brand new roof, to be celebrated with a ribbon-cutting on the first night of Sukkot, Friday, September 25th at 5:45pm.

Then he turned personal. A member for about ten years, he described how his own involvement grew "little by little," each yes leading to meaningful work alongside people he came to "like, admire, and count among my friends." In his words: "Paradoxically, the more I gave, the more I got in return. The more of my heart I put into the HBT community, the more my heart was filled by the HBT community." He spoke about this past year being genuinely hard for him and his family, and how Rabbi Aliza and the HBT community showed up with "wise counsel, empathy, hugs, and encouragement." "We felt meaningfully supported," he said, "and having experienced that support, that love, that connection... I want that for every person in this room."

He named resilience, physical, emotional, spiritual, as something "easier in community," and pointed to real footing behind that: HBT is heading into the new fiscal year with a balanced budget, made possible, he said, by the congregation's own devotion and generosity. Then came the appeal itself: a $27,000 goal for this year's pledges, more than half already committed through early gifts, with every size welcomed, "for some, it may be an $18 gift, for others $1,800 or more," and, for anyone unable to give right now, an equal invitation to give time and talent instead.

Taken together, these teachings invite us to begin again, stay present, question what we have inherited, and show up for one another. Jason's reminder of HBT's 126 new solar panels offers a fitting final image: a community turning shared values into something visible, practical, and hopeful. As we move through the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Return, toward Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur, we carry these threads with us. View the Kol Nidre & Yom Kippur schedule →