As I was walking to shul on Rosh Hashanah morning, I did some personal accounting (’tis the season and all). My first “High Holiday gig” was blowing shofar in our minyan in Ann Arbor around age 14. The first time I led Rosh Hashanah Musaf was at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in New Haven in the fall of 1999, and I’ve continued doing that in various places nearly every year since.

But then it occurred to me that this year is my fiftieth experience of the High Holidays. (My father, may he rest in peace, always used to love wishing us a happy birthday by saying, “Mazal tov on entering your Xth year,” referring not to the number signified by our birthday, but by that number plus one: the year it ushers in.) And that kind of interrupted my nostalgic trip down memory lane (High Holidays version) and brought things into a different focus.

Fifty is traditionally thought of as one of life’s bigger birthdays, of course. While my own birthday is still more than six months away, my Rosh Hashanah realization led me to this association:

You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the shofar; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the shofar sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family. (Leviticus 25:8-10)

It occurred to me that this is my Yovel, my jubilee year.

Now the Yovel is, of course, a communal enterprise. It really isn’t meant to be significant primarily for individuals. But I also thought of one of my favorite teachings of the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (d. 1609), who addresses a good question: Why does the Torah prescribe blowing the shofar to proclaim the Yovel on Yom Kippur, and not on Rosh Hashanah? “The Jubilee and Yom Kippur—the two are really one,” he says. “For the Jubilee is the return of each individual to their original place of security, to be as it was in the beginning. And so too with Yom Kippur: everyone returns to their original place of security as the Holy Blessed One atones for them.” (Gur Aryeh Behar, s.v. “Mimashma”)

The Maharal’s phrase that I’ve translated as “original place of security” is hezkat rishonah, which has a flavor that’s a little hard to capture in English. On a literal level, it’s probably better rendered as “original holding,” as in land holding, which is what the JPS Bible translation cited above does. But the word hazakah connotes something strong (hazak)–i.e. an assumption in which we can place our faith, a place of security.

So what does it mean that on Yom Kippur–whether it’s our first or our fiftieth–each of us returns to our original place, our place of security? Obviously we’re not making a physical return (that is left, in theory, for the Jubilee year). And it’s not as if we forget all that we have experienced and learned in the preceding year.

What I imagine the Maharal is getting at is the idea that Yom Kippur is a day of rebirth, a day the Rabbis understood to be a mikvah in time. At the conclusion of Tractate Yoma in the Mishnah, Rabbi Akiva quotes Jeremiah 17:13: Mikveh Yisrael, “O hope of Israel! O eternal one!” He then plays with the the similarity between the Hebrew root signifying hope, kaveh (like Hatikvah), and the word for ritual bath, mikvah. “Just as a ritual bath purifies the impure, so too, the Holy Blessed One, purifies Israel.” And just as someone who emerges from a mikvah is considered a renewed being–clean and pure–we, upon our emergence from Yom Kippur, are clean, pure, and renewed.

During these ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, we make reference to the Talmud’s teaching that the books of our lives are open and being written. That can sometimes feel disempowering: It’s all up to God. Or it can feel transactional: If I do good deeds now, then God will write me in the Book of Life. In my experience, that’s a theological posture likely to result in disappointment, if not shattered faith.

A perhaps more helpful alternative comes from the Maggid of Mezritch: “On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur the ‘writing’ is the thoughts that we think” (Torat HaMaggid Rosh Hashanah). That is, the book is our book, the story of our lives. We are writing it. And the beautiful opportunity of this season is that, no matter what the story has been until now, it really can change with this new chapter.

Gemar chatima tova – May the chapter you write now be one of blessings for you and for all of us.

Reading my friend Jane Eisner’s wonderful new biography of Carole King, I learned about the Brill Building, which sits at 49th and Broadway in Manhattan and, in the 1960s, was the center of the American pop music world. There was King herself, of course, but reading through the list of songwriters and bands that centered around the building one gets the sense of just how extraordinary a place it was: Paul Simon, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Sonny Bono, Liza Minnelli, Dionne Warwick, and many many more.

(A plug: I’ll be doing a public book talk with Jane on October 23, a couple of weeks before we start teaching our IJS online course “Don’t Turn Away: Reading the News Without Losing Your Mind,” which begins November 3.)

One of the writers at the Brill Building not on the Wikipedia list is Fred Neil, whose song “Everybody’s Talkin'” was made famous by Harry Nilsson, whose version was featured in the 1969 movie “Midnight Cowboy,” and then again in “Forrest Gump” (1994). The song has been covered by over 100 other artists, from Stevie Wonder to Leonard Nimoy (!). (My personal favorite is sung by Jacqui Abbott with the English band The Beautiful South.) Here are its opening words:

Everybody’s talkin’ at me
I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’
Only the echoes of my mind
People stoppin’, starin’
I can’t see their faces
Only the shadows of their eyes

On one level, of course, this is just excellent social commentary. Already by 1966, when Neil wrote the song, the modern world had produced such a cacophony for so many people that millions of Americans could identify with this sentiment. There was just so much noise in modern life, and people understandably longed for some kind of escape:

I’m goin’ where the sun keeps shinin’
Through the pourin’ rain

Goin’ where the weather suits my clothes
Bankin’ off of the northeast winds
Sailin’ on a summer breeze
And skippin’ over the ocean like a stone

Of course, the cacophony only feels like it has grown louder since. When I get on public transportation or an airplane these days, I, like so many others, pop in my noise-cancelling headphones to listen to a podcast, or a guided meditation, or, yes, this very song. Everybody seems to be talkin’ at me—in spoken words and flashing ads and emails and social media and notifications—and I just want to mentally take myself to a place where the sun keeps shining, skipping happily over the noisy ocean like a stone.

Yet Fred Neil knew, as you and I do, that simply escaping the noise isn’t really what we’re really trying to do. What I really want to do—and I expect you, as well—is hear our own voice. As the song’s first words say, it can often feel like we’re hearing only the echoes of our minds—but not the voice of our mind itself. In order to do that, we have to get quiet. And while escaping to someplace less noisy certainly helps with that, it’s no guarantee. Getting quiet is one thing; hearing the still, small voice within us is another.

The seventh Mishnah of the third chapter of tractate Rosh Hashanah reads as follows (based on Koren/Steinsaltz emended translation):

If one sounds a shofar into a pit, or into a cistern, or into a large jug: if they clearly heard the sound of the shofar, they have fulfilled the mitzvah; but if they heard the sound of an echo, they have not fulfilled the mitzvah. And similarly, if one was passing behind a synagogue, or their house was adjacent to the synagogue, and they heard the sound of the shofar… if they focused their heart, i.e. they established an intention to fulfill the mitzvah, they have fulfilled it; but if not, they have not fulfilled it. (It is therefore possible for two people to hear the shofar blasts, but only one of them fulfills the mitzvah.) Even though this one heard and also the other one heard, nevertheless, this one focused their heart to fulfill the mitzvah and has therefore indeed fulfilled it, but the other one did not focus their heart, and so has not fulfilled it.

There would seem to be two related big ideas here. The first is that, in order to fulfill the mitzvah of hearing the sound of the shofar we have to make sure we’re hearing the actual sound and not an echo. Yet stop and think about that for a moment: How do we know what the “actual” sound is? Sound reverberates off the wall, the ceiling, the floor. Unless our ear is right up against the shofar, aren’t we always taking in some aspect of the sound that isn’t “pure?” (And even then: If our right ear is next to the shofar, our left is still picking up sounds that have reverberated around the room.) What is the voice, and what is the echo?

Perhaps the Mishnah is thus already inviting us to a broader conception of “hearing”—one that isn’t strictly limited by physical dimensions, and thus also opens up broader potential meanings. Thus the second, related, idea in the Mishnah: To truly fulfill the mitzvah of the shofar, it’s necessary to engage in kivvun halev, directing the heart. While the Talmud debates whether or not, in general, doing mitzvot requires intention, in the case of hearing the sound (literally the kol, the “voice”) of the shofar, it certainly does.

What does it take to direct our hearts? For some it might be pausing before the shofar blasts to make a mental note: “I’m experiencing these blasts in order to fulfill the mitzvah.” But I would suggest there is a more expansive opportunity for us if we choose to take it.

The language the Mishnah uses, here and elsewhere, to describe one who has fulfilled a mitzvah is yatzah yedei chovato, which literally translates to “has left the grip (yad/hand) of one’s obligation,” or, in abbreviated form, simply yatzah, “has left.” There is motion here, an act of leaving, of going somewhere. On one level, of course, it’s leaving the state of still being obligated to fulfill the commandment of hearing the shofar: once we’ve heard it, we have discharged the obligation, and thus “left.”

But on a deeper level, I think there’s an invitation here to transcend the noise-drenched world in which we live, to go deeper, to go inward. In the voice of the shofar we can, for a moment, leave the cacophonous din of this world and hear other kolot, other voices: The voice of the Divine that called to us at Sinai and, according to the Talmud, still calls to us every day; the still small voice that remains after the storm (to borrow from I Kings 19); the voices of joy and delight, of brides and grooms, in a comforted and spiritually renewed world (Jeremiah 33:11).

“The Torah is not in heaven,” Moses tells us, “nor is it across the ocean… It is on your lips and in your heart that you may do it” (Deuteronomy 30:12-14). Already in Moses’s time, it feels like the world could be a noisy place. It certainly is today. It often feels like so much work to attune to the genuine signals amidst the haze of so many siren songs. The shofar is our people’s ancient spiritual technology for cutting through the noise. This year, may we direct our hearts to hear it, to sense its vibrations deep inside. May the voice of the shofar help us attune to the compassionate, loving Divine voice within each of us.

Many years ago when I was a young rabbi working at Northwestern University Hillel, I went to meet Patti Ray at her home. Patti was the longtime director of Hillel at Loyola University, one of our neighboring campuses in the Chicago area. After this long time, I don’t really remember why I went to her house, but that visit has had a lasting impact—because the day that I came, Patti was having her windows cleaned before Rosh Hashanah.

This wasn’t something I had grown up with. While I can definitely remember using Windex and a rag to clean the windows in our house as a kid, that was only on the inside. Patti had hired professionals to clean not only the inside, but the outside. And, having never seen this, I got to experience the dramatic difference it made. With apologies to Joni Mitchell: You don’t know how much schmutz you’ve got til it’s gone. (Or, alternatively, Johnny Nash: “I can see clearly now.”)

This week the window cleaners came to our house and the result is, as ever, transformative. But, of course, it’s not only the physical aspect that makes such a difference. There’s also something about cleaning the windows, and thus being able to see clearly, that is particularly evocative during Elul. For me, it’s a kind of embodied metaphor for the self-accounting, purification, and renewal that the season invites and demands of us.

“When all of these blessings pursue you and overtake you” (Deuteronomy 28:2). This is a frankly strange verse in our Torah portion: There’s the unusual notion of blessings almost physically chasing us—how does that happen? And there’s the odd juxtaposition of this active, subtly violent language (rodef, pursue, is the word the Torah uses to describe Pharaoh’s army chasing after the Israelites, for instance) with the abundant tone of the rest of the verse. How to make sense of it?

One answer comes from Rabbi Mordechai Yosef of Izbicsza: “When one becomes wealthy,” he says, “one changes—they become a different person. Thus this is a special blessing: If all of these blessings of material success come upon you, they will find you as you are—not “puffed up” (nechmetzet, like chametz) and not unmoored.”

Wealth can take many different forms—yes, financial, but in other ways too. “Who is wealthy? One who is happy with what they have,” as Ben Zoma teaches. So one invitation of this reading might be to ask ourselves: How have we grown wealthy—and what changes might that have brought about in us? How may our perception have shifted? How, if at all, might we need or want to re-attune ourselves with our deepest values?

A second reading comes from Rabbi Chayim Ephraim of Sudilkov: “When one is in a more constricted state of mind, one can wind up fleeing from the good—for they don’t realize that it is in fact good for them. Thus King David prayed, ‘May goodness and hesed pursue me’ [N.B. again, the word rodef], for there are times when I don’t realize I should pursue goodness and hesed myself—in such cases, may they chase after me and find/overtake me. Thus the Torah assures us: ‘When all of these blessings pursue you and overtake you’ — that is, they will come upon you and greet you.”

This is a related but slightly different lesson: We can’t always perceive clearly what is actually the good in a given moment. Sometimes—especially when we are harried, when our consciousness is constricted—we can miss the goodness that’s right in front of us, or we only come to appreciate the goodness that was present long after our encounter with it. So the invitation of this reading is to recognize the good that’s present when it’s present.

Elul is a time of spiritual cleaning: clearing off the schmutz both inside and out. One of our goals for that cleaning is to gain greater clarity of perception, to behold what needs change and realignment and the many blessings that are often already present but that we fail to acknowledge. May our practices support us in doing so—for ourselves and for our communities.

On Monday I had the rare opportunity to attend two funerals of women who died well into their 90s. They happened to know each other, they were both matriarchs of families with whom I’ve enjoyed long friendships, and they even shared the same first name (though spelled differently: Rheta Shapiro and Rita Mendelsohn). It’s not every day such a thing occurs.

I have always found funerals in Elul to be particularly poignant. Many of us are already engaged, to a greater or lesser degree, in spiritual reflection as we prepare for the High Holidays. As the seasons change, as children head back to school, as the sense of so many different new years arises, I find myself entering some deep grooves of memory—thinking and feeling backwards and forwards, feeling the legacies of ancestors and considering what I’m creating and bequeathing as an ancestor myself. In other words: Heshbon hanefesh, spiritual accounting. ‘Tis the season, after all.

Rita Mendelsohn’s funeral was led by her son-in-law, Rabbi Marty Lockshin. In his eulogy, he spoke of the mitzvah of sending away the mother bird when gathering eggs from a nest, which we find in this week’s parashah. Marty cited the 19th Century Italian commentator, Rabbi Shmuel David Luzzato (known by his acronym, Shadal), who observes that most of the time a bird will fly away when humans approach. (Any child who has ever playfully shooed away pigeons in the city will know that.) But a mother bird won’t fly away: She’ll stay to protect her eggs, a reflection of the deep bond to which we might all aspire in our loving relationships.

In his comments on the verse, Rashi focuses on the unusual assurance that observing this mitzvah will result in “lengthening of days.” If a “simple” or “light” mitzvah (mitzvah kalah), which involves no element of expense on your part, yields such a reward, all the more so with a mitzvah that does. Rabbi Avraham Mordechai Alter of Ger (1865-1948) observes that there are many other mitzvot that don’t involve expense, yet they are not referred to as “simple” or “light.” So why is this one? “Because it involves no preparation,” he says. As the Torah puts it, this mitzvah applies “If you chance upon a bird’s nest” (Deut. 22:6). Thus the definition of a “light” or “simple” mitzvah is one that requires no preparation—while weightier ones do.

Of course, the lines can become blurry. Yes, building a sukkah requires preparation and intention. So does making Shabbat dinner, or blowing the Shofar, or reading from the Torah. But one could argue that sending away the mother bird itself requires some preparation: moral preparation, to recognize the situation and not simply kill the mother bird—cruelly taking advantage of her own vulnerability which is the result of her innate desire to protect her chicks—and then take the eggs. And, in the reverse, there can be moments of illumination and epiphany, moments when we haven’t prepared, but life seemingly summons us to do something of significance.

Yet the Talmud reminds us, Ein somchin al hanes, “We don’t rely on miracles.” That’s why we plan and prepare. In Elul “the King is in the field,” the atmosphere is laden with the spirit of reflection and preparation. It’s a time to be considering the stories we hope will be told years from now as we’re remembered by loved ones, to make changes in our lives to live in alignment with those stories, and to repair the relationships with those who might tell them long into the future.

One of the most delightful parts of being a parent has been studying parts of the Mishnah with each of my children. With my older kids, who are now both in college, it has been a little while. But my youngest is still at home, and our synagogue recently began a new collective project to study two mishnayot (individual teachings) per day, with the goal of completing the entire Mishnah in five years. If we stick to it, Toby and I will finish before he graduates high school. In the meantime, the shul is incentivizing teenagers with the lure of a gift card for each tractate we finish. That was enough to whet his appetite.

I was on the road a couple of nights this week, but Toby and I Facetimed for 15 minutes each evening to study the tractate of Rosh Hashanah together. While the later chapters discuss the shofar (as one would expect), the opening chapters focus on the mitzvah of kiddush hahodesh, the sanctification of the new moon. In ancient times, the Jewish calendar—which remember, is lunar—depended on the monthly declaration of the new moon by the Sanhedrin, the rabbinic high court. In order for the court to proclaim the date of the new moon—and thereby establish the dates for the holidays and festivals, which had a significant effect on individual and communal life—the court had to receive testimony from two witnesses who saw the new moon. The opening chapters of Rosh Hashanah deal with the whole procedure.

The first teaching of the second chapter reads as follows:

Initially, the court would accept testimony from anyone. But when the Boethusians corrupted the process, the Sages instituted that they would accept testimony only from those they knew to be valid.

The Boethusians were one of the groups that opposed the Rabbis. Much of their disagreement centered on the notion of the Oral Law, the set of customs and interpretive traditions that particularly distinguished Rabbinic Judaism. In several places the Talmud (which was, of course, written by the Rabbis) relates stories of these disputes: Over the proper dating of Shavuot, for example, or over the way the High Priest was supposed to perform the rituals of Yom Kippur. This results in an emotional scene in Tractate Yoma, when the Rabbis make admonishing the High Priest part of the regular part of his preparation: the text relates that everyone cried at this, presumably because of the breakdown in trust that it represented.

Toby and I caught a whiff of that sad sensibility in this Mishnah too. The Boethusians, it seems, were not only committed to their version of ordering time, but went so far as to undermine the institution of testimony—that is, truth-telling that establishes a common reality—by sending false witnesses to the Sanhedrin. While the Rabbis would generally have been very expansive in trusting those who came to testify, they ultimately had to presume distrust, and limit testimony only to those whom they knew. We reflected together that it’s much more comfortable to live in a world where you feel like you can trust people, and it’s painful to feel otherwise. It’s kind of the bedrock of safety.

Parashat Shoftim begins with the commandment to appoint judges and magistrates, v’shaftu et ha’am mishpat tzedek, “and they shall govern the people with due justice” (Deuteronomy 16:19). Rashi, following the Sifrei, interprets: “This means, appoint judges who are expert and righteous to give just judgment.” The Torah expects a combination of both expertise and righteousness: Judges need to know the law—that is, they need to be experts—and, in the same breath, they need to understand how to apply the law with fairness and equity.

Why does the Torah feel the need to articulate this? Perhaps because a society ultimately depends on our collective trust that our judges and leaders know their stuff and will apply the law fairly, balancing the needs of individuals, society, and the law itself. Yet as the Mishnah reminds us, all of us are part of maintaining that trust. Even those of us who aren’t appointed leaders or judges have to be trustworthy to offer testimony. When any aspect of this collective trust begins to erode—whether our trust in our leaders’ expertise and ability, or our trust in one another as reliable narrators committed to the collective welfare—that is, at a minimum, an occasion for sadness and regret. At maximum, it jeopardizes our ability to live together in peace.

One of the greatest judges in the Bible is King Solomon. Famously, upon assuming the throne, he asks the Holy One to grant him a lev shomeah, a listening heart, “to judge Your people” (I Kings 3:9). In this season of spiritual attunement, and in this time of so much distrust—between communities and their leaders, between neighbors, between fellow Jews—may our spiritual practices help us to open our hearts, that we might be trustworthy to one another.

Ever since we moved into our home 12 years ago, we have faced a challenge whenever there’s a heavy rain: our backyard turns into a small pond. Thankfully the water has not posed an issue for our basement (though the presence of three sump pumps in the house tells me that it probably did for the previous owners). Mostly it has just been a wet inconvenience. Depending on the amount of rainfall, it can put our backyard out of commission for a week or more—and in the Chicago area, every day that isn’t winter is a precious chance to be outside.

We’ve looked into various solutions. The one that would most effectively solve the problem is regrading, but it’s expensive. So for years, every time there’s a big rain, I have donned my rubber boots and schlepped an electric pump that sends the water through a hose out to the drain in the street. Not pretty, not fun, but effective.

This spring we tried a new solution: We planted a rain garden. Our neighbor Ron runs a landscaping business that specializes in native plants. He came over and designed an L-shaped garden of beautiful flowering plants that are indigenous to this area of northern Illinois: Rose milkweed, white turtlehead, cardinal flower, brown-eyed susans. It didn’t take long for them to grow, and by the middle of summer there were beautiful reds, yellows, blues and pinks throughout, along with monarch butterflies and hummingbirds and even a pair of goldfinches.

Earlier this week the garden got its first real test: 2.5 inches of rain in the span of about 4 hours on Monday night. The next morning I was eager for the dawn so I could get a look. And lo and behold, while there was water in the garden, much of it had been sopped up by the plants—and it was much prettier to look at than the muddy pond that would have been there otherwise. Success!

“There shall be no needy among you” (Deut. 15:4) declares Moses as he explains the mitzvah of shemittah, which involves both cancelling debts every seven years—and continuing to lend to those in need, even with the knowledge that the loan will be cancelled. (N.B. This is what led Hillel the Elder to come up with the pruzbul, whereby debts could be sold to the Rabbinic court and carried over through the sabbatical year—thereby ensuring that those with capital would lend to those in need.)

Yet despite this categorical statement—”There shall be no needy among you”—just a few verses later Moses contradicts himself: “There will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy kindred in your land” (15:11). The medieval commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra observes this seeming contradiction and suggests a resolution based on the language of verse 6: “For YHVH your God will bless you as promised: you will extend loans to many nations, but require none yourself.” Ibn Ezra says, “Moses knew that a generation will arise that will not be mostly meritorious. He therefore said, ‘For the poor shall never cease out of the land.'”

I would suggest an additional way of resolving the contradiction: Moses’s first statement is an aspirational one; his second is realistic. We should aspire to a society in which everyone has what they need. Yet we know from our own experience that our desire not to see need can lead us, through motivated reasoning, to overlook it altogether. Thus we hold the vision on the one hand while perceiving clearly and honestly on the other. Living in that tension between ideal and real enables us to make progress—however partial and incomplete it may be.

The rain garden isn’t going to stop the storms that will continue and intensify. As I found when the morning finally came, it’s not even going to soak up all the water. But it undoubtedly makes things better than they were, providing beauty for us to enjoy and a habitat for plants and creatures to live in their glorious interdependence.

In a casual line of conversation years ago, Rabbi Nancy Flam pointed out that “contemplative” means “with time.” I think about that observation nearly every day. These days I find myself thinking about how we who engage in and teach contemplative practices approach questions that seem to have great urgency: How do we end suffering right now? How do we bring about action before it’s too late? I’m still working on my answer to that. But I know that a key element is continuing the practice so that we can live in this tension between ideal and real, to plant and tend the garden as best we can.