CBE President’s Column September – October 2026

Fellow Congregants,

Every year around this time, we greet each other without a second thought: “Shanah tovah u’metukah” — a good and sweet year. Or, we might say, “A happy and healthy!” We say it in the parking lot, in the hallway, in cards and emails. There is nothing wrong with that wish.

Yet, it’s worth noticing that “Shanah tovah” isn’t actually the traditional greeting at all — it’s a modern derivative for something older and more pointed: “K’tivah v’chatimah tovah,” may you be inscribed and sealed for good, which seems more a verdict than warm greeting. It assumes judgment. Somehow, over time, we simplified things to “have a good year,” and in doing so we quietly dropped the very thing the High Holidays are about.

If you carefully read the Torah readings, the Haftarot, and the machzor (the special prayer book) we open on Rosh Hashanah, “happy and healthy” never finds its way into these two days. Taking anything away from the sweetness of the season, I want to suggest that we’re missing a major component of Rosh HaShanah if we limit ourselves  to apples and honey (or Taiglach if you are Ashkenazi, Deblas or Knafeh b’Azeer if you are Sephardi/Mizrahi.)

On the first day, we read from Genesis: the joyful feast celebrating Isaac followed almost immediately by Sarah’s demand that Hagar and Ishmael be banished, and Hagar’s anguish in the wilderness as she waits, unable to watch, for her son to die of thirst.

On the second day, continuing in Genesis, we read the Akedah — the binding of Isaac. A father raises a knife over his bound son. However we resolve that story theologically, the plain narrative is almost unbearable each and every time we read those verses.

The Haftarot we pair with these readings convey the same sense of tribulation and judgment. On the first day, we read of Hannah — barren, “bitter of soul,” weeping, refusing to eat, so consumed in prayer that the priest Eli mistakes her for a drunk. It’s worth pausing on this one in particular; Hannah’s quiet, desperate prayer is the rabbinic model for the Amidah itself — the way we’re taught to pray grows out of a woman in anguish, not a woman at ease. On the second day, we read of the prophet Jeremiah’s metaphorical Rachel, weeping for her children and refusing all comfort, because they are gone.

None of this is “Apples and Honey.” None of it is easy. In my opinion, none of these readings are selected for us by accident.

Then there’s the machzor itself. Much of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy is, structurally, the same as Yom Kippur’s — including and especially the U’Netaneh Tokef, recited at the identical spot in the Musaf service on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; the same stark enumeration of who will live and who will die, who by fire and who by water, and the plea that repentance, prayer, and charity can temper the decree. The prayer itself tells us why it belongs on both days — it declares “Hinei Yom HaDin,” behold, this is the Day of Judgment. That’s not a label we’re inferring; it’s the prayer’s own name for the day, said in the same words at the same moment on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur alike.

Even the shofar, another favorite of our youngest congregants, carries this same double message once you listen closely. Tekiah, the long unbroken blast, and teruah, the rapid staccato bursts, sound like an alarm — a call to action, to wake up, to notice. But shevarim, the three sighing, broken notes in between, is something else entirely; not a summons but a sob, the sound of brokenness itself. We don’t get to choose one cadence over the other. The shofar service asks us to hear both — the blast that rouses us and the tremors of the shevarim that admits how compelling, and perhaps scary, the alarm is for each of us and for our community.

None of this is a case against apples and honey. For our children, that sweetness is exactly right, and exactly enough — and there’s something genuinely lovely in the fact that the song “Apples and Honey on Rosh Hashanah”, is one children in Israel and around the world are singing too (in Hebrew and many other languages). That shared innocence is worth protecting, not correcting.

But for the rest of us, I’d like to suggest we owe these days the solemnity the biblical texts and ancient liturgy demands. We have the capacity — I’d argue the obligation — to let ourselves feel the actual weight of the Torah readings and the actual weight of U’Netaneh Tokef, rather than skating past them toward the honey cake. Given the world we’re living in right now, the harsh realities so many of us are carrying into these Yamim Nora’im, these Days of Awe, that weight doesn’t feel like a stretch.

This year, that heaviness isn’t theoretical. Erev Rosh Hashanah, the evening we gather for our festive meal and open the year with hope, falls on September 11th — the 25th anniversary of those devastating attacks. For so many of us in this congregation who lived and worked in the greater New York area in 2001, and who may have been in Manhattan that very day, this anniversary won’t be an abstraction. It will be recalled through all five senses and with the same disbelief we felt then — not just on the day of the attacks, but in the many days that followed. That emotion will be present in the room whether we name it or not.  Again this year, the Days of Judgment are palpable, just as they were 25 years ago.

So this year, let us lean in. Let us gather together with conviction, not as a formality but because we need each other in the sanctuary and on Livestream. When given the chance to pray silently, let us do so with real intent, the way Hannah did. When invited to sing together, let’s join in harmony as if the coming year genuinely depends on our individual and collective voices— because, in the way our tradition asks us to understand it, it most emphatically does.

And maybe, this year, when we greet each other, let’s add K’tivah v’Chatimah Tovah along with Happy and Healthy.

B’Shalom,

David