I saw a clip recently of someone being asked when the Jewish holidays fall this year. Without missing a beat, he said: we don’t find them; they find us. I have not stopped thinking about that answer.
It is true, isn’t it? Most of us live our daily lives on a secular calendar. We track deadlines, school years, fiscal quarters, appointments. That calendar is linear and relentless, and it rarely pauses to ask whether we are ready for what’s coming next. And then, somewhere in the midst of all that forward motion, a feeling arrives. The light changes. The air shifts. And before we’ve consciously registered the date, we sense it: the holidays are coming.
This is one of the quiet blessings of being part of a minority living inside someone else’s calendar. Jewish time does not operate on the grid the rest of the world uses. It moves in its own rhythm, a wave that rises and falls according to its own logic, largely invisible to the world around us but deeply felt by those of us carried along by it. And if we are blessed, if we let ourselves notice, that wave finds us year after year, whether or not we were watching for it.
Tonight is Kol Nidre. However, this day arrived for you this year, whether you felt it coming for weeks or whether it caught you mid-stride in the middle of an ordinary Sunday, you are here now. And here is where something different is being asked of you than what the rest of your week has asked.
The rest of your week asks you to produce, to respond, to keep moving. Tonight asks you to stop.
I want to invite you, if you can, to actually do that. To let go, just for these hours, of the to-do list sitting in the back of your mind. To set down whatever frustration, worry, or unfinished business you carried in here with you. Not because these things don’t matter, but because they will still be there tomorrow, and tonight is not for them. Tonight belongs to something else.
What our tradition offers us on this night is a kind of suspension. The melodies of Kol Nidre, the long stretches of communal prayer, the fact that we step away, even briefly, from food and from the small comforts that usually structure our days: all of it is designed to loosen our grip on ordinary time. To create space where the urgent quiets down and the essential can finally be heard.
If you can let yourself enter that space, even partially, I believe something will happen. Your neshama, your soul, does not need you to figure everything out alone tonight. It needs you to be present, and to let the people around you, this community, this room, these voices rising and falling together, hold what you cannot hold by yourself. That is what communal prayer is for. We are not here only as individuals working through our own accounts. We are here as a whole, carrying each other.
And from that place of being held, something can begin. Self-reflection that doesn’t feel like self-judgment. An honest look at who we have been this year, met with enough compassion to imagine who we might become. And beyond that, a turning outward: toward the people in our lives, toward our community, toward the work of repair that the world is always, quietly, asking of us. Teshuvah is not only about the self. It is about how the self, restored, moves back into the world.
The holidays found you again this year. Whatever brought you here tonight, whatever state you arrived in, you are inside Jewish time now. Let it hold you.
May you have a meaningful Yom Kippur. May this day give you what you need, and may you leave it lighter than you entered.
Rabbi Jodie
