It's been a long year, and not just for me. For Jewish people all over the world, we have faced collective trauma and heartbreak we could not have anticipated.
We watched helplessly as 1200 beautiful Jews were slaughtered, many in the prime of their lives. We flooded the Kotel and we poured our hearts out to Hashem, begging for help, struggling to find meaning in the chaos of devastation.
And those who didn't have this lifeline to clutch– they too endured the agony of being attacked for the simple and existential crime of being Jewish, as hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets, calling for our annihilation and making all of us wonder if we had in fact been transported in a time machine back to the 1930's.
And the college students, hopeful and bright eyed, who only wanted a good education, watched as their campuses became a hotbed of anti-Israel hatred and vicious antisemitism, reminiscent of the Holocaust.
And the death– the death was everywhere. Soldiers and hostages, they came back one by one– in body bags. And our hearts are aching as we didn't know they could.
And the one thing that stays with me is last Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur, mere days away from the start of this hellish year, when our fate as a nation was decreed, and we had no idea. So we put on our sparkly new yom tov clothes and we bought sweets for the kids and new machzorim. And we patted oursleves on the back for getting past the serious times and ran off eagerly to buy our lulavim and schach. And we built our sukkas. And finally we got ready for Simchas Torah (more cooking!), buying sweets for the kids (again!) and flags and stuffed mini-Torahs for the little ones.
And then. Well, we all know what happened.
And know it's Elul again. And I'm finding it hard to seek a brand new start and to connect with this beautiful month.
But I know that I have to, because all things come back to Hashem. Because we will never understand His reasons and we aren't meant to.
And more than ever, I (and we) need all the rachamim we can get, and maybe– just maybe– this will be the year of final redemption.