Summer provides many of us an opportunity for respite and rejuvenation, for adventure or relaxation, for the comforts of the familiar or the quest for the exotic. When we return in the Fall to our routine, the everyday world of work and school, family and friends, we are changed, yet ever more the same. If we have been fortunate, we enter our season of renewal refreshed in spirit, prepared for the challenges of the next year.

All of this was magnified for my wife, Irene and me, as we traveled to Peru and the Galapagos this past July. In both places we were permitted a glimpse of the nexus between the divine and human realms. We explored the mystery of the Incas, human aspiration reaching into the heavens at Machu Pichu, and then encountered those tiny islands in the Pacific where the wonder of revelation, through the observations and intuitions of Charles Darwin, enabled a quantum leap in human knowledge.

With fresh memories of the grandeur and magnificence of the natural world, I began my preparations for the coming Days of Awe. I soon happened once again upon these words of Rabbi Leo Baeck:

…All creation has its force, its constant birth.
Creation and revelation,
becoming and designation belong together;
they determine on another…
Space; and nevertheless, unendingness;
Time; and nevertheless, eternity.
God is the space of the world,
but the world is not the space of God…
It is the creation and revelation of God
and therefore a world fi lled with tension.
It is an interweaving of opposites,
an immanence of the transcendent,
a being at one with the other,
the covenanting of the finite and temporal
with the infinite eternal…

As we prepare to come together anew as a sacred community, let us bring to one another the excitement of our most recent experiences, a sharing of vision and revision, “a covenanting with the infinite eternal.” In anticipation of those moments, my colleagues and I and our families wish for you and yours, a Shana Tova Umetuka, a good year filled with blessing, a sweet year filled with hope.

— Rabbi Ronne Friedman