So many emotions.

If we don’t celebrate our holidays or if we allow our enemies to define how we celebrate, we are giving them a victory. Do we want to allow them to live inside our heads and sit at our Rosh Hashanah table with us, prevent us from eating apples and honey and praying for a sweet new year? I don’t want the perpetrators of evil to define my atonement on Yom Kippur, and I won’t let them disrupt my celebration of Sukkot. If I diminish my Simhat Torah, then I am reducing the very heart of the Jewish experience.

Yet, how can I celebrate with a full heart a full year after my brothers and sisters in Israel have been attacked, taken captive, and held in inhumane conditions, in tunnels and in fear, in deprivation and in pain?

The answer is to set aside time during our season of festival days to remember. Following Rosh Hashanah and preceding Yom Kippur, the Grand Rapids Jewish community is joining together for an October 7^th commemoration on Sunday, October 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Temple Emanuel, 1715 East Fulton. Join us for prayers in memory of those whose lives have been lost, on that horrific days and in the days and months following, and those taken hostage yet to be returned. We pray for the Israel Defense Forces and for the strength of the State of Israel to be a beacon of Jewish values to the world. We’ll also hear from both leaders in the Jewish community and civic leaders from Grand Rapids.

We need to tell the world, in one unified voice along with Jewish communities around the world, that we stand with Israel, with human dignity, with freedom of religion. Our message needs to be that we come from Zion, that our 3400 year old connection with the land of Israel is not as a 20^th century colonial power, but as a people returning to their ancestral homeland.

I hope to see you on Rosh Hashanah to celebrate the new year and begin the process of repentance. I hope to see you on Yom Kippur to renew our connection to God and ask for full atonement. I hope to see you on Sukkot to celebrate the bounteous fall harvest. I hope to see you on Simhat Torah to celebrate and dance with the beating heart of Jewish life, Torah. And, please, join me for this important commemoration as well.

Shana Tova, may this be a good year for the Jewish people.

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

• Am Yisrael Chai! The Nation and People of Israel Lives!