A Spiritual New Year

Rabbi Irwin Wiener, D.D.


The New Year we are about to celebrate affords us the opportunity to pause and reflect and even contemplate. So much has happened in one year. Lives are lost, births are recorded and in between we travel into unknown areas – places we haven’t been to before. There is excitement as well as hesitation – a fear of the unknown.

A New Year also gives us time to rededicate our spiritual selves. It is a time to think about relationships, missed opportunities. We know that bonding and connecting help us make life livable and rewarding. Our lives are cemented by love and understanding with friends, family and sweethearts.

Even when we lose a loved one, we somehow, through the experience of this season, find comfort and courage. One day we wrote the name of someone we held dear on the sands of time and then it was washed away. Some are fortunate to be able to write a new name and just as many never seem to find the energy or the desire to write again. All this becomes part of the experience of our spiritual journey.

This time of the year seems to produce melancholy and despondency. Instead of rejoicing as another years rolls around we concentrate on what was and we tend to go through the motions of gladness. We should remember that just as the trees shed their leaves in the winter and sleep, we too go through certain emptiness. But then comes spring and summer and a time of re-birth. – and all is right. Even those of us who lost our true love or a loving parent or a child, have memories – but those memories should sustain us and give us renewed strength. Life goes on and we owe it to ourselves and those left behind to continue because life is to live even as we mourn.

A New Year enables us to garner our strength and bring a new sense of purpose to our existence. A New Year connects us to life as we remember the past. A New Year helps us understand the beauty of life, while not forgetting those who are no longer a part of everyday living.

A New Year endows us with ability understand that time is a healer and our best friend in the entire world is God. A New Year should teach us that doing evil to another human being is worse than doing evil to God.

Sometimes we find it so difficult to fathom God and our place in the universe. We become so cynical because of all that happens or doesn’t happen. It is ironic that people of faith sometimes lose that faith. It is so difficult to remember that we have so much to be thankful for – family, friends – more importantly – life! Instead we look for scapegoats for our sometimes self-inflicted misery. We seem to be so sure that God is nowhere to be found because there is so much ugliness. How can there be a God and also such agony? We constantly blame God for our misfortune and all the while we create such unhappiness by not allowing love to be part of our daily experience.

God is here! God is everywhere! All we have to do is look around us to see the beauty of nature, or the birth of a child, or the colors of the rainbow, the breathtaking view of the horizon as the sun rises and sets. Just watch a bird soar through the sky and know that God is there to lift us to greater heights of ecstasy through intimacy and sharing.

We should be reminded that we need to learn and reflect to the best of our capacity, and when we reach a point where we are unable to make sense of life, we should supplant understanding with faith. We must have faith in tomorrow and our ability to meet each day with joy and thankfulness. And just when we think we have lost all faith and seem to have been abandoned by God, we should love God even more. We do no less for a friend or family member – we have unconditional love for a child – how much more so for God who gave us the ability to love so completely.

Perhaps, at this beginning of a New Year we should reinforce our belief in the Creator who created us and is a guide to all creatures, that He alone makes and will make everything – that He is unique and only he is God – who was, who is and who will always be.

Perhaps we will awaken in us the faith needed to comprehend this time and what it can offer us so that we will face tomorrow with greater anticipation. After all this is a time of faith and healing and dreaming. This is what a New Year is all about. And dreams do come true if you believe.