When I was a child, 30 years and a climate ago, Rosh Hashanah arrived when the leaves began to turn.
Some years, when the holiday came early, the change was subtle: a single yellow leaf on a tree otherwise still defiantly green. When Rosh Hashanah fell out in October, the holiday season would carry us through the transition from the last clinging bits of summer into the depths of fall. Those years, we would finish our last meal in the sukkah amidst a world ablaze in autumn colors and leaves beginning to coat the earth.
There’s often a mismatch between the Jewish calendar, situated around the agricultural rhythms of the Middle East, and contemporary life in the diaspora. Dinner in a sukkah makes less sense when the temperature at night has dropped into the forties. A month of holidays is less intuitive when they coincide with the beginning of the school year instead of the end of the harvest.
But there’s something about the autumnal new year that feels right. And maybe that’s because in Judaism, the birth of the new year is also about the death of the old. Like the waning autumn light and falling leaves, our year is gradually dying.
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The Jewish high holiday liturgy reflects this understanding that the transition to the new year is a moment not just of birth, but of death. Unetaneh Tokef, perhaps the most famous Rosh Hashanah prayer, links life and death and our inability to know who, on this day of judgment, is fated for which: “How many shall pass away and how many shall be born; who shall live and who shall die; who shall live out his allotted time and who shall depart before his time”
In context, Unetaneh Tokef is about God’s judgment: Some people will be judged for life, others for death. But read differently, Unetaneh Tokef tells a different truth: Even those who are fated to live must also die. We all need to let go of parts of ourselves in order to become something new, to let go of parts of the world we have known in order to make space for new possibilities.
Some years, this process is painful. Like the wistful late August feeling when we look back at a summer full of joy and brace ourselves for the autumn to come, there are years where we don’t want to let go.
This is not one of those years. This year, there is so much I feel ready to let go of. The chaos. The pain. The feeling of a world on fire.
The Talmud (Megillah 31b) states that at this time of year we read the Torah portions describing what will befall the Jewish people if they sin because we want to slough off the curses along with the old year. Techaleh shanah u’klaloteha. May the year and its curses end.
But the truth is, we don’t just get rid of the things that feel obviously painful. Sometimes, we also need to let go of good things simply because they belong to the old.
The Torah portions we read at this time of year are a story about beloved things — or more accurately, a beloved person — we must leave behind in order to move forward. The entire book of Deuteronomy is an account of Moses’ final speech to the people before his death. It is also a protracted exercise in moving forward and letting go, and the way those two are inextricably linked. Moses belongs to the Jewish people of the desert: he cannot cross into the promised land because he does not belong there. If the Jewish people are to cross the Jordan, to move on into the new world, they must let go of Moses. The man who represented the old must die.
This is tragic. But as anyone knows who has seen green leaves blaze red before they fall to the earth to feed new life in the spring, it is also deeply true.
So this year, as I watch for the first leaves to change color and pray for the curses of this year to die, I’m asking myself: What are the beloved things I need to leave behind if I want the curses to end? What old ways of being might have served me once but no longer do? What ways of thinking, what truths we once believed about the world, must we allow to die if we want things to change?
These are frightening questions. But they are questions we need to ask if we dare to hope for something new.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on September 6, 2025. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
