~ The Season for Change

Today is the Jewish New Year, it starts a weeklong period of reflection and meditation. As with seasons, this is a marker in the calendar year representing change and a familiar opportunity to capture a moment.

Recently I have continued thinking about the seasons of life. I think Barry Levinson captured something inherently innate in his 1990 movie Avalon about his family coming to Baltimore. Essentially, it is the story of an immigrant coming to America, building a family, the complexity of family and the liquidation or evolution of this family into the next generation. It also spoke of the abandonment of a person’s identity as an expectation. The abandonment of identity in the sense of “what was” from the old world to “what is” in the new world.

I totally get it. People hear my last name and see me and automatically think I am a religious person. They think that I have an understanding of Judaism and they make a lot of assumptions. The truth is that I never subscribed to it. I never cared about it, and it never made sense to me. As far as I am concerned, religion is as real as Star Wars. If this time in the calendar gives me some opportunity to reflect and marks a time to take a break and keep an eye on the seasons, I appreciate that. As far as the rest of it goes, many Jews like me are just labeled and marked by some outside expectations.

I will take this time to think about today, yesterday, and tomorrow.

As I look towards the next few months, I am focusing on small things.

Small things I can do to have manageable opportunities and reasonable wins.

Paint a door, trim a tree, sit outside, and feel the sun on my face, have a glass of cold water with ice cubes.

Be courageous, and honest and continue to take risks with low fear.

Even though I am not religious, I do think about the people I’ve interacted with this year. I don’t believe that I have abandoned all of what was in regard to the history of my culture, but I am surely not passing on what I experienced as a child. Some say that being good and kind is not enough. We have to follow scriptures, manuals that were written for us, doctrine, policies for humankind.

If this is what you believe, I respect your belief. As for me, being the best person I can be is good enough.

If you celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Happy New Year, if you don’t Happy Sunday.

Today is a gift as tomorrow is NOT a promise, what are you going to do today?