Last Saturday Jews around the world celebrated Rosh haShanah, the beginning of the new Jewish year, and tonight we will usher in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The spiritual work of this time of year is to examine our deeds, to do deeds of repentance, and hopefully to start the New Year with a clean slate.

Certainly many if not most people around the globe would love to have a new, different kind of year, a new start. If only we could close the door on the old year which held a global pandemic, an extraordinary number of “extreme weather” events (including an unprecedented season of wildfires and destruction on the West Coast, and flooding along the Gulf Coast), the highest rate of unemployment in this nation since the Great Depression, and what has seemed to be a “plague” of civil rights violations and deaths of people of color at the hands of the police and by white “vigilantes.” We in the United States have been suffering from a great deal of political division and incivility for some time now, but it has gotten even more dire over the last year.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could seal all of that off, put it behind us, and start fresh? But life does not work like that; there are no “magic” cures or “get out of jail free” cards. In order to start off the year on the right foot, we have to wrestle with what went wrong in the past, to take responsibility for those things that we are responsible for; to ask for forgiveness from those whom we have hurt or wronged; to forgive those who ask forgiveness of us (and also those who may not have asked, if the wrong was not significant); we have to unflinchingly assess our lives, our words, our actions, and make a serious commitment to live more forthrightly, more honestly, more bravely, more compassionately.

And yet all these actions, if we can do them (and it is harder than it sounds!), are still not enough to fulfill one of our most important obligations as human beings on this planet: to make sure that we bequeath both an ecosystem and a human society in which our children and grandchildren can live and thrive. Sometimes, as I sit in physical comfort on my living room couch watching the evening news, I find myself in great moral discomfort: look at the devastation of those fires, that hurricane, the chaos and hatred of that riot, the difficulty and isolation of this pandemic! I have had a good, mostly happy and safe life for sixty years…but our son is only seventeen, just starting his senior year of high school (remotely). What will the year bring? Will he be able to start college around this time next year? How will he be able to go through the normal steps of making new friends as a young adult, finding romance or even a life-partner, starting his first adult job, enjoying all the “firsts” of independence that young people look forward to when they leave their parental home?

Will our children and grandchildren grow up to be adults in a world that is hotter, where our homes are more frequently invaded by water or fire, where jobs are harder to find and housing harder to afford? Even if/when we get past this pandemic – will there be many more like it in their future?

I know that the solutions to the problems I’ve mentioned above are not obvious – that different people would emphasize different causes behind each problem, depending on their inherent personalities, or depending perhaps on the culture in which they were raised. And yet can we not all agree on this – that our deeds do not affect only ourselves alone, but create waves that ripple out to many others in the world, leading to results that we might never know about?

This truth gives us a reason to be heedful of the way we live our lives. But it also gives us a reason to hope as we go forward, trusting that if we indeed try with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our strength to love our Creator, our Creator’s world, our fellow human beings – living with generosity towards the generations that will follow us – then perhaps those generations will be able to solve what we couldn’t in our lifetimes.

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.”

This is my prayer (not just for Jews, but for all the world) for the New Year – that the power of love may overrule the love of power, and that our world may know peace, blessings, health, and the joy of being alive. Wishing a happy (Jewish) New Year to all!

Shoshana Brown serves as cantor and spiritual leader at Temple Beth El of Fall River.