Maybe
Please go see Monet at the Brooklyn Museum
Dear friends,
Maybe, just maybe, all is precisely as it is supposed to be.
Maybe a greater intellect is at work than any of us can imagine, that accepts time as a continuum longer than the life of a person or a nation or a planet.
Maybe we are being invited to see both what’s missing and what’s present.
Maybe we’re being challenged to bring our best into it all of it against everything this world tells us.
Maybe we’re up for the task.
Maybe we don’t have to look back at 2025 and see darkness.
Maybe we know there was an abundance of light by the way that we struggled against all that our guts felt was wrong, unfair, cruel, mean and false.
Maybe it really is a blessing to live in interesting times.
Maybe this very life that we are living this very day in this very place is an incredible gift that only us who are alive today get to receive, with all of its sadness and difficulty and weirdness and pain and all of its pleasures and surprises and beauty and joy.
Maybe God was wrong when God said that human instincts are evil all the time from childhood on, and actually the vast majority of our instincts are toward helping, and smiling and caring like we do whenever we see a stranger in need and feel first the desire to help and only after it fear and guilt and calculations of the panicking mind at war with itself.
Maybe God knows all of that, and even said the opposite a hundred times like when God called each neshamah a candle of God.
Maybe the world is a mirror and the reason it looks so bad is because we struggle to see ourselves as beautiful candles of divinity, or beautiful sparks of light or beautiful anything.
Maybe we can admit for a moment that we are beautiful, each one of us reading these words, and so is the world reflecting us to ourselves, and so are our lives, and so was this past year with its 365 sunrises and sunsets and moonrises and moonsets and infinite movement and unending flow.
Maybe that flow is love.
And maybe 2026 will be just as beautiful inside and out and outside and in.
Maybe we will be able to stay connected to that flow, to remember it and to see it and feel it and live it and pass it around to those we love easily and even to those we have a more difficult time loving.
Or maybe, just maybe this year will be even better than the one that ends tonight.
Before I sign off, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for reading my words this year when you were able to. It is a strange and intimate thing, to communicate with you all in this way, and I cherish it, as well as the lovely responses some of you send me on occasion.
As you know, our Shul doesn’t live on spirit alone, so if you’ve enjoyed my words this past year and are inclined to lend a shekkeling hand you are especially welcome to support us with a donation HERE.
Happy new year, with love,
Rabbi Misha