Rabbi’s Monthly Message

October 2026

Dear Coalition Members:

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles in the days after Yom Kippur ends. The shofar has sounded its final note. The fast is broken. Sukkot has come and gone with its building and outdoor living. And then — nothing. No more liturgy demanding our attention, no more sanctuary reminding us who we meant to become. Just Tuesday. Just the school dropoff line, the inbox, the grocery list, and the other regular to-dos of life.

It is tempting to treat this quiet as a letdown, as if the spiritual work of the season has simply evaporated. But new habits don’t take hold in a single burst of resolve. They actually take hold in the unglamorous repetition of ordinary days — which is precisely where we now find ourselves. And that is what makes this time of year special and a real change to continue the turns we started during the Days of Awe.

My daughter, Kol, is now in Spanish 2 at the high school. But she began learning Spanish a few years ago, mostly through Duolingo, mostly alongside a small circle of friends doing the same. What struck me wasn’t her vocabulary — it was her face when she showed me her streak. Dozens of days in a row, each one small, none of them remarkable on its own. But she wasn’t proud of any single lesson. She was proud of the unbrokenness of it — and prouder still that she can now actually communicate with her friends in a language that used to be foreign to all of them. The daily minutes had become something real: a shared fluency, a shared accomplishment. That is what consistency does. It turns effort into identity, and identity into longer-term change.

Our tradition has a word for what we carry out of the Days of Awe: a hachlatah — a resolution formed in a moment of unusual clarity, when the machzor was open, the community was gathered, and our defenses were, for once, down. A hachlatah is not a New Year’s resolution in the popular sense. It is quieter and more specific: to call my child more. To guard my tongue at work. To give more patiently to those who ask. To be in a relationship when it is challenging.

The danger is not that the hachlatah was insincere. It’s that the conditions that produced it — the fasting, the melody, the community — are gone by the time we need the resolution most. Maimonides, one of my favorite medieval theologians, understood this. He taught that character is not formed by insight but by repetition: a person becomes generous by giving, patient by practicing patience, again and again, until the trait becomes second nature. The holidays give us the insight. The days after are where the repetition has to happen, without the choir behind us.

So what do we do with a hachlatah once the holiday has ended? We shrink it. We attach it to something small and daily, the way Kol attached “learning Spanish” to five minutes on a phone. A commitment to greater patience becomes I will pause once today before I respond. A commitment to more generosity becomes: I will look for one chance today to give. The streak matters more than the scale. And when we miss a day — because we will — the tradition offers no penalty for restarting. Teshuvah was never a single turn made once a year. It is a direction we keep facing, one ordinary day at a time.

This is the deepest comfort of the season now behind us: we were never asked to arrive as finished people on Yom Kippur. We were asked to become people who are still becoming. The work is not behind us. It’s just beginning to look like Tuesday.

Wishing our whole Coalition a meaningful October — one small, faithful day at a time.

Kol Tuv,

Rabbi James