Rosh Hashanah Day 2 2025

“Rewriting History, Rewriting Our Own Personal Past”

If you had the power to rewrite one single day in your life—to relive it, or even to change it—what day would it be? Why that day? And what would you want to change?

It’s an interesting exercise, isn’t it? One that Rosh Hashanah almost invites us into. This is, after all, a day of memory, a day when we review our lives and imagine what could have been different.

And it’s not only personal. As Jews, we might also ask: if we could go back in modern history and change one day—what might it be?  Kristallnacht in 1938? October 7, 2023?
Or maybe an earlier spark that set the flames in motion. Or maybe a day afterward—when silence, inaction, or indifference shaped how the world would view Jews and Israel.

This summer I read Stephen King’s new book Never Flinch. For those who haven’t yet, don’t worry—I won’t spoil it. But I will say this: King raises hard questions about whether changing the past can ever really fix the present.

In one thread, he tells of a man wrongly convicted of a crime, murdered in prison before justice could be done. Someone then threatens to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty” in revenge. The question is asked: does that make sense? Is it justice? Or is it only another wrong, multiplied?

Another thread follows a hired killer sent by a Westboro Baptist Church-style stalker, to silence a provocative women’s rights activist. Here King critiques our culture of “virtue signaling”—the distance between appearing to do the right thing and actually doing it. The book forces us to ask: is it really possible to rewrite history, or even to bend it, without unleashing unintended consequences?

It reminded me of one of my favorite historical novels of Stephen King’s: 11/22/63.

The premise is simple but haunting: what if you could go back in time and stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? The hero tries. And he learns, painfully, that changing even a single day in history sets off a chain reaction. The butterfly effect. The dominoes fall. Undoing one tragedy unleashes countless others.

Wouldn’t it be nice if life were like a computer screen, where you could just hit “undo”? But King reminds us: you can never change just one day. Everything is connected.

That thought brings us to today’s Torah reading: the Akedah, the binding of Isaac —a day so traumatic that surely Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah might have wished to undo it. Abraham and Isaac were never the same afterward. Sarah, upon hearing, collapses in grief and dies. Their family is fractured forever. If only Abraham had said no. If only Isaac had run. If only…

And yet, our tradition insists this day was not meant to be undone. Abraham needed to face this test. Isaac needed to walk through it. Even God—if we dare say so—needed to reckon with what it means to demand so much of a human being. And in the end, the angel intervenes. The ram appears. And the rabbis teach: that ram had been waiting in the thicket since the very moment of creation. In other words: this moment was not an accident. It was part of the unfolding of who Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah were meant to become.

So, what about us?

We live in a world of Artificial Intelligence. AI promises the ability to rebuild days, to predict futures, to simulate choices. It tempts us to believe that we could go back, pick the right day, and rewrite everything.

But would we dare? And would we really know what the consequences might be?

A few weeks ago, Lisa and I sat down and watched Diane Sawyer’s documentary about Bruce Willis and his battle with frontotemporal dementia. It wasn’t easy—because Lisa’s sister, at just 72, has been in a memory unit for the past two years.

And yet, the program offered hope. Medical research—much of it AI-driven—is now mapping the genes that cause dementia, even imagining how to stop it before it spreads.

No, they cannot undo the day Bruce Willis fell ill. They cannot erase the decline of Lisa’s sister. But perhaps their suffering is paving the way for breakthroughs that will save countless others.

The same was true with Christopher Reeve—the Superman he was both before and after his tragic accident. He could not be healed. But his son Will, now a journalist, has carried forward a legacy that might never have existed had his father not endured what he did. And Will Reeve might not be the genuine and caring person he has become if not for what he had experienced in life -- not only through his father but also what his mother taught him until her death a few years later.

Lisa and I watched Will’s documentary Finding My Father. He retraced his father’s unfinished journey with the gray whales, meeting again the families of guides who had helped Christopher Reeve decades before. It was powerful—not just because of what was lost, but because of what was carried forward. Out of pain, a new purpose was born.

What struck me about both Bruce Willis and Christopher Reeve is how people remembered them—not as icons on a screen, but as mensches. Genuinely kind human beings who cared for others, no matter who they were, no matter what their stage in life, no matter what they had. What our tradition calls ahavat adam—the love of every human being as if each were the very first person created by God.

And perhaps the same was true of Isaac. He was never the same carefree child again. He was quieter, more scarred, more vulnerable. But maybe he became the Isaac he was meant to be precisely because of that near-sacrifice.

Joseph, a few generations later will turn to his brothers in Egypt saying:

Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as He is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones. (Genesis 50:19–21) 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, reflects on these words. Joseph could not change the past. But he did something extraordinary: he reframed it. He no longer saw himself as a man wronged by his brothers, but as a man sent on a life-saving mission by God. “Everything that had happened to him was necessary so that he could achieve his purpose in life: to save an entire region from starvation during a famine, and to provide a safe haven for his family.”

This reframing transformed bitterness into blessing. It allowed him to forgive, to reconcile, and to focus not on the wounds of yesterday but on the possibilities of tomorrow. Rabbi Sacks teaches: “We cannot change the past. But by changing the way we think about the past, we can change the future.”

Whatever situation we are in, by reframing it we can change our entire response, giving us the strength to survive, the courage to persist, and the resilience to emerge, on the far side of darkness, into the light of a new and better day.” (Studies in Spirituality).

We cannot change the past of our own personal lives either. We can only change how we respond to it.

At the same time, I will never change my emotional relationship to for example October 7^th, 2023, nor what followed, just as I can never change mishaps and missteps in my own personal journey through life.

And that, I believe, is Rosh Hashanah’s message.

This day is not about going back.
This day is about going forward.

We cannot erase Kristallnacht.
We cannot erase October 7th.
We cannot undo Abraham’s anguish—or our own.

But we can choose how we respond.
We can choose what kind of people we will be.
We can choose what kind of world we will help to shape.

Rosh Hashanah says to us: you cannot go back and change the day behind you.
But you can change the day that is before you.
And that… is enough.

The poet Amanda Gorman put it so powerfully:

“May this be the day we come together.
Mourning, we come to mend.
Withered, we come to weather.
Torn, we come to tend.
…Even if we never get back to normal,
Someday we can venture beyond it.
So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next.
We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,
But to take on tomorrow.”

And perhaps that’s why, at this season, we wish one another “Gemar Chatimah Tovah.”

Not that the past will be erased. Not that the story will be rewritten. But that—whatever has been written—its ending may yet be for good.

May this be the year we find the courage not to undo the past, but to build the future.

“Gemar Chatimah Tovah.”