The Meal in Front of Us
Some time ago, I made a Szechuan pepper stir-fry.
I wish I could tell you that I followed a treasured family recipe. I did not. I wish I could tell you that I carefully measured every ingredient and recorded every step. I had not.
I was improvising. A little of this, a little of that. I tasted, adjusted, added something else, and somehow—through instinct, accident, grace, or some combination of the three—it became immaculate.
Everything was in balance: heat and sweetness, salt and acid, and that strange, citrusy electricity of Szechuan peppercorns. It was one of those meals that makes you stop talking for a moment. I remember thinking: This is it.
And so, naturally, I tried to make it again.
I bought the same ingredients. I reconstructed the steps. I tried to remember how much of everything I had used. The second stir-fry was delicious.
But it wasn’t that stir-fry.
So I tried again.
That one was delicious too.
But it still wasn’t that stir-fry.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that I was no longer tasting the food in front of me. I was comparing it with a memory. I was eating one meal while judging it by another.
Because I was trying so hard to recover an experience that was gone, I could not fully receive the experience I was actually having.
The meal in front of me was good.
But I was absent from it.
How much of life do we spend this way?
We want a relationship to feel as it once felt. We want a holiday to resemble the holidays of childhood. We revisit a familiar place and want it to look the way it did before everything changed. We want our children to be small again, our parents to be strong again, our bodies to behave as they once did.
Sometimes what we remember was genuinely beautiful.
And sometimes—if we are honest—the past was never quite as perfect as memory has made it.
Either way, our longing for what was can prevent us from encountering what is.
There is a verse we return to throughout the Jewish year, and which carries particular force during these Days of Awe:
Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha v’nashuvah; chadesh yameinu k’kedem.
“Return us to You, Adonai, and we shall return; renew our days as of old.”
We sing it with longing. We sing it as the Torah is returned to the ark. We hear in it a desire to go home—to recover what has been lost, to restore what has been broken, to return to the days that once were.
But I wonder whether we often misread it.
Listen carefully to what the verse actually asks.
It does not say, “Return the old days to us.”
It says, Hashiveinu—“Return us.”
We are the ones who must move.
And where are we being asked to return? Not to a former decade. Not to an earlier version of our family. Not to the synagogue of our childhood. Not to some supposedly simpler moment in history.
Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha—“Return us to You.”
The destination is not the past.
The destination is God.
And then comes the second half: Chadesh yameinu k’kedem.
We often hear it as, “Make our days exactly as they used to be.” But the verb is chadesh: renew. Make new.
The verse does not ask God to reproduce our old days. It asks God to renew the days we have now.
That is a very different prayer.
The Book of Lamentations, from which this verse comes, knows that the past cannot simply be recovered. Jerusalem has been destroyed. Its people have experienced violence, exile, and grief. The world they knew is gone.
When they cry, Hashiveinu, they are not asking God to pretend that none of it happened. They know too much for that. They have lost too much.
They are asking whether, after all that has happened, relationship is still possible.
Can we turn toward You from here?
Can these days—not those days, but these days—be made sacred again?
That is also the question of Yom Kippur.
We call the work of this season teshuvah: return. But teshuvah is not time travel.
We cannot return to last year. We cannot become the people we were before the diagnosis, before the loss, before the betrayal, before the mistake. We cannot unsay what we said or unknow what we now know.
Even when forgiveness is possible, we do not return to a relationship untouched by what happened.
Teshuvah does not erase the journey.
It changes the direction in which we are travelling.
The Talmud makes an astonishing claim about this. Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish teaches that when a person returns out of love, even their deliberate wrongs can be transformed into merits.
Not erased. Transformed.
The tradition does not imagine that repentance reaches backward and removes a page from the story. Instead, it asks whether the page can become part of a different story—whether regret can become wisdom, whether failure can create humility, whether harm honestly confronted can deepen our capacity for responsibility.
That does not make the wrong good. It means the wrong need not have the final word.
This is why the Vidui, our confession, asks us to name what happened.
Ashamnu. Bagadnu. Gazalnu.
We have caused harm. We have betrayed. We have taken what was not ours.
We do not speak these words to become trapped in yesterday. We speak them so that yesterday will not continue to rule tomorrow. We tell the truth about what was so that we can become responsible for what will be.
There is a kind of repentance that is really nostalgia dressed in religious clothing.
We say: “I want things to go back to normal.”
“I want us to be the way we were.”
“I want to feel the way I felt before.”
But genuine teshuvah asks a more demanding question:
What does faithfulness require of me now?
Not: How can I make this relationship exactly as it was?
But: What kind of relationship can we honestly build from here?
Not: How can I recover the person I used to be?
But: Who am I being called to become, carrying everything I have learned and everything I have lost?
And this is not only personal.
Whole communities can become prisoners of an imagined past.
We speak about “the good old days”—when the community was stronger, when the synagogue was fuller, when families were closer, when people were more committed, when the world made more sense.
Perhaps there were things about those days worth cherishing. Perhaps there was a depth of belonging, a willingness to volunteer, a habit of showing up for one another that we should work to recover.
But the good old days were never good for everyone.
Some people who now have a voice were once expected to remain silent. Some who now stand at the center were once kept at the margins. Some families now welcomed openly would once have felt obliged to hide. Some questions we can now ask honestly were once considered too threatening to raise.
Nostalgia is a selective editor. It preserves the warmth and crops out the wounds.
A community cannot faithfully move forward by pretending that its finest hour lies behind it. Nor can it flourish by discarding everything it has inherited.
The task is harder and holier: to carry forward what was life-giving, to repent of what was excluding or unjust, and to create something worthy of those who are here now.
That is communal teshuvah.
It asks not, “How do we get everyone to behave as they did forty years ago?”
It asks, “Who needs us now? Who is standing at our door now? What does courage look like now? What would it mean for this community to serve God in the world that actually exists?”
We hear the same longing in our public life. Again and again, someone promises to restore a golden age—to take us back to a time of unity, security, prosperity, or moral clarity.
But there has never been a human age without fear, conflict, loneliness, and injustice. Every golden age looks rather different depending on who was permitted to share in the gold.
Jewish memory is not nostalgia.
The Torah does not say, “Remember Egypt because everything was better then.” It says: Remember that you were strangers, and therefore do not oppress the stranger.
Memory becomes sacred when it creates responsibility in the present.
We remember not to live in the past, but to act differently because of it.
That is the purpose of memory on Yom Kippur as well. We remember our failures not so we can endlessly punish ourselves, but so we can recognize the choice when it comes again. We remember those we have lost not so that we can refuse a world without them, but so that something of their love may enter the way we love now.
In the Unetaneh Tokef, we confront the uncertainty of the coming year: who will live and who will die, who will be at peace and who will be troubled, who will be secure and who will wander.
The prayer gives us no assurance that life will repeat itself.
It tells us precisely the opposite: we do not know what this year will bring.
Yet it does not leave us powerless.
U’teshuvah, u’tefillah, u’tzedakah—repentance, prayer, and righteous action—can transform the severity of what lies before us.
These practices do not restore last year.
They prepare us to meet this year.
Teshuvah turns us toward the life that is still possible.
Tefillah teaches us to stand honestly in the present.
Tzedakah moves us beyond longing and into responsibility.
Together, they ask us to stop waiting for the old world to return and to begin answering the needs of the world that is here.
This can be especially difficult in our relationships.
Sometimes we apologize because we want everything to feel normal again. We say, “I’m sorry,” but what we really mean is: “Please make this discomfort disappear. Please reassure me that I am still the person I thought I was. Please restore our relationship to its previous setting.”
Genuine teshuvah makes no such demand.
An apology cannot require another person to recover on our schedule. Forgiveness, when it comes, does not erase history. Trust rebuilt is not the same as trust never broken.
The goal is not to reproduce the old relationship perfectly. The goal is to meet one another truthfully in the relationship that exists now—and ask what repair, tenderness, boundaries, or courage are possible within it.
And there are relationships that cannot be restored. There are people who are no longer alive. There are estrangements we cannot repair alone. There are doors that should not be reopened, because returning would mean returning to danger or diminishment.
Yom Kippur does not ask us to deny these truths.
Sometimes teshuvah means going back and making amends.
Sometimes it means moving forward differently.
Sometimes it means releasing our demand that the present give back what the past has taken.
As this day moves toward Ne’ilah, we imagine the gates beginning to close. We may hear that image as a warning that time is running out.
But perhaps the closing gate teaches us something gentler as well.
Not every door remains open forever.
That is why the door before us matters.
This moment matters.
This prayer matters.
This person matters.
This community matters—not the community we remember, not the community we imagine once existed, but this community: imperfect, changing, searching, and still capable of holiness.
This life matters—not the life we expected and not the life we wish we could reconstruct, but this unfinished life, still waiting for our response.
The great irony of my Szechuan pepper stir-fry is that I may, in fact, have made an even better version later.
I would not know.
I was too busy searching for the first one.
I had allowed memory to become the only acceptable measure of joy.
Memory is sacred. Judaism commands us to remember. But sacred memory should deepen our presence, not replace it.
So perhaps, this Yom Kippur, we can hear our ancient prayer anew:
Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha v’nashuvah.
Do not take us backward, God.
Turn us toward You.
Chadesh yameinu k’kedem.
Do not reproduce the days that are gone.
Renew the days that are here.
Help us preserve what was beautiful without pretending it was perfect. Help us mourn what has been lost without overlooking what remains. Help us take responsibility for yesterday without believing that yesterday is the only place where meaning can be found.
The Book of Life is not the book of the life we used to have.
It is the book of the life still being written.
May we have the courage to taste what is before us.
May we recognise goodness when it arrives in unfamiliar forms.
May our memories become sources of wisdom rather than prisons of expectation.
And may we return—not to who we were, but to God, to one another, and to who we are still capable of becoming.
G’mar chatimah tovah