by Rabbi Joseph Dweck - Senior Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Sephardi Community of the United Kingdom and CCJ President 

The Jewish people begin their new year with introspection. Rosh Hashana, meaning ‘New Year’, in Hebrew, is a day on which we are encouraged to consider whether we are happy with the trajectory of our lives and if we might wish to adjust the course. It is marked by the sound of the shofar, traditionally a ram’s horn, which is a call to awaken our hearts and minds to focus on our lives and consider our current path.

The milieu of the day is punctuated with memory and judgement. This is expressed in the two secondary names for the holy day—Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Memory and Yom Hadin, the Day of Judgement.

Memory is important in the endeavour of introspection because we are meant to take a kind of inventory of our lives and consider who we are today given our current choices, behaviours, attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Our identity is couched in memory. Without the ability to store and recall the people we know, experiences we’ve had, and lessons we’ve learned, we would not have the awareness that we know as our selves. The Day of Memory is one in which we survey our lives as best we can. We bring our identity into the centre of our consciousness.

We then consider its nature, its meaning, its past and its future. This is the aspect of judgement. It is not judgement in the sense of condemning guilt, but rather judgment as productive assessment and consideration of value.

We remember and judge with God and acknowledge on the day that we are co-creating our lives with Him. We strive, no matter how we might have strayed from our original course, each year, to begin again and recommit to living our best lives and being our best selves.