Kabbalat Shabbat, September 12, 2008: "75 Septembers" by Cheryl Wheeler

The following are Cantor Frankel's thoughts on "75 Septembers":

I associate September with the High Holidays. The holidays come early or come late, but always around this time. Each year as September begins the weather cools, the leaves begin to turn, we feel the familiar chill and smell the familiar scents of the season. With September, we physically feel this sense of return. We recognize the familiar feeling of the circle of the Jewish year coming to a close. 

This beautiful song, by Cheryl Wheeler, is about the passing of years and the return to September. It is a song about Wheeler’s father at his 75^th birthday and the way the world has changed, or not, since he was born. She recognizes that the month of September can be simultaneously just one moment, a part of just one year, and a marker in the course of a lifetime. How do we make sense of the varied experiences of our lives? How do come to understand how those many experiences can be the measure of one life? 

This September, during the month of Elul, we must consider this moment in the course of our own individual life. As we approach the High Holidays, we stop to contemplate the questions asked in this song: Did things change for us in a measurable way this year? Or did it seem like more of the same? Did the time fly by? Or did the year move very slowly through the weeks and months? How do the answers to these questions inform our feelings about our lives? How do the answers to these questions motivate us to examine our souls? 

How difficult it is to understand how things can feel more than one way at once. One September can seem like an eternity, and then we look back at all of the Septembers we have lived and wonder where they all went. Life can feel vastly different now than it did decades ago, but the change happened so gradually we hardly felt the movement. May we learn this year, in our High Holiday preparation during this month of Elul, to appreciate our varied, ambivalent, and complicated feelings about our lives and to recognize how we want to move forward in the rest of our lifetimes.

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