The traditional wish for Rosh Hashanah, the new year that Jews celebrated last week, is for a sweet new year. The traditional wish for Yom Kippur, the day of- atonement that Jews mark this week, is for an easy fast.

These greetings do not apply this year, the most difficult and dangerous for the Jewish people in my lifetime. All the apples dipped in all the honey in the world cannot erase the bitterness of the year just concluded or offer reassurance of a year to come that will be any less painful or precarious.

No fast can be easy when - and there are so many ways to end this sentence, all of them chilling. No fast can be easy when so many hostages remain in the tunnels of Gaza, and too many others have been returned in body bags.

No fast can be easy when the parents of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin will mark this holiday, and every other, without their only son. A portion of the liturgy on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, from the prophet Jeremiah, tells us, “A cry is heard in Ramah - wailing, bitter weeping - Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children, who are gone.” At the service I attended, the man chanting this passage broke down in tears.

We weep, we must weep, for all the children. Because it is also true: No fast can be easy when so many Gazan children are dead and maimed. I am deliberately putting them toward the front of this list because their fates are something I will mourn, and for which I will atone in synagogue this week, because our sins are collective as well as individual.

And no fast can be easy when Jewish children cannot feel safe on many college campuses here in the United States. When the security - perhaps the very existence - of Israel is so imperiled; when I stand in my suburban kitchen, slicing my holiday brisket, watching in real time as Iranian rockets are intercepted over the Western Wall of the ancient temple in Jerusalem. When Israel, the target of the most vicious and deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust, has become - and, to be blunt, has helped itself become - less sympathetic victim than international pariah.

At the High Holidays last year - their timing shifts around on the lunar calendar - none of this was imaginable. The Oct. 7 attack came on Simchat Torah, the joyful conclusion of the fall holiday season, celebrating the completion of the yearly cycle of Torah reading. The rejoicing of Simchat Torah will always be tinged with the indelible memory of the massacre.

The centerpiece of the High Holiday liturgy is the Unetaneh Tokef, which builds on the notion that on Rosh Hashanah our fates are written in the Book of Life, and on Yom Kippur they are sealed. “As a shepherd examines the flock, making each sheep pass under the staff,” the prayer states, “so You will review and number and count, judging every living human being, determining the fate of everything in creation, inscribing their destiny.”

As so, we stand and sing, “How many will pass on and how many will be born; who will live and who will die; who will live a long life and who will come to an untimely end.” Still, we are assured, repentance, prayer and righteousness “have the power to transform the harshness of our destiny.”

This prayer has brought me to tears so many times - after losing a parent, grieving in advance for a friend with a terminal illness. Yet it has never felt so powerful - or so problematic - as this year. The Oct. 7 attack and its aftermath remind us of the inescapable fragility of life, with terrors that its ancient author - the prayer dates at least to the 11th century - could scarcely imagine. But, as with the horror of the Holocaust, the prayer also pushes us to grapple with how we think about God’s agency, God’s role in our fate, God’s very existence. Would a just God blow off Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s arm? Could a just God seal his fate, after 329 days in captivity? Would a just God ignore his mother’s prayers, his father’s righteousness?

On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we listen to the piercing sound of the shofar, the ram’s horn. It is usually understood as a wake-up call, to jolt us out of complacency and ponder our deeds. “This year for the first time in my life, this teaching doesn’t work,” my rabbi, Lauren Holtzblatt observed in her sermon. “We’re already awake. We’re on edge, and we’re shaken to our cores. This year, the shofar sounds more like wailing to me - a ritual that captures the utter sorrow and pain and unimaginable loss of this year.”

Rabbis are better than columnists at excavating shreds of hope from despair, so I’ll end with Holtzblatt as well. This year, she told the congregation, “The shofar is a representation of the wordless anguish that hovers over us and in us. Anguish that we cannot turn away from. Anguish that we cannot close from our ears or our hearts. But it is also our teacher. … What if this year the shofar is a call to us from thousands of years ago asking us to find another way forward, to end the sacrificing of our children and to cling to life?”