The Year Begins in Mid-September

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September is a convergence of several things for me. I’ve always loved the new school year: there’s nothing like a blank notebook to make me feel like this year will be different. This year, I’ll be organised and productive. The changing leaves, the squirrels gathering nuts in my backyard, the crisp air—all these make me feel in-tune with nature, like I finally found the rhythm I’ve been looking for all of last year. And the Jewish New Year keeps me firmly grounded in tradition, connected to my ancestors who celebrated the same holidays for hundreds of years.

There’s a Hebrew song that has always been playing on the radio around this time of year when we lived in Israel. The song is called Mid-September, by Asthar Shamir, and performed by Gali Atari in 1986. I keep returning to that song because it’s very catchy and has the word September, but I only recently discovered its background story. The song was written about the Sabra and Shatila Massacre that happened in mid-September of 1982, and it begins with the line: The year begins in mid-September with a vast and growing rage. So, not a fresh start, but an accumulation of the rage we have felt before, the helplessness in the face of the war and violence around us.

The new year is incredibly appealing for us as humans. Every year, we want a fresh start. We let ourselves fall for the fantasy of the blank slate. This year will be different. If I only had a new planner, I’d be organised. There’s a vast industry built around this need: new planners, back-to-school sales. My writing group co-organiser, who has been running the group for almost twenty years, told me there’s a spike in attendance in September and January. Everyone is starting a novel in those months. We want to change our story, start a new chapter, or [insert any other clichéd, romanticised view of the new year].

Don’t get me wrong, we need these fantasies. We need to believe that this year will be different, otherwise we’ll change nothing. Besides, new year energy is real, and it has to go somewhere. What better than a fall clean-out of the closet and the scraps of half-written-in notebooks in the drawers in favour of a blank notebook, a new look, a reinvention of ourselves?

But we also need to remember that wherever we go, there we are. Or, in other words, we take our messy, unproductive, raging selves with us into the new year. In Judaism, the autumn High Holy Days include the new Jewish year (Rosh HaShana) and a day of atonement—Yom Kippur. The days between these two holidays are called The Ten Days of Repentance. During those days, we’re supposed to reflect on the past year and ask for forgiveness from anyone we have wronged. If we refuse to look at who we are and what we are doing wrong, we cannot leave these undesired behaviours in our past. Compassion is the way to renewal.

The continuation of reality isn’t just personal. I’ve written before that I believe the violence and thirst for revenge—as well as the apathy—I see in Israeli society is basically a trauma response. We know that hurt people hurt people. Right now, Israeli society comprises a lot of very hurt people, whose generational trauma became true before their eyes two years ago. And without excusing the atrocities that the Israeli government is executing in Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank as well, compassion goes both ways.

Maybe the new notebooks, the fresh starts, are our way of resisting a cycle we can’t seem to break. Perhaps we need these arbitrary markers of the New Year or Back to School to comfort us when the continuation of reality is unbearable. For a few hours, a few days, sometimes even a few weeks, we can believe that everything is a blank slate, that we can start anew, and that this year will be better.

The thing about new notebooks is that they lend themselves to writing stories. I have long realised that what I can do, amidst the raging storm of shouty, violent politics, is to write my truth. Rather than just staying with the rage, I use my words and the words of wiser people who have written before to convince myself that there is something I can do about the state of the world, even if it’s a small thing. Small things accumulate eventually.

In the same way we carry our rage and failures with us, we also carry with us into the new year our successes, our compassion, our small acts of kindness. The year begins with rage, but it also begins with new notebooks, and our stubborn refusal to let the rage take over the story. For me, at least, this year, I’m not trying to escape the cycle. I’m trying to write my way through it.