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I always find it perplexing when someone says to me, “There’s someone I know who looks exactly like you.”

How am I supposed to respond to that? Thank you? Amazing? I hope they’re good-looking? I usually settle with: “Are they also a Calvin Klein underwear model”?

But I always walk away wondering, aside from looking like me, is my secret twin actually anything like me? Do they know what makes me tick, what drives me, what I care about and what really matters to me?

And I guess the harder question is: Do I?

For the past 15 years, I’ve been working on a dream of building a Jewish world for grad students. I am incredibly thankful that in so many ways that dream has come true. But like with any dream, growth comes with its own challenges. Antisemitism on campus, losing great employees, having to raise more money to keep up with our student requests. And of course the biggest challenge I feel these days: time.

I don’t sleep much to begin with, but somehow the older I get, the less time I seem to have.

A few weeks ago, I was dealing with an issue that was literally keeping me awake at night. At some point, lying there thinking about it for probably the hundredth time, I told myself: “Dave, you need to lower the volume on this challenge.”

The problem was real and it needed to be dealt with. But I was allowing it to become so loud that I couldn’t hear everything else - my family, the incredible people in my life, and the fact that a dream I had 15 years ago has actually become real.

As we approach Rosh Hashanah tonight, lowering the volume has become one of my main New year’s resolutions.

We talk a lot this time of year about teshuva, repentance. But teshuva doesn’t just mean changing; it means returning. Rosh Hashanah gives us a chance to turn down all the noise that has accumulated over the year and return to ourselves. To remember who we are, what we believe in, who we love, and what we want our lives to actually be about.

Maybe that’s why the central sound of Rosh Hashanah is the shofar: it cuts through all the other noise and asks us, for just a few moments, to really listen.

There will always be problems that need solving, emails that need answering, worries that keep us up and things that feel incredibly urgent. My bracha for myself and for all of you this Rosh Hashanah is that we learn to lower the volume on some of them, just enough to hear the things that matter most.

And in that quieter space, may we remember who we really are.

Shana Tova!

Dave

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