It’s a rather odd blessing for the new year, the traditional Rosh Hashanah greeting that will be heard across the land on Monday evening: “Tikle shanah v’klaloteha, tachel shanah v’berchoteha” – “May the year and its curses end; may the new year and its blessings begin.”
It is odd and uniquely Jewish because of the emphasis on the curses first. It would be like going to a New Year’s Eve party on December 31 and, before saying Happy New Year, declaring, “May the curses of the past year cease.” What a way to start a celebration.
But it is also deep, illustrating something profound about the Jewish mindset and historical experience.
On one level, it reflects a realism shaped by centuries of hardship.
Jewish tradition is keenly aware of suffering, exile, persecution, and uncertainty. The instinctive first wish, therefore, is not “May the blessings of the old year continue,” but rather “Let the curses end.”
This is a worldview that acknowledges the year gone by may have been filled with difficulties and hardships, and that the greatest relief would be to leave those behind.
At the same time, it also reflects Jewish resilience and hope. The line doesn’t stop at a lament about the curses; it immediately moves to “May a new year and its blessings begin.”
In other words, the Jewish psyche carries both the sober memory of hardship and the unquenchable hope for renewal. Implicit, too, is the understanding that every year brings its blessings. Every year, including the one just ended, as hard as it was.
A year marked by war, hostages, and rising antisemitism
And this past year has certainly given us curses enough to remember: the hostages still in captivity, the fallen soldiers, the grinding war in Gaza, corrosive internal divisions at home, antisemitism abroad, and growing isolation.
These are real, and they dominate our collective memory.
The media, with its obsessive focus on failure – and by its very nature, its inclination to highlight the bad rather than the good – only reinforces that picture. But to stop there is to give short shrift to the fuller story.
For alongside the tragedies and pain were undeniable achievements and dramatic, region-altering changes: the fall of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad after Israel decimated Hezbollah; the decapitation of Hamas’s leadership and continued erosion of its capabilities; and – most significantly – the stunning attacks in Iran that both exposed it as a paper tiger and set back its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, an existential threat to Israel.
Those achievements, and others – like the surging stock exchange and the strong shekel – disappeared from the radar, drowned out by tales of how bad everything is. Yet the public seems to know better.
Since the October 7 massacre, many have said that the Israeli people have proven better than their leaders. They have also proven better than their media, with its constant drumbeat of how divided we are, how ineffective the government is, how useless the war is, how tragic the hostage crisis remains, how our isolation deepens, and how bad everything – but everything – is.
The public instinct is different. Tellingly, the most popular song of the year was Sasson Shaulov’s “Tamid Ohev Oti” (Always Loves Me), with its upbeat and infectious refrain: “It will always be only good for me / And it will be even better / And even better (od yoter tov).”
The country is engaged this year in a multifront war, the world is turning against it, hostages are languishing, and the decibels of political debate are deafening – yet the most popular song is about how things are always good and will only get better. Not a lament about the futility of war, not a ballad about the failures of October 7, but an anthem of supreme optimism.
That song offers a peephole into the Israeli soul: a soul that – if the year-end Central Bureau of Statistics figures are to be believed – is not nearly as sad or depressed as the daily news might suggest.
According to the statistics bureau’s annual year-end survey, 91% of respondents said they were satisfied with their overall quality of life, and 66% were even satisfied with their financial situation.
Those numbers don’t reflect a country falling apart at the seams, as some – especially opposition politicians and many in the media – would have us believe.
And that may be the real message to carry into 5786. Not to ignore the pain or the failures: They are real, they are there, and they must be acknowledged.
But they are not all that there is, and they should not be allowed to completely overshadow the victories, the achievements, and the blessings.