Generation Interrupted

A High Holidays D’var on Cellular Memory, Civic Repair, and Belonging

Rosh HaShanah, the head of the year, remembers creation not as a finished act but as an unfinished charge. The question comes back every year: What kind of world are we daring—or failing—to create now? I invite you to read my reflection—a d’var, or word—connecting the themes to current events, or current events to holiday themes. Either way, to everyone, I hope you enjoy this reflection, and to the tribe, Shana Tova!

No Team Idolatry

This year’s High Holidays reflection braids three strands: the fracture in politics where belonging is traded for team loyalty; my own inheritance, what feels almost epigenetic, something I wasn’t sure fit but had to learn to wear; and the universal invitation—to extend your own ethnography, to listen again for the stories and rhythms that might sustain you through this season or beyond.

A quick glossary for the ride-along crowd

The following concepts feature in this essay–and in this season.

• Teshuvah: not “oops, my bad,” but return to your stated values. It has muscle: name the harm, repair it, change the behavior.

• Tashlich: a ritual near Rosh Hashanah where we symbolically cast off what we won’t carry into the new year. (This ritual is often practiced by throwing bread crumbs into a body of water. Yes, the ducks are judging you.)

• Tikkun olam: repair of the world. Not a slogan but a discipline.

I write in a Jewish key, but the melody is for anyone who longs for cohesion, conscience, and repair.

I should be clear about how these rituals and concepts show up in my life. I don’t keep the full ritual calendar. If I do tashlich, it is adapted—a quiet porch, a stone, sometimes only a thought released. Services are more often streamed than in person. For example, I am a dues-paying member over at the Secular Synagogue, a 100% online community grounded in humanistic Judaism. What I carry is not strict observance but a lens: these traditions frame how I see fracture and repair; how I interpret the world around me.

I didn’t grow up steeped in this tradition. Diaspora is something I wear like a jacket that I wasn’t sure fit. Then grief, study, and a lot of listening cracked me open. The tradition doesn’t care whether I discovered it late; it cares whether I put it to work. And right now, “to work” means giving myself permission to own my biography and construct meaning from my tradition.

Generation Interrupted: On Cellular Memory and Belonging

I’ve been thinking about memory—the kind that lives in bodies as much as in minds. Evidence from the life sciences suggests that adult cells keep an “embryonic ledger”: a recoverable record of earlier gene switches written in methyl marks on our DNA.

Under the right conditions, those long-quiet enhancers can be reopened, as if a tissue can replay its own overture (Harvard/Dana-Farber, 2019; Scientific American). There’s another register of memory too: circuits inside cells that flip like a light and stay on, carrying a past signal forward through division. None of this proves that specific human memories are inherited. But it does suggest that rhythms, sensitivities, and developmental possibilities can be carried—tendencies inscribed in how genes are read, not what they are. What matters here is less proof than metaphor: science hints, story fulfills.

Through circumstances, I was raised without this heritage. Yet something of it—maybe cellular, maybe spiritual—found its way through. I carry traits my family carries, and in this season of teshuvah, I feel them blossoming. The High Holidays arrive like an old song I never learned but somehow remember: a rhythm written in both by body and belonging.

Teshuvah is a Verb (and Kinda Rude)

Jewishly speaking, an apology without repair is theater. The ruleset fits on a phone background:

1. Name the harm. No passive voice. No “mistakes were made.” No “if you were offended.”

2. Make amends. Replace what was taken, restore what was harmed, re-platform what was silenced.
   

3. Change the pattern. Put a speed bump in your future so you don’t drive the same route again.

The reason this feels rude is that it is accountability. Teshuvah confronts our favorite loophole: “But our opponents are worse.” Maybe! And? The command isn’t “be better than the bad guys.” It’s “become who you said you were.” That’s teshuvah: a return to the you that your mother bragged about when you weren’t in the room–and sometimes when you are in the room. It’s kind of embarrassing, Mom.

We Become What We Repeatedly Excuse

Teshuvah, not as apology only but as return, calls us into an active and continuous practice of self-improvement and improvement of the world. Here is a working rule: We become what we repeatedly excuse. If we excuse retaliation against critics because it’s tactically convenient, we become people who prefer convenience to liberty. If we mock “cancel culture,” then cheer when the state chills dissent we dislike, we become the thing our memes pretend to resist. And if we shrug—just for now, just until the election, just until the next court date—those shrugs accumulate into a posture. Shrug long enough and it calcifies. That’s character, too.

Free speech isn’t a full-throated defense of your favorite politician–well, it is, or that speech is protected, is what I should say, but free speech, beyond the technical definition of state-sanctioned suppression of speech, is a civic discipline; something we hold ourselves to when we’re furious, embarrassed, or tempted by the easy win. That’s what makes it a principle and not a press release.

Tashlich for the Public Square

Every year, “practicing” Jews–not an ideal descriptor because a Jewish person is a Jewish person is a Jewish person, regardless of practice, and to suggest otherwise is to raise the specter of the “Good Jew, Bad Jew” trope, infamously antisemitic, but for fear of losing the thread, what I mean to say is that religious Jewish people who observe the traditional rituals, including tashlich, stand by water and toss bread or pebbles, or when the gluten-free guilt hits, imaginary crumbs, naming what each refuses to carry forward into the new year.

My version is humbler, less halachically (Jewish law) informed: Sometimes a stone, sometimes silence, sometimes from the porch steps. The form changes, but the point is the same, naming what I refuse to carry forward. The ritual is elastic, but the discipline is not.

Crumbs to Cast Off

This year’s list for the civic sphere of the crumbs you may want to cast off:

1. Words as weapons. When speech is only sharpened to wound the other side, it’s not principle—it’s spite. Cast it off.

2. Quiet for comfort. When silence is just the price of staying liked, or staying in the room, it’s not respect—it’s retreat. Cast it off.

3. Leaders on pedestals. Politics isn’t faith, and your chosen politician isn’t a king. Cast off the worship and keep your conscience.

And I’ll admit: I fall short on each of these. That’s why teshuvah matters—naming where I’ve missed, repairing what I can, and trying again. Because these aren’t just private habits—they’re the cracks that hollow freedom from the inside out if we don’t cast them off.

You don’t need to be Jewish to do this. Find a river, a pond, or a backyard hose with good water pressure and an imagination. Name the habits you’re done lugging through the news cycle. Toss them. Walk away lighter.

“But What About…” (The Section where I Disappoint Everyone Equally)

Free speech comes with a paired responsibility: It protects your neighbor’s right to speak recklessly, and it asks you to refrain from reckless speech yourself.

In Jewish tradition, Hebrew is sometimes called lashon hakodesh, the ‘holy tongue.’ I don’t take that literally but interpretively: our texts imagine a world spoken into being. From that comes a reminder—words make worlds. Not metaphysics; ethics. If creation begins in speech, then interpretation becomes the discipline of how we use it. What if freedom of speech began with modeling that responsibility?

Of course, restraint has limits. Concessions can meet greed, and compromise can meet bad faith. But teshuvah still calls us to cultivate restraint, even when it costs something.

Does that mean rolling over in the face of lies, distortions, threats, and hateful rhetoric? Of course not. Free speech isn’t my only value. Justice is. Welcoming the stranger is. Protecting the vulnerable is. Above them all, pikuach nefesh—the cherishing of human life. I won’t swap those away for stubborn allegiance to “anything goes.” Values must be balanced, held in tension, guided by a vision for a world that lets all of us flourish. There is that tikkun olam!

The take-home message is this: Rights without restraint collapse into entitlement, while rights with responsibility can sustain a community.

Why I’m saying This Now

Because the temperature isn’t just rising—it’s boiling. Reporters are being told to sign pledges that they’ll only echo official, DOD-approved messaging. Trump is threatening to yank broadcast licenses from critics. The chill isn’t hypothetical anymore; retaliation is already policy. And fear that worse may come doesn’t excuse us from doing better now. Teshuvah begins at home: in the mirror, in the mouth.

If you’re outside the Jewish orbit, welcome. This isn’t about Judaizing your life. It’s about a practice anyone can claim: tell the truth about what you justified, repair what you can, and change what you’ll do next time. That’s tikkun olam at street level. Not a policy platform—though policies matter. Not a yard sign—though signs have their place. It’s the civic habit that keeps freedom alive so that we guard against becoming what we excuse.

Creation and Repair

Rosh HaShanah, the head of the year, remembers creation not as a finished act but as a charge to keep creating. Fracture is part of that material—our politics prove it daily. Fear and grievance are real; I can empathize with their pull. But empathy is not a license for domination. Belonging isn’t inherited alone—it is made, again and again. Creation asks us to choose covenant over control, repair over retaliation.

Teshuvah is the discipline that refuses to excuse harm even when fear tempts us to. That’s the civic work too: to re-enter creation not by silencing each other but by becoming people who can hold fracture and still repair. Belonging isn’t inherited alone. It is created—together, or not at all.

What we inherit, we still have to choose; what we carry forward, we still have to repair. That is the civic teshuvah as much as the Jewish one.

Amen.

And so, I circle back to where we began: Rosh HaShanah remembers creation not as something finished, but as a question posed again each year. What kind of world will we create this year—through what we excuse, through what we repair, through what we dare to begin again?

Shanah tova, friends—Jewish and otherwise! Welcome to Hebrew year 5786.

Notes

On cellular memory:

• Scientific American (2019), “Can a Cell Remember?” — explainer on how tissues carry “memory” of earlier states.

On civic fracture and free speech:

• Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump (2d Cir. 2019): blocking critics on @realDonaldTrump unconstitutional (vacated as moot).

• TikTok & WeChat injunctions (D.D.C., Sept. 27, 2020; N.D. Cal., Sept. 20, 2020): courts blocked app bans on speech grounds.

• Santa Cruz Lesbian & Gay Community Center v. Trump (N.D. Cal., Dec. 22, 2020): enjoined “divisive concepts” executive order for chilling speech.