Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

The above lyric and the title of this post come from a song of the same title, popular back in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Semisonic released it in 1998). Beginnings and endings have been a running theme in my life for weeks now, ever since the High Holy Days.

This week, Jews around the world celebrated Simchat Torah, which is a joyous festival – indeed, the culmination of our fall festival season – in which we actually come to the end of the Torah, and return to the beginning of it to start our weekly readings all over again. The holiday is a lot of fun, but much like the other prominent days in this season, it brings about a lot of reflection too. Each Shabbat morning at school, a student or teacher prepares a D’var Torah (a small commentary on the weekly portion) which they share with everyone; this week, the student whose turn it was hadn’t been able to complete the task, so I turned to some resources online to have at least a little something to read to everyone. What did I find? A commentary about new beginnings, of course. I’m starting to wonder how much more needs to be said about the concept, since I keep running into it. Truthfully, it’s been an eventful week at school, compressed though it was with Monday and Tuesday off in observance of holidays. But even with our shortened week, I had an exciting new beginning of my own.

For our school assembly this week, we had a school Poetry Day, which was seemingly arbitrary, as National Poetry Month isn’t until the spring. But it was because of me. A few weeks ago, our interim Head of School and I were talking, and somehow, I ended up showing her a poem I’d written over the summer, one that I intend to turn into a children’s book. She loves it so very much that she decided to create a Poetry Day at school, largely as an opportunity for her to read my poem to the students. We teachers took the idea and ran with it, so we had our classes all write poems to read too. We provided “refreshments” in the form of sparkling grape juice and crackers, and the students read their poems, and then mine was read, and the students all loved it…

Truly, after a lifetime of invalidation, to have this kind of support for what I do, for who I am…it feels so much like a new lease on life. It’s a beginning I’ve always wanted and never believed I deserved.

But as the lyric from the start of this post goes…

This afternoon, one of our community rabbis, the rabbi whom I work with at school, lost his beloved wife. It’s a tragic situation and we collectively feel pretty crushed by it, hallmarked by a sense of helplessness. We wish to support the family, but it’s hard to know how. What’s the best thing to do, when the one who needs comforting is usually the one whose job it is to do the comforting? This loss, it is an ending that feels utterly unfair. I never got the opportunity to meet her in person, but from all I’ve been told, she was surely an extraordinary woman. May her memory be a blessing.

It seems we cannot have one without the other. Beginnings and endings go hand in hand. At times like these, it can make one question the concept of a divine plan. How can G-d want this for us? Indeed, blasphemous though it sounds, sometimes I wonder honestly if G-d doesn’t actually have a plan, but rather, He’s more or less just winging it up there. Who knows? Maybe He’s just some holy bartender, and sooner or later, it gets to be closing time – and we don’t have to go home, but we can’t stay here.