The Well We Cannot See

Rabbi Stephanie Kennedy

Erev Rosh Hashanah 2026 • 1 Tishrei 5787

One day this summer, I was walking down a street in Berkeley listening to a political podcast and feeling really angry about the world.

I don’t even remember exactly what I was listening to. A story about suffering, about something cruel. But I remember the feeling. I was walking quickly, headphones in, completely absorbed in everything that was wrong.

And then I looked up and saw one of the kids from Growing Together, our family school.

He looked at me in that way kids do when they see a teacher out in the wild, his eyes wide with this sweet look of awe. He smiled and waved, I smiled and waved back. As we passed each other and continued in opposite directions, his head turned, his gaze still following me.

That encounter stayed with me because I realized something about myself: I am angrier than I used to be.

Not all the time, and not at everyone, but the anger is closer to the surface. It doesn’t take much for it to bubble up. A headline. Another breaking news alert. Another story of needless suffering.

Part of me wants to defend that anger. There is, after all, much in the world that should enrage us. Judaism has never asked us to ignore anger or become indifferent to injustice for the sake of some imagined inner calm. The Torah is full of anger. Moses shatters the tablets. The prophets speak with fire. There are things worth being angry about.

Anger is not the enemy. We all know anger can reveal what matters, what is important.

But in that encounter this summer, I found myself asking a different question.

Not: Do I have reasons to be angry?

But: What is my anger doing to me?

Because what struck me later was how quickly that child’s face had changed something in me.

A moment earlier, I had been completely absorbed in everything that was wrong. And then he looked at me and saw Rabbi Steph. For just a moment, I saw myself through his eyes. 

And it reminded me that there was more to me in that moment than the anger I was feeling.

The anger hadn’t disappeared. But it was no longer the whole picture.

Because there is a difference between feeling anger and becoming shaped by it. The same is true of so many feelings that can settle into us in difficult times: fear, hopelessness, despair, cynicism.

These feelings are understandable. Cynicism grows out of real disappointment. Hopelessness comes after hoping and being let down again and again.

The danger comes when a feeling stops simply telling us something and begins telling us everything.

The Torah has an image for what happens when these feelings accumulate around us. Near the end of the Torah, as Moses looks back on the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness, he tells them, “Circumcise your heart.”

Moses has just retold the story of the Golden Calf, of the people’s failure and the tablets he shattered in anger. And still, they are being asked to begin again. The possibility of renewal begins with removing what has calcified around the heart.

The image suggests that our hearts can become covered over, closed off to anything new. Perhaps by deep disappointments, fear, old hurts, anger, despair, layer after layer, until what has gathered around our heart begins to feel like our heart itself.

Until “I am angry” becomes “I am an angry person.”

Until “I can’t see another possibility” becomes “nothing else is possible."

Until we begin to say: This is just who I am. This is how I am. This is simply the world we live in.

And when that happens, we can become blinded not only to what is possible in the world, but to what is possible in us.

On Rosh Hashanah, many communities read a story about precisely this kind of loss of vision.

Hagar has been sent away from Abraham’s home with her son Ishmael. She wanders in the wilderness until her water runs out. At that point, she can see no way forward.

She places her son beneath a bush and walks some distance away because she cannot bear to watch him die. Then she sits down and weeps.

And then the Torah says something remarkable: “God opened her eyes.” And she saw a well of water.

The Torah does not say that God created a well. It says that Hagar saw it. The well was there. She simply could not see it before.

And maybe that is true of us more often than we realize. What is right in front of us can become invisible, even if only temporarily. 

That child on the street could see something in me that I wasn’t particularly connected to in that moment.

And because he saw it, for a moment I could see it too.

Perhaps that is one way to understand teshuvah, the central call of the High Holidays.

We often translate teshuvah as repentance, but its root, lashuv, means to return. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook taught that teshuvah is not about becoming a completely different person, but returning to something within us that has become obscured.

There is a paradox here that I love: sometimes becoming different means rediscovering what was already there.

A capacity for tenderness. A capacity for hope. A capacity to imagine that things could still be different.

Like Hagar seeing the well, teshuvah can be a kind of seeing again.

Not discovering that everything is actually fine. Not pretending that what has happened did not happen. But starting to see what anger, fear, or despair had hidden.

Perhaps that is where teshuvah begins: in creating a little space between what has been and what comes next.

The space between “this is what I always do” and “maybe I could choose differently.”

Between “nothing will ever change” and “I don’t know what might be possible.”

Between “this is simply who I am” and “perhaps I am still becoming.”

And here, I think, is where Rosh Hashanah enters with one of its most radical claims:

You are not finished. And neither is the world.

The people we have been are real. The choices we have made are real. What has happened this year is real. But none of those things has to have the final word.

This year, I don’t want to ask, “How do I become less angry?” There is too much in our world that deserves our anger.

Instead, I am asking: What am I allowing to take hold of my heart? What am I not seeing because of it?

We have a striking phrase in the Rosh Hashanah liturgy: Hayom harat olam.

“Today the world is born.”

Hayom. Today.

Every Rosh Hashanah, we make an extraordinary claim: what exists right now is not all that can exist. The world is still becoming.

Hayom. Today.

The world is not finished.

And neither are we.

May this be a year in which the wells we cannot yet see come into view.

May we be surprised by what is still possible in us.

May we be seen by people who help us recognize parts of ourselves we had lost sight of.

And may we offer that kind of seeing to one another.