The Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah begins this Friday at sunset. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year and it is the start of a 10 day period of reflection and repentance that culminates on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Yom Kippur is also called “Day of Atonement”.

I grew up in the Catholic church, but my husband is Jewish and over the years I have come to really love these holidays. We don’t always celebrate it in a big way, but we try to acknowledge it and do a little something to make it special.

I like reflective holidays. I suppose this period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur could be compared to Lent in the Christian tradition, with its focus on reflection and ways of living up to one’s faith. I think the condensed time frame – 10 days instead of 40ish (there’s some complicated math related to Lenten fasting) – makes it easier for me to stay engaged. But one thing that really keeps me engaged is something I’ve been doing since 2009: participating in 10Q.

10Q is hard to explain as a thing, it’s more of a process. It is basically a website and service that poses one reflective question each day (plus one bonus question) for the 10 days. You answer the question and submit it, with an option to allow your answer to be seen by others or to remain private. At the end of the 10 days, the answers are “locked in a vault” for the year. The next year, they email you a copy of your answers a couple days before Rosh Hashanah so you can review them before starting again. The questions ask you to reflect on how the prior year went at personal, familial, community and even global levels. They ask you to articulate some ways you might want to do things differently in the coming year. They check in on what has been hard and what has been joyful. They get you to think about how you engage with the world around you. And then you get reminded of what you were thinking a year earlier.

This is so my thing.

Well, yesterday I got last year’s answers. As you might imagine, reading last year’s answers felt like looking at pictures from a decade ago. I teared up after reading the first few, thinking of all I did not know then about what was to follow. Here are some snippets:

So, we built a house in 2019 and didn’t fully understand the scale of the plans we had and, well, it turned out larger than I had expected. That may sound stupid, but I’ve learned that there are a lot of things that affect how big or small a certain amount of space feels – light, color, stuff, size of stuff, presence of fowl odor… Anyway, I felt like kind of an ass about it. But after six months of staying home, I have embraced the space.

Ugh. Even the reports I was referring to talked about 10 and 12 years out. F#%*!

Besides those ones, I was actually somewhat comforted by a lot of my other answers because while they were specific to that year, there was a sense of groundedness that I think has actually served me well this year. It wasn’t certainty – in fact one answer even referred to a sense of learning to be more comfortable with uncertainty – but there was a stability of sorts. The answers still make sense to me, even after a year of shock, grief, disorientation, fear, anxiety, and global unease. That’s reassuring to me, at I time when I can really use reassurance.

Not to brag, but I think I showed real wisdom on this one:

But I may have overshot with the bonus question:

This year, I think I’ll just write “More beautiful, less mess. Please.”

If this sounds like something you’d like to do, you absolutely should. Anyone can do it and it’s free. Just go to DoYou10Q.com and sign up.

Shana tova. Wishing everyone a good year.