Our best Rosh Hashanah in years. That's the part that worries me.

Ask a business owner which year almost took them under, and it usually isn't the bad one. The bad year you see coming. You cut costs, you chase every lead, you pay attention to everything. The year that gets you is the one right after the great one. Revenue is up, the phone is ringing, and nobody in the room thinks to ask what happens if it stops. I've been thinking about that all week, because we just had a wonderful Rosh Hashanah. This week we read Ha'azinu, Moshe's final song to the people he carried for forty years. He begins by telling them to look backward. “Zechor yemos olam” remember the days of old. Remember the desert. Remember who fed you there, who fought for you, who brought you to a land you did not plant. And then comes the warning. It isn't what you'd expect. Moshe doesn't warn them about being crushed. He warns them about doing well. “Vayishman Yeshurun vayiv'at” Yeshurun grew fat, and kicked. Abundance came, and with it a kind of forgetting, and eventually G-d "hides His face" and the hard years arrive. The threat in Ha'azinu isn't suffering. It's comfort. It's the good year that quietly convinces you the good year takes care of itself. Which is exactly why Moshe opens with remember. Gratitude in this parsha isn't sentimental. It's protective. You look back not to feel warm about what happened, but to stay awake to the fact that it did not have to. So let me look back with you. Before Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Heschel taught a Rosh Hashanah 101 class and a challah bake for families and their kids. On the first night, about seventy people sat down to a meal at Chabad. The next morning, roughly the same number again in the sanctuary (and the kids program) almost entirely a different crowd. Sunday afternoon we went out to the arts festival at the park and blew shofar for whoever wanted to hear it, and then Tashlich and shofar in the park drew eighty-three mostly new people. What I'll remember isn't the numbers, it's the feeling in the room, tribal, in the best sense of the word. Family, people who walked in and belonged there before anyone said hello. And one more number, because I'd rather tell you the truth than tell you a nice story: on the second day we struggled to get a minyan. That's the one that stays with me. Not because it ruined anything, but because it's the whole point of Ha'azinu in a single morning. A packed house does not guarantee the next morning. No anttendence is not automatic, nothing runs just on momentum. Which brings me to the ask, and it's the same one I made from the bimah on Rosh Hashanah. Think of one Jew in your orbit. The coworker two desks over. The cousin who stopped showing up somewhere along the way. The neighbor you've known for six years and never once mentioned it to. You already know who it is, most people do, within about four seconds of being asked. Invite them, not only to a program, necessarily. To you, to your Shabbos table, to a class, to a coffee where the subject finally comes up. Yom Kippur begins Sunday night. There is no easier invitation on the Jewish calendar and no better one, for a lot of Jews, this is the one day a year the door is already half open. All it needs is someone standing in it saying, come sit with me. Our full schedule is here: HarfordChabad.org/Holydays. And thank you, a place where seventy people can walk in for a meal, where a stranger can show up on a Monday morning and be handed a machzor and a seat, does not keep itself open. You keep it open, every one of those numbers above has your name somewhere underneath it. Ha'azinu doesn't end on the warning. It ends with G-d returning to His people, forgiving them, standing up for them. The song knows we'll drift. It just refuses to accept that the drift is the end of the story. May this year be a good and sweet one for you and your family. Shana Tova and gmar chasima tova, Rabbi Kushi Schusterman