Memories of 2023 and Beyond

How will Jews ever recall 2023 without thinking of the nightmare of Oct. 7? Terrible memories seem to endure, while positive ones are all too fleeting.

For my wife and for me, recounting the best of each year has become an annual ritual, even during the most dreadful of times. This tradition feels more important now than ever.

For my wife and for me, recounting the best of each year has become an annual ritual, even during the most dreadful of times.  This tradition feels more important now than ever.

It began in December of 2013, at Friday night services at Am Shalom synagogue in Glencoe, Illinois. Rabbi Steve Lowenstein handed out Mason jars labeled “2014 Jar of Good Things.”  He encouraged the congregation to note uplifting events as they happened, and as 2014 concluded, to open the jar and read about the year’s many joys.

What an extraordinary idea that was.  For the past 10 years, I have cut up a piece of paper into 52 smaller ones and numbered them.  Every Shabbat, I dutifully write down a couple of highlights of the week that just passed.  And on New Year’s Eve, I read the slips of paper aloud, and my wife and I select a dozen or so of the year’s most noteworthy entries and list them on a summary sheet. We then go through the summaries from each of the previous years.  The entire exercise takes maybe an hour or so, and it has turned out to be a fabulous way to count our blessings.

It is wonderful to look back and be reminded that during that first year, 2014, our son accepted a life-altering job offer, our oldest daughter began a Ph.D. program in a discipline she adores, and our youngest got off to a promising beginning in high school.  We also had one of the most magical Shabbat dinners of our lives, celebrated with friends in Jerusalem. Those summary sheets bring such important times to life:  from successful surgeries, to renewed friendships, to a myriad of personal and professional milestones.  This year will mark a decade of memories that we will relive as 2023 draws to a close.

While these entries are supposed to be about joy, I thought it was appropriate to also write down some of the most challenging and heartbreaking moments of each year.  Reading the summaries reminds me that my dearest childhood friend died suddenly in 2019, and that I went directly from his funeral in New Jersey to the rehearsal dinner that night for my son’s wedding in New York, experiencing the deepest despair and greatest elation on a single day. My parents and my father-in-law had passed prior to beginning this tradition in 2014, but my beloved mother-in-law died in 2018.  There it is, week nine, “Marcy 7/28/25 – 2/28/18.  End of An Era.”  To recall it is one thing; to see it written in my own hand is another.

We will shortly be summarizing the joys of 2023, while of course noting the life-changing horror of the Simchat Torah massacre and its awful aftermath.  It is tempting to dismiss the entire year as an “annus horribilis,” as Queen Elizabeth II, in light of one royal scandal after another, so aptly labeled 1992.  But those pieces of paper tell a different story. When you read them, it is hard to ignore last year’s delightful family gatherings at our new home in Los Angeles, attending Northwestern men’s basketball’s second-ever trip to March Madness with one of my daughters, our other daughter’s college graduation, celebrating my 70th birthday with family and friends, and, most memorably, the birth of our first grandchild, and her trip home after a difficult month in a neonatal intensive care unit.  

So do yourself a favor and consider following our lead.  I asked Rabbi Lowenstein to guess how many congregants still have that jar after 10 years, recording weekly events and reviewing them as the year concludes.  He sagely replied: “At least one.”  

Take a sheet of paper, cut it into fifty-two smaller ones, and number them sequentially. Find a jar in which to place them.  It might just turn out to be a time capsule that you will come to treasure as much as we have. And may that jar be filled with the greatest of memories in 2024 and beyond.

Morton Schapiro is the former president of Williams College and Northwestern University.  His most recent book (with Gary Saul Morson) is “Minds Wide Shut:  How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us.”