Like most of my fellow teachers and professors, I spend a portion of every summer preparing for the fall semester. I pull out my syllabi of past courses, reflect on where they succeeded and where they fell short, and plot out a new syllabus for the new semester. Sometimes I make minor edits (tweaking a reading here, moving a due date there), but other times I embark on more ambitious revisions, building entirely new courses around new themes and new intellectual tasks. For me, the process of crafting a syllabus is a creative challenge, as it requires articulating precisely what I hope students will learn and a deliberate mapping of the steps they will take to arrive at that level of understanding.
Rosh Hashanah invites a different kind of syllabus creation. It offers us a chance to look back on the past year and ponder where we succeeded, where we struggled and why. It offers us a chance to look ahead, to set goals and objectives and to think about how we can achieve them. Sometimes we choose to revise our lives a little bit. Yet other times we engage in a more substantive revision, as we redefine our aspirations and re-evaluate how our daily activities reflect those aspirations.
Planning and executing a syllabus is, for me, a lot easier than planning and executing my daily life. But in these days before the High Holidays, as I agonize over how much time and value to assign to each topic in my syllabus, I am grateful to have the opportunity to reflect on the activities and relationships that define my life and think instead about how much time and value I assign them. This is the season to plot a new course.
