At the High Holidays, think of 5787 this way: The Year of Decision.

Every year, of course, brings important decisions – but many of those decisions were unanticipated and come in the course of the new year, as they did in the Gregorian calendar 1941 (Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7), 1963 (the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22), 1990 (Iraq invasion of Kuwait, Aug. 2), 2001 (terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, Sept. 11).

This new year may be shaping up to be more like 1861 (the imminence of a Civil War) and 1974 (the denouement of the Watergate scandal): Informed observers knew big decisions were looming.

All of this is in perfect harmony with the season. The High Holidays are a time of change; what is transformed is more than the calendar page and the figure signifying the new year. Sometimes those changes are material and easily seen. Other times they are more subtle, changes in attitudes, approaches and sentiments. Jews mark the change in the year with prayer but also with both resolutions and resolve. This new year that is especially true.

At the cusp of this new year in the Jewish calendar, we know there will be several important turning points, unavoidable hinges in politics as well as in social, economic and cultural realms. Several of them will surely prompt introspection during the High Holidays, a 10-day arc of contemplation and redemption, that begins at sundown Friday.

They will influence not only the course of life for Jews in the United States but also the politics of the country and of Israel – and the nature of international relations in the Middle East. Some of these events will transpire in less than seven weeks, though their implications will fill the remainder of the year.

And don’t forget: The unexpected, like the Nov. 4, 1995, assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Kings of Israel Square and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, can reshape a year, a country and a region.

And so, in the coming Year of Decision, here are some of the decisions we know are pending. Think of them as the Shofar Call of Decisions:

• Israel’s elections. Benjamin Netanyahu, who has bestrode Israel politics like a colossus for a generation, faces yet another test. The longest-serving prime minister of the Jewish state, and perhaps the greatest survivor in modern Jewish history, Netanyahu is approaching what very likely is the most consequential election he and his ever-changing, ever-demanding coalition have faced.

In Israel, at issue is whether impatience with the power of the Orthodox, qualms about the prime minister’s personal morals and judgment, and above all his response to the Hamas invasion will combine to produce what political scientists call a “change election.” All the elements are there, of course. But, like Richard Nixon, Netanyahu is the master of the comeback – and, like Nixon, who ran and won in 1968 as a “New Nixon,” is peculiarly adept in reshaping his image or packaging the political and military environment in such a way as to persuade voters he is not only the indispensable man but the inevitable man.

But this election has important consequences far beyond Israel. Netanyahu has terrible approval ratings in both the United States and Canada. On Capitol Hill, the prime minister and his attacks on Gaza have left the pro-Israel consensus in tatters, an unprecedented state of affairs for the country, and especially dangerous when it is in a perilous situation with its neighbors and in a war with Iran. The defeat of Netanyahu’s coalition by a more moderate Israeli government would vastly improve its funding prospects on Capitol Hill.

• The U.S. elections. Seldom has a set of midterms been as important; previous examples include 1974 (right after the resignation of Nixon); 1994 (in the wake of the failure of the Clinton healthcare plan); and 2010 (in the wake of the approval of Obamacare). This time, with little remaining in the Trump legislative agenda, what is at stake is subtle: the tone and timbre of U.S. politics. That, plus the possibility of House investigations (with subpoena power) of the president, his family, and associates, and the possibility of a Democratically controlled Senate holding up presidential appointments, even in the event of a Supreme Court vacancy.

• The course of antisemitism. This scourge has resurfaced in recent years, reaching record levels. The fevered political environment is surely one factor, though not the only one. On both the left and right there has been a surge of anti-Jewish sentiment. Some of it, of course, grows out of discomfit with the Israeli response to the Hamas attack, which is why the Israeli elections are so important.

• The cumulative effect of the Year of Decision trifecta. These three elements work in tandem, kind of like a positive-reinforcement phenomenon in nature. Some liberal Jews believe changes in the first two elements – the profile of both the Israeli government and the U.S. Congress – will spur changes in the third, the amount of antisemitism in the country. Conservatives may be skeptical of the symbiosis but in any case do not favor changes in Congress and may have mixed feelings about adjustments in the profile of the Israeli government. All are hoping for a dramatic change in the number of antisemitic incidents and expressions of Jew hatred.

In 1996, Bill Clinton attended a Rosh Hashanah service on Martha’s Vineyard, the first president to join a High Holiday worship service. He and Hillary Rodham Clinton wished congregants, who had gathered in Edgartown’s Old Whaling Church, a “Shana Tova.”

Though now a figure from the past, Clinton was – and in a way still is – an apostle, if you will forgive the term, of change. One of his most famous remarks seems unusually appropriate for this turn of the year: “Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world. And the urgent question of our time is whether we can change our friend and not our enemy.”

In that spirit, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, once said, “If you are not a better person tomorrow than you are today, what need have you for a tomorrow?” At this change of the calendar, we might adapt that aphorism to ask, “If there is not a better year than the one we have today, what need have we for a new year?” Θ

David M. Shribman, who won a Pulitzer Prize as Washington bureau chief of The Boston Globe, is executive editor emeritus of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and McGill University.