A few days before Rosh Hashanah, I got a text from my friend Gayle. Gayle and I go way back. Our oldest kids went to preschool together eons ago, and we belong to the same Reform temple.

“We’re going to family service at 8:30,” she wrote, “we” meaning her daughter and 5-year-old grandson. “Do you want to go? It will be like old times!”

To be clear, those old times were 40 years ago. Now, our “kids” are even older than we were when we met, which was in the classroom of a JCC preschool. Every weekday morning, we’d hustle them out of the car and into the building, then try to pry ourselves loose from them so we could get to work without being too egregiously late. And every morning – amidst the tears and chaos around misplaced teddy bears and lost mittens – Gayle and I and another mom named Amy exchanged friendly greetings, then bolted to our jobs as a lawyer (Gayle), journalist (me), and social worker (Amy.)

In time, our kids became playmates, and so did we. We snuck out for dinners together, talked about work and politics and other grown-up things, and welcomed the arrival of more children, each being announced with great fanfare on the preschool classroom door. (“Solly has a baby sister!” read the sign when my daughter was born.)

We got to know each other’s families. We carpooled to Hebrew school. (Amy’s mother-in-law drove, often late and often lost.) We celebrated the Jewish holidays together, each of us taking a holiday and hosting a meal. I picked Hanukkah, though Amy’s husband would commandeer the kitchen to make his sweet potato latkes, maintaining they were better than my ordinary ones, with my pedestrian Russet potatoes. No meal was complete without the argument. Or without my sugar cookies, in the shape of menorahs.

Amy hosted the Passover Seder, presided over by her father, a rabbi. My assignment was to make the gefilte fish, a laborious production that was non-negotiable. One year my family couldn’t make it to the Seder, and I called Amy to apologize.

“That’s OK,” she said. “But can you send the gefilte fish anyway?”

Gayle hosted a lavish Rosh Hashanah brunch following temple services, that would stretch well into the afternoon and culminate with my sugar cookies again, shaped like shofars this time. The kids played in the basement. The grownups argued about politics.

So many milestones, so many events. Our rabbi retired; a new one came in. Our parents died, one by one. There were bar and bat mitzvahs. Weddings and baby showers and funerals. Somehow, we, too, became grandparents – all but one of us, that is, since my husband died after a long illness before our kids were even married.

This year, the “new” rabbi, as some still call him, announced he was retiring, after 31 years. Thirty-one years? In his video announcement to the congregation, he sang a passage from the famous Pete Seeger song, adapted from Ecclesiastes, the theme of which is the fullness of life, the cyclical nature of what happens.

To every thing, turn turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven.

I often think of this passage at Rosh Hashanah, when the seasons are palpably changing, when the elders of our congregation grow more frail, entering with walkers and in wheelchairs. When hope is renewed each time we dip apples in honey and wish each other a sweet and good year. A shana tova.

And every year this has seemed like a reasonable expectation. In many ways, my own life has gotten sweeter, now that “Solly’s little sister” has a little boy of her own, and Solly has two kids himself.

But this year felt different, felt off, as I walked into the Rosh Hashanah service with my daughter and my grandson, and not just because the holiday coincided with the Sept. 11 anniversary when a member of our congregation died on the first flight to hit the World Trade Center.

On the face of it, the scene looked the same – little hands reaching up, big hands reaching down, on a sacred holiday. But this year, police in fluorescent jackets met us at the door. And volunteers scanned QR codes on our tickets before letting us in.

Of course. Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh. Colleyville synagogue in Texas. Central Synagogue in New York. This but a small part of a very long list.

It was impossible not to feel how profoundly world events have brought ominous currents to this otherwise joyous and hopeful tradition.

What our synagogue is experiencing is, of course, mirrored across the country. Many Jews are thinking about how the message of Rosh Hashanah has been forever altered. Our rabbi addressed this in a High Holiday letter to congregants. “The world breaks our hearts daily. It disappoints us and frightens us. Some days it feels as though a giant asteroid is aimed squarely at our heads.”

But he invited us to sing, and pray and put our burdens down, at least for this holiday.

The hopeful and lasting image I’m left with is my 2-year-old grandson standing wide-eyed in the aisle as the rabbi blew the shofar. His joyous fascination seems to affirm our enduring traditions, which again and again have been renewed throughout history – in ages darker than the one we’re living through now. Θ

Linda Matchan is a Boston-based journalist.