The High Holidays were different this year. Rosh Hashanah was my mother’s first Yahrzeit. And Yitzkor had a different meaning for me. It was the first time that I felt totally alone.

What is it about the power of memory, about the power of Yitzkor? The rabbi called Yitzkor the crown jewel of Yom Kippur – a chance to think about all the things that formed us – the complicated relationships with the people we’ve lost, the love, the anger, the good times and the pain.

If we want to change, if we want to grow, we need to look back on our stories, to face our lives honestly, and like Joseph at the moment when he was reunited with his brothers, we need “And now don’t be afraid and don’t be sad. God sent me before you to save lives.” We take the pain and the hurt into ourselves because they are part of us. And we find a way to give life a greater meaning.

My parents tried their best, but they had their own challenges. Love, joy, warmth weren’t very common in our household. And when the rabbi asked us to take a moment, to remember the people we had lost and the people who had brought softness into our lives, the only person I could think of was me.

How do we become loving, caring people when we didn’t grow up with it? How do we find hope? And how do we learn what’s important in life?

For me, it was a miracle. When I was eight years old, the Jewish Publication Society published a new translation of the Torah. In New York, where I lived, the news was all over the place, “A new translation, so clear that I child can read it.” When I heard that, I wouldn’t let my parents alone. They had to buy me a copy.

Somehow, at the ripe old age of eight, I managed to read it, and I found the verse that changed my life. At the beginning of Exodus, the people cry out, and God says, “I have seen the suffering of my people in Egypt and I have heard their cry.” For the first time in my life, I found hope. And I discovered that if I hid in a corner, reading the the Torah out loud, my entire family changed. Love, warmth, and peace entered our house.

For me this year, the High Holidays were a time for community, a time for prayer. But they were also a time for holding all of this.

Yitzkor has passed, and I said Kaddish for my parents, standing there, cradling that 60-year old Torah translation in my hands, wrapped in the tallis of a friend who died years ago. And last night, I sat in the sukkah, remembering the tradition of the ushpizin, the sages of the past who go from one sukkah to another, visiting all of us. All I could think was, “I wish I could see my parents one last time.”

The High Holidays remind us about the fragility of life. And Sukkot reenforces it. Sitting in the sukkah, exposed to the elements, we realize that life is radically uncertain. And then finally, we celebrate the one thing that has kept our people alive for generations. We celebrate the Torah.

No wonder that it has become common to unroll the Torah on Simchat Torah. We stand in a circle, with our entire story spread out before us – from the moment of creation to the moment when Adam and Eve realized that they both were mortal, that all that would survive of them was there values, passed on through one generation of children to another. And finally, we read about the death of Moses, standing on the mountain knowing that he would never enter the land.

We see our story and we realize that this year can be better. We have atoned and we have changed. And we can begin studying Torah once again, finding new insights and new meaning, because another year has passed and time has changed us. And standing in that circle, we remember, we realize how much we need each other. If one of us were missing, the entire scroll would fall.

How many times I’ve stood inside that circle, ready to read Bereshit. I look at the adults standing on the outside and the little ones sitting in the middle with a glow on their faces. The adults ask me what portion they are holding, and the kids ask me to find their Torah portions. And there’s an excitement in the room, because the mystics’ teachings are true. God is hidden between the letters. And when we study Torah together, God’s presence comes to dwell within us.

And so, in the end, my parents were malachim, messengers of the Most High. Whatever their limitations, whatever their failures, they inspired me to begin studying Torah.

Sefat Emet noticed that the blessing for Torah changes tenses in the middle. We begin by thanking God as the one who gave us Torah. And then we say, “You planted eternal life within us. Blessed are you Adonai who gives us the Torah.”

“Why the change in tenses?” Sefat Emet asks. Because this is the definition of eternal life, that in every year and in every generation, we can study Torah, and we can create new Torah together. This is the gift that my parents gave me – the gift of eternal life.