In his Rosh Hashanah prayer book, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that life may be hard, but it can still be sweet:

To be a Jew is to live for simple things: the love between a husband and a wife, the sacred bond between parents and children, the gift of community where we help others and others help us and where we learn that joy is doubled and grief is halved by being shared.  To be a Jew is to give, whether  in the form of tzedakah or gimlet chassadim, acts of living kindness,  It is to learn and never stop learning, to pray and never stop thanking, to do teshuvah and never stop growing.

Millions of pages have been written about what it means to be a Jew. And all of us live our Jewish lives differently. But there are certain basic truths: that to be a Jew – to be human – is to grow, to give, to build community.

And to be a Jew – to be human – is to admit that we did not build this world all by ourselves. We inherited this planet, with its bounty and its beauty. We inherited the air that we breathe, the food that we eat, the water, the rain, and the sunset. And to be a Jew – to be human – is to never stop thanking.

And there is another truth that we, as Americans, hold to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are the truths that shape our lives.

But we live in a world where truth is being discarded, where election deniers are being given key committee assignments, where a man who invented his entire life story is allowed to serve in Congress.

It’s likely to be a difficult year. The truth deniers will try to gaslight us, to convince us that there is no such thing as truth. And they will gaslight us for their own political power. How do we survive such a fundamental assault on truth?

We survive by doing what Jews have always done – by bringing light into the world. We survive by caring for each other, by remembering joy is doubled and grief is halved by being shared. And we survive by speaking out, by holding each other close, and by remembering the things that we can be thankful for.

The Chassidic masters compared all the times that our people have faced darkness – the descent into Egypt, the Babylonian exile, the Roman occupation. And they taught that the oppression by the Greek-Syrians was worse than all of them. Why? Because the Greek-Syrians tried to send truth into exile.

For thousands of years, the nations around us have tried to extinguish the truth. But they have never succeeded. The simple truth – that we were put here to care for each other – can never be extinguished.

L’chaim. To life.