A new year is an invitation to love the world

Goodbye, 2023.

Good riddance, some will say.

What will we remember?

We entered the year full of hope, celebrating Israel turning 75. We end the year worried about its future and the lives of those still held hostage by Hamas.

The bad news? The brutal attack by Hamas on Oct. 7. The war in Israel. The war in Ukraine. The endless flow of immigrants to our borders seeking a way out of poverty, fear and oppression.

Those immigrants give us hope. The thousands that show up daily remind us that America is still the great hope in the world, still a beacon of democracy, no matter how much politicians try to dim that beacon, it still reaches the poorest of the poor.

The good news? Voters in Ohio chose to protect women’s rights. The Pope approved the blessing of same-sex unions. We celebrated Taylor Swift’s rise to greater heights with her Eras Tour and movie that followed, and her romance with Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs star who grew up in Cleveland Heights.

We lost Rosalynn Carter, Sinead O’Connor, Matthew Perry, Jimmy Buffet, Henry Kissinger, Sandra Day O’Connor, Tina Turner, David Crosby, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, Norman Lear, Alan Arkin, Rabbi Harold Kushner and Burt Bacharach. We nearly lost Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin when his heart stopped during a game. We lost 18 people in Maine to another mass shooting, one of countless mass shootings in 2023.

Beloved Cleveland Guardians manager Terry “Tito” Francona retired. The Cleveland Browns are talking playoffs as fans go wacko for quarterback Joe Flacco.

Hollywood writers went on strike. Auto workers went on strike so strategically that the strike ended quickly. The Earth took another beating as climate change continued to wreak havoc. A Hawaiian wildfire took out a town and the Earth experienced the hottest summer on record.

New obesity drugs are giving people hope. In England, they crowned a king while millions read “Spare” about royal son Harry, who was always considered Plan B.

“Ted Lasso,” “Succession” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” came to an end. We flocked to theaters to watch “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” and “The Color Purple.”

Fox gave Tucker Carlson the boot. TikTok and AI still scare us, along with China and Russia. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was moved to a more brutally cold, isolated prison. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is still being held captive by Russia.

Was it a good year or a bad year? Let’s just call it a year.

At the start of this year, I quoted author Marianne Williamson who wrote, “I have a feeling about 2023; I think it’s going to be big. I think it’s both a challenge and an invitation to rise to our best selves, to find our courage, to spread our wings and help heal the world.”

Now that we’ve lived this year, what an invitation it was to repair the world. To believe past our fear, to hope past our despair, to practice tikkun olam in a world that feels more broken than ever.

A new year isn’t an invitation that we open on Dec. 31 at midnight. It’s an invitation that greets us every single morning.

It’s an invitation to love the world.

As we bid farewell to 2023, I read once more the farewell letter to life that Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote in one of his books. He called it “A Love Letter to A World that May or May Not Deserve It.”

“Dear World, We’ve been through a lot together over the past eight decades, you and I – marriages, births, deaths, fulfillment and disappointment, war and peace, good times and hard times. There were days when you were more generous to me than I could possibly have deserved. And there were days when you cheated me out of things I felt I was entitled to. There were days when you looked so achingly beautiful that I could hardly believe you were mine, and days when you broke my heart and reduced me to tears.

“But with it all, I choose to love you. I love you, whether you deserve it or not (and how does one measure that?). I love you in part because you are the only world I have. I love you because I like who I am better when I do.

“But mostly I love you because loving you makes it easier for me to be grateful for today and hopeful about tomorrow. Love does that.

“Faithfully yours, Harold Kushner”

Faithful.

What a great way to thank an old year and greet a new year.