A Rosh Hashanah letter from Rick to TINAU community

As we approach Rosh Hashanah (ראש השנה), I write with hope and heaviness braided together — a feeling fitting for a community built around language not as vocabulary alone, but as inquiry, attention, and encounter. I am both a student of Arabic and Hebrew at TINAU and a member of this language cooperative, which has become an important part of my life. With a new year dawning, I find myself reflecting on what this community helps us notice, hold, and become.

This has been a painful time for anyone paying attention to Israel/Palestine. The scale of Palestinian suffering — the deaths, the displacement, the daily indignities of occupation and war — is not abstract to those of us who have spent hours in the company of friends and teachers in Palestine and Israel. Our Arabic teachers have shown a quiet courage: continuing to open the door to language, memory, and daily life while carrying burdens many of us can only begin to imagine. This suffering deserves to be named plainly, especially in a season that asks us to face ourselves and the world with honesty.

To name this suffering plainly is not to close the conversation; it is to enter it more truthfully, trusting that a serious community of language learners can hold grief, gratitude, and accountability together without blurring the edges of any one of them.

At the same time, our Hebrew teachers in TINAU have modeled another kind of courage: the willingness to look unflinchingly at their own society’s failures, to teach Hanoch Levin alongside the headlines, and to ask what teshuvah (תשובה / return, repentance) might mean for a nation as well as for a person.

This is exactly why TINAU exists — not to offer escape from these realities, but to give us a discipline for facing them honestly, root by root, word by word. Learning the words “freedom” (حرية / hurriya) and “occupation” (احتلال / ihtilal) in the same lesson is not incidental. Language taught this way becomes a lantern: it deepens attention and refuses to let us look away.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to weigh who we have been against who we intend to become. This year, I would ask our community to hold two things at once: grief for the scale of Palestinian suffering, and gratitude for teachers joined not only by language, but by a shared mission and a shared practice of attention, accountability, and hope.

To our teachers — todah rabah (תודה רבה) and shukran jazeelan (شكراً جزيلاً). To fellow students: let us keep conjugating verbs like it matters, because it does. Each hour of study asks us for attention, humility, and solidarity, and offers us a way to practice all three because they are needed in the world. And to those who will come to these languages after us: may you inherit not only words and grammar, but the courage to listen carefully, to learn across pain, and to keep faith with one another. 

Shanah tovah v’metukah (שנה טובה ומתוקה) — a good and sweet year — to all of you. May it bring closer the justice and peace this land and its people so urgently deserve.

Warmly, Rick Shapiro