Choosing Life
Sep 09, 2026
This time of year gives me all the feels.
The weather changes almost overnight, summer somehow disappears without asking permission, school buses clog every intersection, and all those scabby little knees vanish underneath school uniforms that are still a size too big.
And then there’s Elul.
The sudden seriousness of it.
Yes, I know the King is in the field. I know Ani L’dodi V’dodi Li. I know that Elul is supposed to be a month of closeness and love and return.
My adult mind knows all of that.
But somewhere inside me is still the child sitting at a school desk while a teacher belts out the words of Unesaneh Tokef:
Who will live?
And who will die?
Those words did all kinds of things to me growing up. Sometimes they scared me. Sometimes they made me angry. Sometimes I shut down completely.
Because, let’s face it, I was fairly certain I wasn’t on the nice list.
25 year later, even my kids seem to know this about their mom:
And then, during my Junior year in high school, right after the Yamim Noraim, the unconscious fear became real.
I was diagnosed with cancer.
Strangely, it didn’t even feel shocking. It felt like the other shoe I had somehow always known was going to drop had finally dropped, hard, directly onto my head.
Spoiler alert: I’m the girl who lived.
But something changed in me after that.
I didn’t only survive cancer, and I didn’t only live to tell the story. Somewhere along the way, I began learning the difference between being alive and actually choosing life.
The Torah says, U’vacharta bachaim, choose life.
Not wait to see whether life chooses you.
Choose it.
And I think for years I heard “Who will live and who will die?” as though I were standing before Heaven waiting for someone else to make the decision.
But u’vacharta bachaim places a different question in my hands.
If I am here, what am I going to do with being here?
Four years ago, I had the bizarre déjà vu of doing it all again.
Two days before Rosh Hashanah, my oncologist called.
This time, the call was to tell me that surgery had been successful, the seven-centimeter tumor was gone, the follow-up testing was clear, and on the eve of a brand-new year, I was cancer free.
Two bouts of cancer, exactly nineteen years apart.
One felt like being sentenced to death.
The other felt like being handed my life back.
But both ultimately left me standing in front of the same questions.
What is this life I’m fighting so hard for?
What am I actually choosing?
Who do I want to be on the other side of this?
Where am I going?
Whether I live or die is not entirely in my hands.
But aliveness is.
Choosing life is.
And this is why I invite you into Vessel every year at exactly this time.
It is, objectively, a ridiculous time to ask anyone to begin something.
We’re getting children back into school, spending absurd amounts of money, prepping for Yom Tov, making lists, finding shoes, making more lists, remembering that somebody grew three inches since Pesach, and trying to tap into the emotional bandwidth to prepare for the holiest days of the year.
Who has room for Vessel right now?
And yet, every year the answer inside me is the same.
This is exactly when.
Because this is the season in which we are asked to choose the way we will walk into another year.
Am I going to live this one awake?
Am I going to keep repeating the patterns I already know hurt me because they're familiar?
Am I going to keep abandoning myself in the places where I desperately want other people to choose me?
Am I going to keep telling myself I’ll pay attention to my own life when things calm down?
Because things calm down, eventually.
The holidays get packed away. The kids settle into their routines. The meals get eaten and the sukkah comes down and September turns into October.
But then what?
This month may be asking you to carry a tremendous amount.
But when the month is over, who is carrying you?
I refuse to let another year disappear while I'm too busy trying to survive it.
I refuse to sleepwalk through a life I fought this hard to keep.
This is what u’vacharta bachaim means to me.
Choose life.
Choose to be inside it.
Choose to know yourself.
Choose to become more available for the people you love, for Hashem, for joy, for grief, for possibility, for the entire mess of being truly alive.
Choose you.
Vessel registration opens soon.
Make this year yours.
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Life happens in little bits. Learn to love the little bytes.
