Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and personal accounting - opinion

My friend Gila Halelli Weiss is a successful accountant. A CPA. She used to work for hi-tech companies, but five years ago she went out on her own. Every year, her client base grows.

Her birthday coincides with the approach to the High Holy Days. In keeping with her professional and personal inclinations, she writes out a year plan and, to reinforce it, goes public with the plan on social media. First, she takes a hard look at the previous year’s goals and how well she did. Then, she boldly goes forward.

In her self-effacing way, Gila apologizes for sharing this practice. “Rosh Hashanah (almost) plus my birthday (ditto). Which means it’s also time for my annual plan – that lovely aspirational document in which I detail all the things I want to do, and all the areas I want to improve in, even as I realize that I’ll maybe hit 30%.

“I don’t know why I do this, but I do, and I do it every year. Furthermore, I write it after reviewing not only the last year’s results but also reviewing accumulated results from the start of my current 10-year plan. Both of those should be enough to get me to give up annual plans and resolutions, but, alas, they’re not. I can no more go into a year without a plan than I can drive my car without my glasses.”

Isn’t Gila doing exactly what we’re all supposed to do in the Hebrew months of Elul and Tishrei – combine the celebrations of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with self-searching and personal accounting?

Have you already chuckled to yourself that this process is futile in Israel, particularly this year? My late mother so often said in Yiddish, “Mann tracht un Gott lacht.” Humans plan and God laughs.

Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America

So let me tell you that I know Gila, like many of the extraordinary people in my life, through my work in Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. But no one knew Gila’s identity when I first saw her in the intensive care unit of Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem in April 2002.

A new immigrant from Rockland, Maryland (and coincidentally, a Hadassah chapter president in Washington, DC), she loved Friday shopping at Mahaneh Yehuda, the Jerusalem open-air market. She was supposed to bring the dessert for a Shabbat dinner. With her bag of chocolate rogelach, she waited for a bus to go back to her shared rented apartment.

That’s when the female terrorist, pretending to be pregnant but actually stuffed with a bag filled with plastic explosives and a battery, hit the switch. Gila suffered severe blast wounds and terrible burns. Her body was pitted with shrapnel.

Israeli Naot sandals protected her feet, so her roommate identified Gila by her snazzy pedicure.

A team of surgeons, ophthalmologists, and otolaryngologists put her back together again. Not all shrapnel is best removed surgically; some is better left to work its way out. Gila has written powerfully about this process in a recommended blog, “My Shrapnel” (myshrapnel.blogspot.com).

So Gila has an appreciation for the unexpected and life’s vicissitudes. Nonetheless, she’s still accounting and planning, her plans like a laser beam through a murky world.

I READ Gila’s post to a car full of colleagues heading north last week, and we were all inspired. We were preparing for the year memorial of October 7. First, we stopped at the Ashkelon police station, where a 29-year-old detective named Timor Cohen-Sasson has returned to work, dealing with thefts, assaults, and accidents. Then we went on to Sderot, where he lives.

Called early to the police station on October 7, Timor drove via the back road to avoid the heavy rocket fire. A few minutes from his home, he spotted a white Toyota van. With a handgun and 14 bullets, he held off eight terrorists, saved a wounded police officer, and sounded the alarm about the enemy penetration. In the firefight, Timor lost a bone in his right arm. He underwent surgeries and spent six months in Hadassah’s new Gandel Rehabilitation Center.His parents and siblings, evacuated from Sderot, stayed in a hotel nearby. They’re all back in Sderot now. His dad told me how much they love Sderot, even though they have only 15 seconds to get to their safe rooms. “It’s such a beautiful, quiet town. You can hear the birds sing.”

We also stopped at a military base, and with the hard-won permission of the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, we interviewed battalion commander Asaf of the Armored Corps for an October 7 program. His tankers first cleared Kibbutz Be’eri of terrorists, and then went to the dusty fields of Gaza.

Briefly out of his tank in Khan Yunis, Asaf was shot in the elbow. I got to know him in rehab, where he pushed himself to regain the use of his arm so that he could go back to leading his battalion.

He’s taught me a lot about tanks, once thought to be obsolete for modern warfare. “Boots on the ground means tanks on the ground,” he said. Standing amid the so-called behemoths of the battlefield, what we in Israel have named Merkava, the biblical Ezekiel’s word for “chariots,” I felt breathless, awed, not only for the giant machinery with its “advanced capabilities” but also by the father of four who is back in battle command.

On October 7, Asaf was supposed to be named hatan han arim, the honoree in the synagogue who has done the most for the kids’ program. Talk about planning.

We drove north to film the students at Hadassah’s Youth Aliyah Village Meir Shefeya, near Zichron Ya’acov. The music director is Boris Feldman, once the head of a large music conservatory in the former Soviet Union. He metamorphoses teens into skilled musicians and singers. Sixty young people were gathered on the lawn, smoke trails in the sky and distant booms of warfare in the background, but no sirens yet. The students are Israelis of all backgrounds and potential immigrants from Naale Elite Academy, the high school program for Diaspora teens.

Feldman occasionally supplements Hebrew instructions with Russian because several students are newbies from Ukraine, Russia, and Turkic Azerbaijan (the videographer happens to speak Turkish – this is Israel!). The young scintillating faces of teenagers, our Israeli future, brought tears of joy to my eyes. Their song: “Hatikvah.”

Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold said, “Dare to dream, and when you dream, dream big.” Hematologist Polina Stepenksy (whose story I’ll tell another day) says that’s not enough. Saving lives every day, she insists that you need to dream big, but then get a plan.

So, Gila, I’m opening a computer file for 5785, knowing that the heavenly file with my name on it may trump my earthly plans.

May our personal files and those of the hostages be written and saved with inspiration, sweetness, good health, and success in that big digital Book of Life in heaven, ketiva v’hatima tova. 

Gila Halelli Weiss’s accounting tips can be found at cfosecrets.com/.

The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.