The High Holidays ask us to look back at the year that has passed while turning toward the year ahead. For someone experiencing infertility, that invitation can hold both hope and heartbreak.

Published for the High Holidays of 5780, Kol Tikva: Hear Our Voices brings together reflections from people navigating infertility, mental health professionals, clergy, and loved ones supporting someone they care about. The collection explores what it can mean to enter Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur carrying another year of treatment, waiting, unanswered prayers, pregnancy loss, or uncertainty.

Contributors write about self-compassion, feeling exposed in synagogue, complicated relationships with God and prayer, the stories of Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah, and the challenge of sharing in other people’s joy while carrying private pain. Several pieces also turn outward, asking how family members, friends, clergy, and communities can respond with greater empathy and make room for people whose High Holiday experience may feel very different from their own.

What You’ll Find Inside

• Reflections on entering another Jewish year while experiencing infertility
• Guidance for approaching the High Holidays with greater self-compassion
• Jewish perspectives on Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, prayer, and longing
• Personal accounts of feeling visible or emotionally vulnerable in synagogue
• Reflections on pregnancy loss, faith, anger, and questions of meaning
• Perspectives on holding joy and heartbreak at the same time
• Practical guidance for friends, family members, and community leaders
• A loved one’s perspective on watching a daughter experience infertility
• Encouragement to make Jewish communal spaces more thoughtful and inclusive

A Note on This Edition

This collection was originally published for the High Holidays of 5780 (2019). Some language and references reflect the time in which it was written. We continue to share it because the central experiences explored within these pages — longing, unanswered prayer, self-compassion, belonging, faith, grief, and the need to feel understood within community — remain deeply relevant.

A New Year Can Hold Hope and Grief at the Same Time

Another Rosh Hashanah may bring renewed hope for what the coming year could hold. It may also make painfully visible what did not happen in the year that passed.

There is room for both.

Hear Their Voices

Read reflections from people who have experienced infertility personally and from those seeking to support them with greater compassion, sensitivity, and understanding.

High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Simchat Torah, Infertility, Jewish Infertility, Pregnancy Loss, Prayer, Self-Compassion, Faith, Community, Personal Stories, Kol Tikva