The Jewish High Holidays are often framed as a season of renewal, reflection, prayer, and hope for the year ahead. But when you are navigating infertility or fertility treatment, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur can bring emotions that are much harder to name.

What does it mean to pray for a good year when you are carrying disappointment from the year before? How do you approach hope when hoping has already hurt? What happens when familiar prayers, family gatherings, synagogue announcements, or conversations about children suddenly land differently because you are still waiting to build your family?

In Hope in the Waiting: Navigating Infertility During the High Holidays, Yesh Tikva’s Gila Block and Kenzi Locks, LCSW, HWC come together for an honest conversation about the emotional and spiritual experience of infertility during the Jewish High Holiday season.

Together, they explore the complicated relationship between hope, grief, uncertainty, faith, and waiting—and why none of those feelings need to cancel the others out.

The conversation includes reflections on:

• Navigating Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur while experiencing infertility
• The pressure to feel hopeful or spiritually renewed when the future still feels uncertain
• Difficult prayers, themes, and communal moments during the High Holidays
• Grieving the year you thought you would have had
• Entering a new Jewish year without knowing what your family-building journey will look like
• Making space for anger, sadness, envy, exhaustion, faith, gratitude, and hope at the same time
• Finding ways to participate in Jewish community and tradition without minimizing what you are carrying
• Allowing hope to become something more flexible than certainty that a particular outcome will happen

Infertility can make the passage of time feel especially visible. Another holiday. Another birthday. Another family gathering. Another year beginning differently than you once imagined.

For some people, the High Holidays offer comfort and connection. For others, they bring painful reminders of what has not happened yet. And for many, they are both.

This conversation is not about finding the “right” way to approach the High Holidays or forcing meaning onto a painful experience. It is about creating room for the full reality of Jewish infertility, reproductive grief, fertility treatment, spiritual uncertainty, and hope—without requiring you to resolve the contradictions.

Whether you are currently undergoing fertility treatment, living with infertility, grieving reproductive losses, reconsidering your path to parenthood, or simply finding this season more complicated than it once was, we hope this conversation offers a place to feel understood.

You do not have to enter the new year feeling certain.

There can still be hope in the waiting.