The year 5779 has just ended, but it will be remembered for many moments and events in our personal and collective journeys. 

One day, April 11, 2019, stands out as a guidepost for me. 

It started out as a regular day. I took my daughter Ariella to school. I went in to my former shul to do some work. Then I got in my car to drive off to two events, both of them off the Long Island Expressway. 

First, I drove far out to Mt. Ararat Cemetery, about 45 minutes away, as I was privileged to officiate at the graveside funeral of my friend and congregant Lillian. 

Lillian had outlived most of her friends, and her body had started to shut down on her in the weeks and months before her demise. She was basically immobile, and was being kept alive with absolute dignity with the help of a first-rate caregiver. Before I arrived at the shul, Lillian had been a mainstay in the Sisterhood.

Lillian was lonely, and I made it a priority to visit as often as I could. 

The last time I had seen her was three weeks before, on her birthday, March 8. She shared a birthday with my husband, so we both went over to wish her best wishes. 

Lillian was 99 when she passed. The funeral was full of adult children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, plus a few friends. There were tears of course, but also laughter. 

Immediately following the funeral, I hopped back on to the Long Island Expressway, toward the Cradle of Aviation Museum, as an invited guest of the Consul General of Israel in New York. I had a reserved ticket to the Jet Blue Sky Theater Planetarium.

What a contrast!In a very short period, I transitioned from focusing on, in Kol Nidrei terms, the yeshiva shel mata, to the yeshiva she mala. From what went deep in the ground to what was deep in the sky.

The planetarium was full of members of the pro-Israel community, from elementary-aged children to leaders of Jewish institutions.  

We came to watch Israel land on the moon. 

By now, the SpaceIL story of a little rocket from a little country with big dreams is a well-known symbol of Israel’s high-tech capabilities.  

It started in 2010 with a Facebook post. Yariv Bash, a computer engineer, wrote “Who wants to go to the moon?” A couple of friends, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub, responded, and the three met at a bar in Holon, south of Tel Aviv. 

The three men formed a non-profit, SpaceIL, to undertake the task. Its goal was to be the first private venture to go to the moon.

A little more than eight years later, their dreams came to fruition. A small spacecraft they named Beresheet blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. 

Beresheet carried a time capsule. The time capsule consisted of three discs containing digital files, including details about the spacecraft and the crew building it, but there were also Israeli national and Jewish symbols.

There was a Tanakh, Hebrew songs and artwork created by Israeli children. There was a children’s book that was inspired by SpaceIL’s mission to the moon. There was a Tefilat Hadereh (the traveller’s prayer); books of art and science and Israeli literature; information about Israeli scientific and technological discoveries and developments that influenced the world. 

And there was a photo of Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut, who lost his life on the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.

Beresheet spent seven weeks making its way to the moon. It swung around Earth a few times, using our planet’s gravity to build the momentum it needed to get to its destination.

One of the reasons I was excited to watch this landing was that I had heard SpaceIL Co-Chair and investor Morris Kahn at the National AIPAC Policy Conference in March. He, Yonatan Weintraub and a NASA administrator presented on the main stage in front of nearly 20,000 people, celebrating this historic achievement. 

Actual tears welled up in my eyes when this 89-year-old man, a South African oleh to Israel, who is my height, offered his prayer to Beresheet: Travel well, land peacefully and make us all proud.

I kept him and his prayer with me until April 11. 

When I arrived at the Planetarium an hour after Lillian’s funeral, there was electricity in the air. Something incredible was happening.

The planetarium was linked to Mission Control in Israel. On one screen, we watched the team in Israel. On another screen, we saw graphs and charts of real time progress. 

As I sat, I thought that the next half hour would be monumental, like when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made it to the moon, with a lot of rah rah Israel thrown into the mix. I wasn’t even alive in 1969 and I still get goosebumps when I hear that grainy recording of Neil Armstrong saying: “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

But it was not meant to be. 

Beresheet did not quite make it all the way. The little spacecraft crashed into the gray dirt around 3:25 p.m. EDT. Mission control lost communication when it was about 149 meters above the moon's surface. After travelling so far and for so long, it stopped and crashed about one-and-a-half football fields away from the moon. 

One can easily think of the entire expedition and experience as a failure, since the lunar lander did not actually touch the moon. But I don’t see it that way.

Beresheet’s story was not only about its destination. It was equally about the journey.

It was Lillian’s funeral earlier that day that helped me see Beresheet as a success. As I stood above her grave and heard stories about Lillian as a mother and a friend, I realized that Lillian’s 99 years were all about her journey up until her final breath. 

Her life journey was the ikar, the essence of who she was – not her death. That was what we celebrated. 

Our sole focus should rarely be on the end game. Time and time again, Jewish thought and wisdom amplifies the journey, not the destination. 

The Yom Kippur liturgy reminds us over and over that our journey is relevant. When we list the al chayts, we acknowledge that our journey continues and we can do better next year. We might have engaged in foul speech this year, we might have been overly arrogant this year, we might have been stubborn, but we acknowledge what we did. We apologize and move on in our journey called life and hope to do better in the coming year. 

Journeys matter. 

In the Tefilat Hadereh, the traveller prayer, we don’t just ask God to get us there safely; rather, we list the parts of the journey where we request protection. We say:

May You rescue us from the hand of every foe, ambush, bandits and wild animals along the way and from all manner of punishments that assemble to come to Earth. May You send blessing in our every handiwork and grant us peace, kindness and mercy in your eyes and in the eyes of all who see us.

We request God’s protection all along the way.

When Abraham is told in Genesis 12, “Lekh Lekha, Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” he is never given an actual destination. The destination is deliberately kept from him.

The 19th century Sefat Emet learns from Lekh Lekha that a person should always keep walking and journeying. Journeying and moving on are essential parts of who we are.

We learn countless lessons from the escapades of the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness. They don’t even make it into the Promised Land at the end of the Five Books of Moses. The end game, the land of Canaan, is not what we focus on in our Torah. 

We spend week after week diving into and learning from their journey. 

Numbers 33 is one place where journeying is highlighted. The chapter specifically lists the places where the Israelites stopped and then set out from again. An entire chapter of the Bible is given over to listing places where the Israelites stopped!

Commenting on the itinerary, Rashi offers a parable.

There was a king who had a sick son

So he took to a distant place to cure him.

When they returned home the father began to enumerate all the stages,

Here we slept, here we caught cold, here you had the head-ache, etc.

(Midrash Tanhuma 4:10:3.)

This way. the family could share a travelog and a joint journey and history.

The journey was just as important as getting to the Promised Land. 

So often in life, we are so focused on the prize and the goal that we fail to acknowledge and appreciate every special moment along the way.

By listing all of the steps in their journey, Moses asks the people of Israel to stop and think about where they’ve been and what has happened to them. 

These individual experiences are just as important as where they are going. He asks them to slow down and think about all that has happened in the course of forty years.

Jotting down and remembering and focusing on our journeys helps us tell our shared stories, just like we did at the end of Lillian’s life.

The life story of a person, a people or an Israeli-made spacecraft can be rich and full of meaning and inspiration. 

The main goals of Beresheet, according to SpaceIL representatives, were to advance Israel's space program, increase the nation's technological know-how and get young people more interested in science, technology, engineering and math. 

The lander certainly did all that. It managed to make it to lunar orbit and send back a selfie from near the moon's surface. It almost nailed the landing.

Project team members met with more than 1 million Israeli children over eight years, taking the message of space-exploration to the masses.

When he realized that Beresheet did not reach its full potential, Morris Kahn said: "Well, we didn't make it but we definitely tried...I think we can be proud." This from a man who invested more than $40 million USD into the spacecraft. He might be a billionaire, but $40 million is not pocket change. 

Even Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was present at Mission Control, said following the crash, "If at first you don't succeed, you try again." He did not cry, he did not get angry, because so much was learned from the process and from Beresheet’s journey.

One of my favorite parables is the story of a poor woman whose children were constantly hungry.

One day she came home with an egg. 

She called her children together and said: “Children, you have nothing to worry about. I found this egg. Being a careful woman, I will ask my neighbor for his hen so that this egg will be hatched.

When the egg hatches, we will let the chick grow up, but we won’t eat it.

We will wait for it to lay more eggs. 

But we won’t eat the eggs; we’ll hatch them and then we will have many chickens. 

And eventually, we’ll sell the chickens and buy a nice cow. 

But we won’t eat the cow – it will birth more calves and eventually we will sell the cows and buy a large field and won’t be hungry anymore.” 

As she talked, the egg fell from the woman’s hand and it broke.

Planning for the future is important, but we must live in the present. 

Let’s focus on where we are on our life’s journey, rather than where we are going.

As we begin our annual 25 hour journey of introspection and conversation with God, I bless you with the words by Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weiberg, in A Modern Traveler’s Prayer- 

A prayer for the journey

We could say it every day

When we first leave the soft warmth of our beds

And don’t know for sure if we’ll return at night…

When we get in the trains, planes & automobiles

And put our lives in the hands of many strangers.

Or when we leave our homes for a day, a week, a month or more,

Will we return untouched by flood or fire…

to a home at peace?

How will our travels change us?

What gives us the courage to go through that door?

A prayer for the journey.

For the journey we take in this fragile vessel of flesh.

A finite number of years and we’ll reach

The unknown, where it all began.

Every life, every day, every hour is a journey.

In the travel is the discovery, the uncertainty,

The wisdom, the joy…

even the despair.

Every life, every day, every hour is a journey.

And setting forth is the reward, the blessing, and peace.

G’mar Hatima Tovah.