Lately, everything around me has made me think about new beginnings.

It started when the last group of living hostages came home, and I found myself thinking obsessively about them—how they would be able to begin again after two years underground. Two years of darkness, fear, silence. Now, they are learning to live again in the full light of home.

Two years in captivity is almost beyond imagining. Many of them were injured, all of them scarred. Their healing will take time and patience; every trauma leaves its mark. The changes are profound and lasting.

Sometimes though, trauma can open the door to transformation. I know this intimately. The trauma of my own deadly cancer diagnosis—which I unexpectedly, but gratefully, survived—eventually led me to become a rabbi.

But it also changed something subtler in me, something that took years to unfold: I fell in love with adopting senior dogs.

My newest companion is a ten-year-old beagle who lost his home when his owner died. The shelter staff despaired of finding him a family. He wasn’t sick, just old. Old dogs are hard to place. No one wants to bring home a creature who will break your heart too soon.

And yet there is something deeply spiritual about watching an old dog step into a new life. They relax at first—partly because the chaos of the shelter is replaced by the quiet of a home—but then they brighten, as if realizing they’ve been given another chance.

It turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks. This one easily learned the rhythms of my household, found his favorite spots, and responds to a new name with tail-wagging joy.

Humans and animals alike, we grow older and we change. It is both inevitable and miraculous. Each morning is a new beginning. I wake, greet my dogs, and thank the Divine for another day.

This Shabbat, I find myself thinking of Abraham, who left his home simply because he heard a voice calling him to go. That voice made promises: that he would be blessed, and that he would be a blessing.

Like Abraham, I too have moved forward—into a life I never imagined and might never have chosen.

The former hostages are doing the same. We all are. None of us knows what the future will hold, or whether we will encounter God along the way. But we step forward nonetheless, trusting the promise—that somehow, in beginning again, we may yet be blessed, and be a blessing.