The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, is a time for introspection, for reflection, for repentance, for seeking forgiveness, for examining one's behaviour over the past year and trying to fix wrongdoings or mistakes.

It makes the timing of tonight's Iranian onslaught all the more eerie.

The piercing call of the shofar traditionally blown every day in the month of Elul leading up to Rosh Hashanah was instead replaced tonight with the chilling wail of the air raid sirens.

Just as before Passover we felt that we had experienced a modern Pesah miracle, the hand of the destroyer literally passing over us, so now, this repeat Iranian missile attack and our salvation from it raises the hairs on one's nape, the plans of an enemy seeking our destruction ending instead once again with what to us feels like miraculous salvation.

Maybe it's a cliche to say that a brush with death can be a wake up call to do better, be better, but just because it's a cliche doesn't make it less real.

The call of the Elul shofar is a call to do teshuva, to repent, to make amends. All month long we've been hearing it at morning prayers, a deep, primal sound to stir the soul and the mind, to wake them from their everyday routine and realise their potential to be so much more, to do so much more in our world.

How much more so when that primal, natural, call is replaced by the mechanical shrieking of the sirens, a nation huddled in sealed shelters throughout the country awaiting its fate while the thuds and booms shatter the night overhead and everyone wonders which are impacts and which are interceptions and if his or her number could be up and what kind of world we will emerge to see when this is over.

To have experienced that massive assault once this year was enough, to go through it again on an even bigger scale, and to thank God emerge once again to find that the destroyer's plan was thwarted, and the hundreds of missiles were mostly intercepted or fell without causing injury, and for all this to have happened on the eve of Rosh Hashanah?

Of course we have tremendous gratitude to all the men and women who created Israel's impressive life saving missile defence system, I hope that goes without saying. And to our allies who played their part too. But being thankful for human success does not contradict the sense of having witnessed something greater at play.

Tonight our people were once again saved on a massive scale, we dodged this literal bullet. We need to reflect on that, take time to absorb the enormity of what we as individuals and as a nation just experienced.

Rosh Hashanah is also known by other names, Yom Hadin (The Day of Judgement) and Yom Hazikaron (The Day of Remembrance). Tomorrow evening we will usher in the New Year with communal prayers and meals that while festive also include sombre reminders that according to Jewish tradition our fate very much still hangs in the balance but we have the ability to make a difference.