An Instant In An Eternity

After spending a month considering the approach of the Jewish New Year, the topic returns and returns in little ways. Rosh Hashanah is a time to remember. There are two reasons we do this. One so that we can look back at the good, the bad, the pain, the triumph, the mistakes, and the achievements of the past year. If we don't look back and evaluate, how can we build a plan to move forward? Two, it is to return farther back to our goals, hopes, and dreams of the previous year. We are to look at the larger picture of our life, our community, our country, our world and take stock. What are we trying to do on the larger, meta-macro level? What did we do and what remains to be done? It's a bit awkward to think about the start of the New Year as a time to be looking back. The secular New Year is a time to make resolutions and to plan for the future. Judaism teaches us that we can't move forward without the past. We must learn from our past, we must heal our past wrongs, we mu...

Rosh Hashanah provides us a time to keep thinking, considering, pondering the world around us, our families, our communities. It is a start, not an end. One of the starts we have comes as we turn to the beginning of reading the Torah (Old Testament) in just a few weeks. The stories, morals, and guidance offered in this text are intense, complex, and insightful parables to help us evaluate and consider our lives and our relationships with others. I heard the following observation recently and have been contemplating it further. Abraham was forced into two difficult situations with the women who were the mothers of his children. First, Abraham was forced to send his first son, Ishmael, away into the wilderness. Sending away his son severed his relationship completely with Ishmael and Hagar. Second, Abraham was instructed to sacrifice his second son, Isaac. He almost completed the act and killed his son, as he felt he was instructed by G-d. There is much ambiguity in the text abou...

We've made it, almost, to the end of Elul and Rosh Hashanah. This came up recently in my Facebook feed. It's really wonderful. It's warm and lovely. It comes from the 92nd Street Y in NYC and a whole host of Reform communities and leaders. The message is just fantastic. Obviously I don't have enough superlative words for it. And it starts and ends with the amazing Angela Warnick, my old babysitter and friend! I was transported back to my post " That grey area " from a few weeks ago. This is the kind of beautiful messaging we get coming out of the grey area of Judaism. And I'm struck by how little of this we get from the black and white. I don't get it, I just don't. There's nothing offensive in the message - a new year, a sweet year, a year of hope, a year of goodness for all. But yet, it's not the kind of message coming from Aish HaTorah or Chabad or any of the yeshivot or midrashot educating the current generation of young Orthod...

Having already established that the better choice in life is to take responsibility over placing blame - at least if we want to build relationships - the next step is to figure out how to both muster the courage to take responsibility and also build safe environments to allow others to take responsibility. It strikes me, based on a sample size of 3 children, that the fear of consequences is one of the major, if not THE major, hindrance to taking responsibility for our actions. When we don't know how others will respond to our confession, our admission of responsibility, it makes taking that step even harder. Interestingly, in the Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) services there are a number of times we recite the Vidui (confessional) prayer. It's almost poem like in our alphabetical recitation of our sins and it is done in the communal form - using plural language. We all stand together and out loud list these sins. Obviously the intent is not that...

Today, September 4th, is the first day of the Hebrew month Elul. Elul is the month that leads us to the Hebrew month of Tishrei. During Tishrei we celebrate the Jewish New Year, the Day of Atonement, and the Harvest Festival of Succot. It's a big month; lots of thought, contemplation, introspection, revelation - at the personal level. So appropriately the month before is taken as a run-up to this most important of months. I woke up this morning and thought about the idea of New Year's resolutions - so popular in the US. Not quite such a thing here in Israel, or in the Jewish community in general. I suspect part of it is that the celebration of the Jewish New Year is not a single day, wait for the ball to drop, kind of moment. Rather we take two days to celebrate the arrival of the New Year with customs and traditions in the home and larger community. And then we follow that up with the Day of Atonement 10 days later, with those ten days being viewed as solemn days of contempl...