If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Before We head off to the night club to party, before we pop that champagne cork, let's take a few steps back. The New Year is not just a chance to party, it is also a time for starting over.
The story of creation begins again this week in synagogues around the world. This annual cosmic rewind gives each of us a chance to deepen our thinking about the stories we heard as children.
As O'Donohue says, "There is a place in you, still, where there is a seamlessness and tranquility. And the intention of prayer, spirituality, love, is to now and again visit that inner sanctuary."
During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for the first truly extended period of time, I returned to myself. I got to experience myself in a state of completion, and got to see and feel who I am when I am whole.
No other month has as much sacred choreography as the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar, Tishrei. But only for the festival of Sukkot does the Torah mandate joy three times.
The painful truth? Your hands, my hands and the hands of everyone else we know are tools of oppression. They directly and indirectly cause suffering in the lives of God's creation -- human, animal and more.
The fast will soon be here. On this Yom Kippur, the highest of high Jewish holidays, I'll be doing my best at not-eating.
For 10 days a year, I try to live my life as a prayer. I reflect on infinity, aware, as the psalmists, that life is a grain of sand and that I am powerless before the world.
The road to wholeness after Irene for some was quick and for others longer. Some are still travelers on that journey. The message of the shofar can help remind us not to lose hope along that path.
Only when we do good together, and see ourselves doing it, will we have hope. God needs us to do this. So does the world.
Is it really such a healthy thing to feel oneself to be inadequate, judged and deficient? Does it make us better people, or does it make us more judgmental ourselves? And does God judge us, or only love?
These 10 days are always very special to me and remind me why I so appreciate my religion. Most significantly, it is a time to chart a more righteous path for the coming year.
I tell you these stories... because, I believe that I am the recipient of a recurrent miracle: someone two, three, four generations ago, cradled something precious and they lobbed it across the generations to me and I caught it.
Our tradition tells us: "For transgressions between one person and another, Yom Kippur does not serve as atonement, until the one offended has been appeased."
I broke up with the boyfriend and remembered something else that I had heard about the Golden Mean: Sometimes you have to hit the opposite extreme in order to reach the middle.
