It has been a long time since I wrote in here. I started the blog several months ago, with high hopes that I would use it on a regular basis to share and express whatever is on my mind.
But it didn't quite work out that way.
It's not that I haven't had a lot on my mind, or a lot going on my life, or even a lot that I would love to share. It's just that I haven't taken the time to sit down and share it.
What makes the lapse even worse is that many of my friends have told me that I really need to get back to this. I have received a tremendous amount of positive reinforcement about my writing, and a great deal of encouragement to continue doing it and sharing it.
So, I won't make excuses. Instead, I will thank those who have given me so much encouragement, and apologize to anybody who thought when I started blogging so far way back when that I would not wait so long in between posts. I hope to do better in the future.
That hope actually provides me with a perfect segue into some of the thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head as we approach the end of the nearly month-long High Holy Day season. It seems to me that an underlying "theme" for Jews around the world this month could be labeled "Looking back while also looking ahead".
We started the holiday season with the Jewish New Year – Rosh HaShana (actually, we started getting "into the mood" a month before that at the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul). Our focus was on this past year – what did we do right, and where did we fall short. We start thinking about the Big Book which our tradition holds that God has open on this day – hoping to have been good enough this past year to be inscribed in the Book of Life.
For the week after Rosh HaShana we are concentrating on asking forgiveness from one another for all of the wrongs that did. Our sages teach us that we can only hope for and expect forgiveness from God if we have first asked forgiveness of those whom we have hurt. The week culminates with Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – when we take a full day (a little bit more, actually – 25 hours) and we go without any food or drink, as well as many other physical earthly comforts, in order to center our entire focus on asking God for His forgiveness. We have now stopped looking so much at the past year, and are looking at the New Year which just began, hoping that we can find a way to make ourselves better people in the coming year – both to God and to mankind.
A few short days after Yom Kippur, we begin celebrating the week-long holiday of Sukkot – the festival of Booths/Tabernacle, when we remember the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness that our ancestors endured before being worthy of entering the Promised Land of Israel. All of our meals are eaten in make-shift booths, and many sleep in them as well. These booths are symbolic of the temporary structures which served as homes for the generation of nomads that left behind a life of slavery and looked ahead to life in Israel. On the surface this would appear to be a hardship, but in fact it is a celebration – of life, of the new beginning after slavery in Egypt and after the tension and power of Yom Kippur today.
The holiday season ends with Simchat Torah – the perfect culmination of the whole "Looking back and ahead" motif. This is the day when we complete the annual cycle of reading the Torah – the Five Books of Moses, which are divided into weekly portions from the beginning of Breishit (Genesis) until the end of Devarim (Deuteronomy). We finish – then we immediately start again. This is a fresh beginning of reading and learning the Torah, matching the fresh beginning of our New Year, and our renewed commitment to be better people in the future than we have been to date.
For those who throw themselves into the deep spiritual meaning of this holiday period, it is both a time of intense introspection, and a time of rejuvenation. The holidays themselves are physically exhausting, but somehow most of us look forward to them all the same. They serve to remind us that life goes on; that there is no such thing as being so "far gone" that we cannot find it in ourselves to come back and to be the kind of people that God wants us to be, and equally important, that we ourselves should be striving to be within ourselves.
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