Posts tagged renewal
Choosing Life in a Pandemic (Erev Rosh Hashanah)

Over the past many months, many of us have understandably become numb in the face of overwhelming cruelty, injustice, and death we have faced personally…. As we armored our hearts against the horror of the past year, we may have found we became less able to fully receive positive experiences: the love of friends and family, the taste of good food, the beauty of the natural world around us. Rosh Hashanah, yom harat haolam is not a time to judge ourselves for this: rather, it’s an invitation to wake up to how we are choosing to live. It’s an opportunity to return, to start over, to renew ourselves; to use our awareness of life’s fragility to live with a bit more intention, to open our hearts once more so they can respond to the challenges we face, and fully receive its joys — so we can live and feel more fully.

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What Matters Most? (Kol Nidre 5780)

Yom Kippur is designed to deepen our capacity for self-reflection: some of us fast, abstain from physical relationships, or dress in white like a burial shroud. As we do, we rehearse the death of the old year, the old self. According to our tradition, in order to begin a new time, we need to release everything from the old time. If we want to enter a new chapter in our lives then we must first let go of what we have been, or thought we would be. Before we can return to God, we must first relinquish everything we have said (or been) and everything we expect to say (or be).

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