Recent Divrei Tora
As we meditate on the upcoming year, we ask ourselves:
Who will we love?
What rightful action will we take?
Who will we help?
Who will we hug?
Pope Francis wrote in the final days of his life (and who better to quote on the High Holidays):
“The absolute truth of people, most of the time, only reveals itself in moments of pain or in the real threat of an irreversible loss.”
I recently opened my Machzor and noticed that at some point in time I wrote a note to myself on the inner cover: “Less than you can; all that you should”. I don’t remember writing it or who actually said it.
But it reminds me that today we wrestle with our own mortality, our pain and our foibles and hopefully we emerge from this process with clarity around our shortcomings and with the promise of finding a pathway and establishing a commitment to becoming our “best humans”
And so we seek forgiveness from God and from ourselves for the following -
For the sin of narcissism and arrogance
It is hard to dance with a partner when you are standing on a pedestal. Better to step down and join in the choreography of life
For the sin of extinguishing curiosity and embracing ignorance
“Know what you don’t know
Don’t do what you don’t know
For you won’t know what you can’t do”
For allowing the messiness of life to create self-doubt rather than using our innate resilience to leap over barriers
For withdrawing kindness and compassion especially from family and friends
And for the sin of living in our heads rather than coming out to play even when enjoined to do so by those we love
For succumbing to rather than befriending uncertainty
For the sin of defensiveness, anger and vindictiveness when confronted with truths about our behavior
For being the loudest voice in the room when others have so much more to say
For spending too much time on the “what if’s” and not recognizing the treasures of “what is”
And for the sin of demagnetizing our moral compass
For allowing ourselves to become addicted to the virtual world of cell phones, screens and social media and donning noise canceling headphones that reduce the screams of pain and suffering that cry out for our attention
For deliberating too long on rightful action but too briefly on how to bring it about
For being buoyed down by the weight of the things we cannot let go
For always searching but not discovering the riches that stand right before us
For deferring to fright and flight rather than fight when confronting evil
And for the sin of trying to repair the world but misplacing our toolkits
For engaging in transactional altruism, seeking recognition and thanks for our acts of presumptive kindness and generosity
And for failing to recognize the extraordinary concealed in the ordinary
For responding only to the loudest notes that punctuate our lives while failing to attend to the silences between those notes- the quiet spaces that allow us to remain attuned to our “still small voice”
For failing to imagine what brought every squeegee kid and homeless person to the corner of the road where the traffic light has turned red – and for being quick to judge rather than curious to understand
And finally for the sin of not having any idea what so many of the sins in the traditional Al Chet prayer actually mean but accepting that I probably engaged in all of them…
For all of these, forgive us, pardon us and grant us atonement
May we seek to be our best humans both for ourselves and for everyone we touch…
And may we all be inscribed in the Book of Life-
Thank you and Amen