Rabbi’s words on Selichot
Our beautiful Jewish year truly follows the drum of a different beat. Summers end is whispering in the breeze. Its time to begin again, to start over, to roll the dice and see where life can lead.
It is time to pack up the boxes of last year.
We are moving closer to the High Holidays with each new day.
Next week we will gather on Saturday evening for Selichot.
“Selichot, is the service that occurs on the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, unless Rosh Hashanah falls on a Sunday evening as it does this year, and then we back up Selichot to the week before. Why? Because we need that time between Selichot and the arrival of the Holiday to do the work required of us before the curtain goes up as the sun goes down and Rosh Hashanah begins.
We need time to reflect on who we are, where we’ve been and where we are headed.
It takes time to review our values by looking at what it was, that we valued this past year.
Did you value your relationships, your friends, your commitments, your promises, your responsibility for the uplift of the human race, God? Did God get a place to reside in the world of your life this past year?
Or did you value our cultures deep passion and insatiable hunger for money, status, power? Did you allow yourself to worship people, things, shallow ideas?
It takes time to look within and ask the important questions.
What did you value this past year?
Because that ends up being the summation of you were, how you lived, this past year, speaks of the values that drove you through those 364 days.
It is a time to make a renewed commitment to the real values that give honor and a legacy to a human life. To the values that the existence of Judaism comes to disseminate throughout the world, throughout all time!
We need time.
Insight and self reflection take time….
Have you reached out for those who share the stage where your life unfolds. have you found the places where you fell short and spoke harsh or sarcastic words when love and patience would have been a more noble response?
The horizon of the new year is coming slowly into view….and our yesterday crumble like castles made of sand…
We need time.
And yet, all that you have been in those fleeting moments of the past year have been captured by God, for what we are unable to see in the rush of time, not so for God’s vision. God sees and knows. God was present in the best choices you made. And for the worst, well, God waits for your willingness to reach back and try, just try to mend the fence.
Do the work. Forgive, dream, remember, imagine, cry and laugh. You have written another chapter in the storybook of your life, we just never know which chapter it is. The 20
th
, the 5
th
, the last? This is not ours to know yet it is ours to honor.
Most people would prefer to remain in a kind of gentrified denial than actually stop and truly look within to see who and what they really are.
A tragedy will force you there, but it’s the work of these High holy Days that must be done, to be of use to our souls when the walls are coming down, come down they will, for life will deliver its share of pain and disappointment to all of us, it can only be this way, it is the very nature of life for it is a constantly changing scenery. Some turns are the coasting on a perfect wave, but others are the tumble’s twist under an unseen undertow that wrestles you for air.
The question is, do you want to live your life as a driven leaf, dragged by the wind, here and there, a victim of happenstance being caught by the fickleness of weather, only to end up wherever the north winds blow or do you want to lay the path towards the highest human spirit that you can be?
This is why we need time, time to look into the life we have built, the people we have engaged, the strangers we passed, the choices we made in it all. Only then can we begin to make a new plan, to reach out and mend, stretch forward and dream.
Selichot comes to beseech us, don’t throw away this time. This is the work that can change it all around. This is the work that can begin the process of truly changing your heart and making it better.
Time is the gift that asks to be seen, as we wrap this year up. We need time to look inward and time to find remedy for the missteps of the past. And so Selichot cries out to us, don’t waste this time. Look in and reach out with compassion and love. We can all be so much more than we have been.
The years circle the sun as we run through our days,
May stillness catch you and ground your feet, so that you stop running long enough, to look back and in and honestly face the reflection in the mirror, as you look in to find your soul.
The holy days are approaching, and the chapter will be closed, take your place and hold on, for the ride through truth is glorious indeed.
May you find strength to do the real work so that this journey, this spiritual feast is more to you than a ploy. For, it is so, very much more.
Shabbat shalom
