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Guest Article for the Everyday Holiness Program The most powerful High Holidays experience of my life was eight years ago. By that Rosh Hashanah, I hadn’t yet returned to work after the nightmare of the attack on the World Trade Center a few blocks away. The charley horse from walking down 42 flights of stairs and up several miles of Manhattan had faded, and my ash-covered clothes long since in the trash. I had a hacking cough, my lungs trying to get rid of the burnt airplane fuel, building, and human suffering that were forced into them. My life’s stride was broken, and I hadn’t yet found it again. There I stood in synagogue, trying to sing with the congregation. But the chaos came back to life in my mind, connecting itself to resonances in the words of the prayer. My throat clenched midsentence, emotions refusing to let me trap them in words. I sat back in my seat, and with the normal channels blocked, the prayer dripped from my eyes onto the book on my lap. I swore to myself that this would theyear, the one when finally the old me departs and the person I want to be will be born. That year, I didn’t need the shofar to wake me up to repent. My ears still echoed the sounds that had pierced my shell. Yet as the following Rosh Hashanah approached, I looked over my spiritual accounting for the year, and I grew frustrated. The list I made of things to work on didn’t differ all that much from the one made back in 2001. What happened to what I promised myself would be “the year”? The Torah tells us that it was only forty days from the revelation at Sinai until making the Golden Calf. Rav Kook, Israel’s first Chief Rabbi explains (Orot haTeshuvah ch. 2) that spirituality must be developed, but the first tablets came from without and suddenly, carved by G-d and handed to us. And thus the holiness was as easily lost. Spirituality must be developed. Even as a gift from G‑d, there is no guarantee of permanence without our effort. This is why Moses is commanded with the second tablets, “carve for yourself.” A person must work at it and not expect change to just come of itself. Buried under all the rubble of 9/11 was a gift, an environment that called upon us to grow as people. But like the first tablets, it didn’t come from within. As the world slowly returned to something more like it was before (although never again the same), so did we lose much (but not all) of that personal growth? The Kotzker Rebbe once asked his students: There are two people on a ladder, one on the fourth rung, and another on the tenth. Which one is higher? The rebbe’s answer was succinct, “It depends which one is ascending the ladder and who is going down.” The journey, not the destination, is what matters. Holiness is measured by our engagement in becoming, so why do we think of teshuvah, repentance, in terms of who to be by Yom Kippur? My dream of having “the year” was deciding to be someone new. Teshuvah as motion, getting from point A to the desired point B. But with velocity comes momentum, and this dream was really my expecting to shift that on the proverbial dime. Expecting sudden relocation to get to that point B is as unreliable as setting oneself a destination without planning the journey. A different metaphor: teshuvah as acceleration – changing the direction and speed we’re taking in our lives, changing the course of life’s journey to aim for that point B, rather than simply expecting to leap there. The goal to set for the season is that by the end of Yom Kippur we have a plan for that year’s growth, and are more engaged in the process of change. It is a time for gathering the means to implement holiness in our lives, and for starting to use those means or tools. Through such efforts, we will hopefully look back on this year as “the year” even as it comes to an end. To read an unabridged version of this essay go to: http://www.aishdas.org/asp/911.shtml
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