teshuvah

A yearly reminder to return

Family friends in their 80s just came over to visit. It was perhaps their first time at our house in a year or so. They’ve been busy. They had a family member move back to Winnipeg, there’s been a pandemic and, well, we’ve been busy, too, with kids on summer break, work obligations, visits from relatives, and home renovation.

When they first visited, our new (to us) historic home was empty. While the house had great character, original workmanship and many good points, it also needed a ton of work. We’ve had it all, from asbestos and electricity to plumbing, insulation, and so many other repairs. It didn’t have a single bathroom that worked.

When they walked in today, they said, “Oh wow! It looks like you’re home! It looks like you really live here now.” My kids then took our friends on a grand tour. They were amazed and impressed by all that’s happened. They saw such big improvements and wanted to know what we’d done ourselves, what our contractors had completed, and when and how it had happened. It was wonderfully reassuring, and also strange. We hadn’t realized how long it had been.

I couldn’t pin down when last they’d visited, even though I looked at the calendar. Then I also noticed that it’s Elul, the Jewish month where we’re supposed to wake ourselves up. We hear the shofar each day if going to morning minyan, a way to remind ourselves that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are coming. We need to look inward, do teshuvah, which is usually translated into English as repentance. Another way of understanding this word is to read it as return.

I have heard sermons or read things that entreat me, as a Jewish person, to start repenting – it’s time to apologize, repair relationships and become a better person. We need the reminder that repairing relationships and apologizing for things we’ve done wrong is important all the time. It’s also a specific ritual to prepare for the High Holidays.

Even as we enter this teshuvah season, I’m thinking of that other definition, the notion of return. Our household has been working hard to cope, in good humour, through an entire year of living through a house under renovation.

We’re lucky – we have a home! It’s mostly been warm and comfortable. Still, we’re all sleeping in temporary places. I’ve had my clothing “organized” in a laundry hamper for the entire year. We’ve had times with one functional bathroom and no kitchen. During this year, there have been days when getting to my chest of drawers or my oven has been an impossibility. We’ve moved and lost things multiple times. We’ve had days without water or heat. Other times, my kids are going to sleep or practising piano or doing homework with contractors working and making noise in the background.

When I see the house through my friends’ eyes, it’s a huge undertaking. This renovation is, in some ways, helping return this home to its best self. When it’s complete, we will have opened up windows and doors that were closed off for 40-some years or more. Things will be safe, full of warmth, light and air, with electricity that’s up to code and even the installation of a much-needed structural beam.

Seeing this house change through my friends’ eyes made me think about this return concept. When we return to ourselves, and hear our inner voice again, it means several things. Our teshuvah/return helps us be the best we can be. First, perhaps we’ve lost our way, but, as the morning liturgy reminds us, we were created in the divine image. It’s like an old house. We have good bones! Maybe we need to do some upkeep, work to stay up to date. Returning to our best selves might require us to listen, pay attention to our gut feelings, do some renovation.

Also, the teshuvah or returning work might be different from year to year. To make a new year a fresh start, we might well have to return to our core values and strengths, open up disused spaces that had been blocked off in ourselves. Sometimes, we start by apologizing to ourselves, too. We all underestimate how far we’ve come and how much we’ve grown and changed. I know our family is guilty of forgetting how much we’ve dealt with over the last year. Although we do remind each other of the changes we’ve experienced, change feels like the only constant right now, as walls move, windows and doors are repaired, and the light comes in again. Through this, we never know which piece of furniture will need moving or what we’ll have to clean (again) because of construction dust.

It’s also about being grateful. Having a kitchen to cook in this summer has been a celebration. How lucky it is to have all this garden produce and to have a place to cook it in. So many don’t have a kitchen or a garden. Maybe they lost it to fire or a bombing. Every day, I feel grateful even as I’m exhausted by my new garden’s potential zucchini and squash crop.

This return work must be grounded in a bigger reality. More than one person has remarked to me that they couldn’t do what we’re doing. In context, though, I’m not sure it’s such a big deal to renovate an old house. People are fleeing wildfires, losing their homes and families, and suffering from war, famine and disease across the world. Living in the middle of a renovation doesn’t feel like too much. It’s a privilege to have a home and have the resources to undertake this repair.

When I’m considering my gut feelings, I know I have high (perhaps unreasonable) expectations of myself and others. I suspect others may approach self-improvement this way, too. Perhaps the biggest teshuvah is remembering that we return to ourselves, while understanding that others might be elsewhere on this path … and that’s OK. Wishing you everything good as we begin 5784!

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Teshuvah: a guide to repentance

Twelfth-century Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides described the sound of the shofar at Rosh Hashanah as a wake-up call for the soul. (photo from flickr.com/photos/gsankary)

The sound of the shofar at Rosh Hashanah, the great 12th-century Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides wrote, is a wake-up call for the soul. Its message: “Arise from your slumber! Search your ways and return in teshuvah and remember your Creator!”

Teshuvah is the central theme of the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, known collectively as the Ten Days of Teshuvah. Typically, teshuvah is translated from the Hebrew as repentance, but it literally means return, as if turning back to something you’ve strayed or looked away from. But that begs the question: return to what? Depending on the time and place, there have been different answers – God, a state of moral purity, the Jewish people and Israel.

The Jewish Experience at Brandeis University asked Near Eastern and Judaic studies professor Yehudah Mirsky about the history of teshuvah. Mirsky, who is also a faculty member of the Schusterman Centre for Israel Studies, is the author of Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press).

Ancient Teshuvah

The Hebrew Bible sees teshuvah as principally a return to God. “Come, let us return to the Lord,” the prophet Hoshea (14:2) tells the people of Israel.

In Psalm 51, King David seeks teshuvah for committing adultery with Bathsheba. Importantly, David’s confession is addressed to God because, as he says, “Against You alone have I sinned.”

Traditional rabbinical commentators have interpreted this to mean that teshuvah requires confessing your sins to God. Part of achieving intimacy with Him involves His knowing your sins. And only in that way can you return to Him.

Talmudic teshuvah

For centuries after the destruction by Rome in 70 CE of Jerusalem’s ancient temple, where Jews would say confession and offer sacrifices for atonement, the rabbis reworked biblical ideas and practices of teshuvah into a roadmap for spiritual and moral growth.

In the Mishnah and the Talmud, the vast collections of law, theology, interpretation, folklore and more compiled roughly between 200 and 500 CE, they called for introspection, changing one’s ways, and asking others for forgiveness.

This line of thinking reached its apotheosis in Maimonides’ Hilkhot Teshuvah (The Laws of Return). He placed confession and regret at the centre of repentance so that teshuvah, according to Mirsky, became a process of “moral and spiritual self-cultivation and self-education.”

Teshuvah was no mechanical act. It had to involve genuine contrition and the individual becoming a better person. In addition to being a scholar, philosopher, jurist and communal leader, Maimonides was also a physician.

“One senses his medical sensibility was at work here, too,” said Mirsky. “Transgression sickened the soul and teshuvah is the cure, a return to full spiritual and moral health.”

Cosmic teshuvah

Already during the talmudic period, rabbis had begun talking about teshuvah as a spiritual energy flowing through the universe that was created by God when He made the earth.

The medieval mystics who wrote the great texts of the kabbalah took this even further. They said teshuvah comes not only from inside the individual but is also a dynamic force all around us. To repent, you tap into it. As Mirsky put it, “You catch the wave.”

In the 13th-century Zohar, the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, teshuvah became a way of repairing a rupture or tear in the spiritual fabric of the universe. When the varying energies at work in the world – justice and mercy, male and female, tradition and change – go out of whack, teshuvah helps to rebalance them. In other mystical texts, return is seen as a kind of rebirth and the achievement of the soul’s deepest freedom.

Some 300 years later, Rabbi Isaac Luria, the great mystic of Safed in northern Israel, famously connected teshuvah with tikkun olam (healing the world). Through teshuvah, Jews perfect God’s work, helping usher in the Messianic Age.

For Luria, this largely meant a kind of spiritual healing. But, over time, and especially in the last century, Jews have begun to connect this to ideas of social justice, adding another layer of interpretation to Jewish messianic ideals.

Teshuvah and Israel

In Mirsky’s view, the Zionist movement secularized and redefined teshuvah.

Political passivity, which the rabbis thought was anathema to the survival of the Jewish people, was now considered a sin. Repenting involved identifying with the nationalist yearnings of the Jewish people for a homeland. In this way, teshuvah returned Jews in the diaspora to Israel, and the Jews as a whole to a more vital sense of group identity.

Kook’s teshuvah

Past and present interpretations of teshuvah came together in the work of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of modern Palestine and the leading thinker of religious Zionism. To him, all existence is rooted in God and seeks to return to God. That return takes the form of religious practice, social and ethical commitment, art and culture – everything we consciously do to make the world better for the Jewish people and ultimately all of humanity. And, all of these elements – the ritual and ethical, material and intellectual, the Jewish and universal – all need one another to do God’s work in the world. (For more on Kook, see Mirsky’s book.)

American teshuvah

Teshuvah in the United States reflects the inescapable individualism of American life. The great American Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel linked teshuvah to the nation’s ethos of spiritual growth and renewal. He wrote:

“The sense of inadequacy ought to be at the very centre of the day [Yom Kippur].… To put contrition another way, develop a sense of embarrassment.… We have no answer to ultimate problems. We really don’t know. In this not knowing, in this sense of embarrassment, lies the key to opening the wells of creativity.

One belief all Jewish thinkers share about teshuvah – the process only begins during the High Holidays. It’s afterward when the real work begins.

For more on teshuvah during the Middle Ages, see Mirsky’s article, “How a lover of wisdom returns” in Sources Journal (sourcesjournal.org/articles/how-a-lover-of-wisdom-returns).

– from the Jewish Experience / Brandeis University

Shattering complacency

The existential themes of the High Holidays are meant to create a sensitivity and appreciation of the precious significance of everyday existence. (Jordan Gillard Photography)

The themes of death and the “thinness” of human existence recur in the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and during the entire period, beginning with the month of Elul. This is not because of a morbid desire to undermine human confidence and autonomy or to shock us into fearing God out of a sense of helplessness and sin. The existential themes of the High Holidays are meant to create a sensitivity and appreciation of the precious significance of everyday existence.

Existentialists spoke about confronting one’s mortality as a necessary condition for achieving human authenticity. Although a preoccupation with death can create nihilism and a paralyzing sense of the futility of human initiative, nevertheless, the Jewish tradition believed that the themes of human mortality and finitude could be integrated into a constructive and life-affirming vision of life.

The language of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers, such as the explicit enumeration of the different ways that a human life can be destroyed, is not meant to terrorize us into self-negating submission. The stark, evocative imagery of the liturgy is aimed primarily at shattering complacency. The impact of this experience can be life-affirming insofar as it serves as a catalyst in a process of self-creation and moral renewal.

Focusing on human mortality and the contingencies that wreak havoc upon human lives heightens our sensitivity to the deadening effects of habit and routine. People often deceive themselves into believing that they can successfully defer living the kind of lives they consider worthwhile until some future time. While not questioning the importance of reflecting on the meaning of one’s life, they believe they can postpone dealing with this issue.

“Why become confused and troubled by the meaning of my life now? I can deal with it later, when I retire, when economic realities are more favourable, when I will be free of parental responsibilities.…” This attitude is naïve and self-deceptive because it ignores the real consequences of present patterns of behaviour and learning that can weaken and that ultimately extinguishes one’s natural capacity to live life deeply and seriously.

Another theme of Yom Kippur, teshuvah, is expressed in the call to return, to renew, to re-create one’s self, and in the appeal for divine forgiveness and atonement, in the recitation of “for the sin we have sinned …” and other confessional sections of the liturgy. The essence of teshuvah – the crucial principle without which this concept would be empty of meaning – is the belief that the past need not define the future. A person can break the causal chain of habit and defy the seeming necessity of repetition that suffocates spontaneity and the joy of life.

The call to teshuvah, therefore, is expressed not only in the plea to God for forgiveness and in the affirmation of God’s gracious love and reluctance to mete out punishment and retribution, but also, and most poignantly, in the repeated attempts at convincing the individual to believe in the possibility of change. The personal significance of Yom Kippur ultimately turns on the individual’s ability to believe that his or her life can be different. The major obstacle to teshuvah is not whether God will forgive us but whether we can forgive ourselves – whether we can believe in our own ability to change the direction of our lives, even minimally.

Teshuvah is grounded in the idea of an open future, in the belief that the possibilities for human change have not been exhausted, that the final chapters of our personal narratives have not yet been written. The sense of empowerment felt on Yom Kippur reflects an underlying faith in the power of the human will to break the fixed cycles of the past and to chart new possibilities for the future.

Many scholars who take issue with translating God’s name, ehyeh asher ehyeh, which was revealed to Moses at the burning bush as “I am that I am,” insist on emphasizing the future orientation of the verb ehyeh, “I will be.” For many, the Jewish concept of God must convey the idea of newness – of new spiritual possibilities in the future, of new ways of understanding and of relating to God. To sense the presence of God in one’s life is to believe in the possibility of radical surprise and of genuine human change.

Communal forms of worship must not be allowed to degenerate into automated, mind-numbing exercises in herd conformity. Our rabbis taught that, although Jews stood as a people at Mt. Sinai, each individual personally appropriated the word of God. We must not be intimidated by the High Holiday prayer book. Although we share a common liturgy, we must be capable of appropriating its significance in terms of our individual lives and concerns. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur challenge us to discover the meaning of personal authenticity and self-renewal within the context of community.

Rabbi Prof. David Hartman (1931-2013) was founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute. This article was first published in September 2009. Articles by Hartman, z”l, and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.

Suzuki at Temple Sholom

On Sept. 9, Dr. David Suzuki will speak at Temple Sholom on the topic We Claim We Are Intelligent: Then Why Are We in Such a Mess? (photo from Temple Sholom)

Temple Sholom has invited Dr. David Suzuki to speak at their annual Selichot program on Sept. 9, at 8 p.m. The award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster will present on the topic We Claim We Are Intelligent: Then Why Are We in Such a Mess?

Following Suzuki’s presentation, Temple Sholom’s Senior Rabbi Dan Moskovitz will join him in a conversation about our responsibility as people of faith and citizens of the planet to do the Jewish act of teshuvah, return and repair, for the harm we have caused in abdicating our commanded obligation to be guardians of the earth.

The theme of the program comes from Temple Sholom’s ongoing engagement with the environmental crisis through the lens of Jewish moral tradition. A responsibility further amplified by a sermon Moskovitz gave on the issue on Rosh Hashanah in 2019 that sparked a larger effort by the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.

Suzuki has taught recently that the COVID-19 crisis has had two enormous and related consequences – it brought much of human activity to a halt and it has given nature a respite. Both provide an opportunity to reset society’s priorities and head in a different direction.

Confrontation with the reality of a new epidemic should have subdued political and economic imperatives to scientific reality and the United States and Brazil have shown what happens when science is ignored or brushed aside. In a time of accusations of fake news, deep conspiracies and relentless trolls, scientists should have regained authoritative prominence. People have had to confront important questions about purpose, values, opportunities and constraints in the way we choose to live. The murder of George Floyd in the United States and the outbreak of racist attacks against Asians in Canada have revealed deep-seated racism and inequities that must be dealt with in a post-COVID world.

In this exploratory presentation, Suzuki touches on some of the stark questions and answers we’ve encountered, from our impact on the environment and our ability to change it, to our dependence on the human creation called the economy and the unfair treatment of our elders, Indigenous people, homeless people, and others. Suzuki puts out a call to action for all of us to rethink our priorities and learn the ultimate lesson in front of us – that nature can be far more forgiving than we deserve.

Temple Sholom’s Selichot program on Sept.9 is open to the community. Pre-registration is required via templesholom.ca.

– Courtesy Temple Sholom

Seeing God’s humanity, our own

A mosaic of the Akeida in Bet Alfa National Park in Israel. (photo from hartman.org.il)

For many of us, the approach of the Jewish New Year offers an opportunity to take a moment from our harried lives to reflect on life’s “big” questions. It is a time for many of us – across the religious spectrum – to think about our relationships with ourselves and our families, with our tradition and with God. For those of us who choose to spend Rosh Hashanah in synagogue, the holiday offers the opportunity to participate in a communal reading of some of our most sacred and paradigmatic collective narratives, which in turn have the potential to illuminate some of our most pressing personal dilemmas.

Two of the most important biblical stories we revisit every Rosh Hashanah are the binding of Isaac (known in the Hebrew parlance as the Akeida) and Abraham’s argument with God regarding the fate of the inhabitants of Sedom. These two accounts represent two different religious anthropologies: one of sacrificial self-surrender and one of assertive moral challenge. As I have previously written, the personal moral empowerment displayed by Abraham in the story of Sedom – his insistence on his own ethical intuition and God’s acceptance, in turn, of those claims – is, for me, the foundation of the covenantal relationship.

The account of the Akeida, on the other hand, presents a distinct moral dilemma: How do we begin to understand a God who would ask His most loyal follower to sacrifice his beloved son? There are many ways to approach the theological puzzle that is the Akeida. This Rosh Hashanah, as we pause to examine not only our relationship to the divine, but our personal family relationships as well, I propose rereading the story of the Akeida by looking at God’s character through an anthropomorphic lens.

Before I begin describing God in human terms, however, it is important to remember that we have a long and deep tradition of doing so. The Bible is replete with images of God experiencing “human” emotions. Throughout the biblical narrative, we are presented with a God who is alternately angry, jealous or ego-driven.

During the Jewish people’s sojourn in the desert, for example, Moses, like Abraham before him, finds himself in the position of having to plead with God not to destroy a people – in this case, the Jews of the desert generation. The Bible describes God in nakedly human terms, as Moses finds that he has to, in some way, appeal to God’s ego. The Midrash describes Moses grabbing hold of God and saying to Him, “I’m not going to let you do what you want to do to the Jews.” Moses even appeals to God’s public relations considerations: he reminds God that He not so recently delivered this desert people from bondage in Egypt; if He kills them now, the other nations will say that He took them out of slavery only to slaughter them in the wilderness. Moses tells God in no uncertain terms that he will not help facilitate a people’s destruction.

Moses has to convince God not to allow His “emotions” to overpower Him, not to let His anger consume Him. This is but one example of many throughout the Bible and the Midrash of profound anthropomorphism, of portraying God as a character full of human weaknesses, with the potential to be both vulnerable and volatile.

In examining the story of the Akeida, we are compelled to ask, How could the God of the covenant – the God who promised Abraham that a great and multitudinous nation would emerge from his son Isaac – command that Isaac be killed? How are we able to understand the covenant in light of this seemingly unfathomable dictum? In attempting to understand the God of the Akeida, and what the Akeida might mean for us today, I have found it helpful to look at God as a parent.

God made the covenant with Abraham. But, after He did so, He got nervous, He suddenly felt scared. He had given over enormous power to human beings and He felt His ego being threatened. Thus, when God commands Abraham to “Take your son,” Abraham senses intuitively that it is not a moment in which to approach God with his moral claims. When God says, “Take your son,” Abraham understands that the God who is speaking – the God of the Akeida – is a God who experiences His own authority as under siege.

Abraham knows that the moment of the Akeida is not a moment for encounter or dialogue, but a moment that requires silence. It is a moment when Abraham knows that his only choice is to be quiet and submit. Abraham, a lover of God, senses the divine mood. When Abraham stood in front of God at Sedom, it was, in part, because he felt that it was a time when he could approach God; he sensed that God was in a willing position, that there was a possibility that He would be receptive to Abraham making covenantal demands.

Abraham’s response to God is analogous to a child’s response to a parent who the child knows is feeling challenged or threatened. There are times in a family’s life when a child knows intuitively – as Abraham knew intuitively – that there’s an opportunity for discussion, a moment when he can be critical of his parents, and his parents will be receptive to what he has to say. But there are other moments when a child understands that his parent is feeling insecure; moments when the mother or father is terrified of losing his or her authority. A child knows that is not the moment to try to encounter the parent in critical relationship; it’s not the moment to remind the parent that, in the past, he or she has encouraged critical reflection. That is a reality of family life: parents can become terrified of losing their position of power; they can become frightened that their children misjudge their encouragement of critical reflection as a negation of their parental authority. So, in some way, I attribute to God the same weakness or the same dilemma. He feels threatened. He feels that He must assert His power and test His child.

Before the Akeida, Abraham is referred to as ohavai elokim, a lover of God. Subsequent to the Akeida, he is referred to as yerei elokim, a fearer of God. The question we are faced with is why must God demand Abraham’s submission and fear? Why was his love not enough? To understand the God of the Akeida, we have to understand that God has conflicting forces within Him. The Midrash on the Akeida paints a very strange portrait of a God who says to the Jewish people, “Please pray for me. Please pray that my attribute of compassion will overcome my attribute of justice.”

Who is this God that must pray to human beings for help in overcoming His impulses? Who is the God that needs to ask human beings to remind Him of compassion? The Midrash illuminates for us the reality of a God who is struggling to reconcile the opposing forces within Him. It is my view that the Akeida is a moment of God’s struggle within Himself. God tests Abraham because of God’s own internal difficulty balancing justice with compassion, fear with love.

How can we talk about God experiencing an internal struggle? The great contemporary biblical scholar Yohanan Muffs argues that it is only in human terms that we can most authentically grasp the nature of the divine. I share Muffs’ view that God’s humanity, so to speak, is essential to a true understanding of Him. Yet it is not only 20th-century thinkers such as Muffs, Abraham Joshua Heschel and I who have portrayed God in starkly mortal terms. Drawing on the tradition of the Bible and the Midrash, the rabbis of the rabbinic period routinely discussed God as having an interior emotional life. While this approach did not fit in with medieval philosophy, which maintains that God cannot take on any human form, that any change or emotion in God is a sign of imperfection, the great figures of the rabbinic period were not frightened to speak of God in the language of human psychology.

It is this tradition that empowers me to think of God in terms of psychodynamic maturation: to cite His shift from being a figure of complete and total authority to a figure who works in concert with human beings. It is the deep rabbinical tradition of ascribing human qualities to God that enables me to see a God who decides to become accountable to human beings.

And it is this precedent of anthropomorphism in the rabbinic canon that informs my view of the God of the Akeida as a parent struggling with his identity, grappling with the competing values within Him. He loves Abraham and He has planned great things for him, but God is beset by his own internal dilemmas, by his own conflicting emotions. This is the God of the Midrash, the God who says to Moses, “Hold me back, Moses, I’m losing myself.”

If this is a bold way of discussing the divine, it is no bolder than the way the Bible itself discusses God. Rather than diminish God in our eyes, looking at God in human terms enables us to understand Him on a deeper level. The God who experiences emotion, who experiences internal struggle, is a God who can enter into a relationship of mutual accountability with human beings. The God who experiences His own psychodynamic reality is the God of covenantal spirituality.

This Rosh Hashanah, as we examine our relationships with our parents and our children, with ourselves and with our tradition, we are all faced in some form or another with the challenge of balancing compassion with justice, authority with love. As the Jewish New Year draws closer, let us allow ourselves to draw on the wisdom of our shared narratives as we struggle to reconcile the competing values within us.

Rabbi Prof. David Hartman (1931-2013) was founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute. Articles by Hartman, z”l, and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.

On making a new start

Why is it so hard for many of us to shake off the past and begin anew? My Bride often tells me she finds it amazing how easily I forgive myself for my errors. She holds her misgivings about past actions to her breast for eternity. For me, when I forgive myself, I find it much easier to strike off in another direction, one which may, or may not, lead to a better result.

Maybe it has something to do with my background. As an adherent to Judaism, I have always been much taken by the ideas associated with the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah, occurring in the autumn, as determined by the lunar calendar, is one of our major holidays. It is a happy holiday, a time of feasting and family gatherings, celebrating that we managed to get safely through another year. And there are lots of wishes expressed that we might do the same again next year, even marking it in our spiritual birthplace, Jerusalem.

But there is a serious side to the holiday as well. The New Year will be followed closely by the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, when all Jews are assessed and judged as to what their fate will be in the year to come. So, the New Year is a time when all Jews are expected to examine their behaviours and make resolutions that, hopefully, will guide their actions more positively in the coming year.

To do so, one has to search one’s conscience, one has to admit to oneself all those things that we have done wrong, that only we know about. We have to admit to ourselves remorse for our actions that we know have not been correct in the light of our values. Then we have to decide that we will not do those things again. We have to forgive ourselves and resolve to do differently. Indeed, during this season, many individuals go out of their way to visit antagonists and others to whom they may have done wrong to beg pardon for any perceived excesses to which they may have been a party.

So, you can see that I come by my approach rightly. It was imbibed with my mother’s milk. Judaism is not unique in including this concept within its construct. It seems to be an important element within many religious and philosophical approaches as to how humans should live. The key thing to me is that we have to be able to forgive ourselves so that our contrition can motivate actions toward a new start.

I must admit I always feel refreshed when I am in the position of having cast off the constrictions imposed by ideas I have been forced to abandon. Ahead of me lie whole new worlds of possibilities. That old stuff didn’t work. What did I learn? Where can I go from here?

What about that idea that we discarded before as impractical, impossible? Could there be something in it? What about what Joe suggested, which we shouted down? Maybe we should ask him to explain it more fully. Could there be something in it that we missed? He has had good ideas before. What if we put that idea together with the one we had? Could that give us a better result? Anybody who has spent a part of his or her life confronting problems, and problem-solving, in concert with other people, will know that of which I speak.

Don’t we feel better after we have cleared the decks with an old adversary? Now maybe we can make a fresh start and work together to accomplish common goals that we share. Isn’t it great when the difference you have had with your spouse has been resolved and you have returned together to the zone of loving and sharing that you were in danger of losing? Isn’t that more important than things that may have divided you? Aren’t so many long-term relationships built by making new starts over and over again?

The Jewish New Year ethic is a part of how we can live our lives each day. Making a fresh start is what we can do every day we wake up. We all know there are things percolating on the back burner. We may not want to think about some of these things. We may push them off to the back of our minds because of their unpleasantness. But they don’t go away. They are the things we will have to tackle if we want to make a fresh start in some important area of our lives.

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His recently published Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.