Mahmoud Sulaiman; Unsplash
Throughout most of the year many of us compartmentalize and push aside the pain and suffering both within us and around us, the big questions of harm and hope.
On the High Holidays, we look directly at all of it. We stop. We recognize, with fear and awe, the vast gap between the world that can be—the visions of mutual aid, genuine respect and care, peace and justice—and the world that we have now which has so far to go. And we recognize each of our parts in widening or closing that gap. We admit both individual and collective wrongdoing and we try not to look away.
It all builds towards the moment that the “gates close” at the end of Yom Kippur, the moment when our prayers are recorded and sealed. However, these holidays are also rooted in the recognition of change, the premise that we can own up to our faults, make amends and do better. And that pushes against the idea of a sealed book.
If we hold responsibility alongside possibility, then I believe that at the end of the High Holidays a set of gates does not close but rather opens – that we come back to life after imitating parts of death, able to walk out of the room and be better, be different, be more than we have been before. Repentance is about believing in the possibility of change – the possibility that another world could exist and that it is on us to keep building it.
Our Transformative Teshuvah resource explores all of these ideas from many powerful angles.
• In our Vision section, Rabbi Alana Krivo-Kaufman offers a daily ritual for cultivating radical possibility and obligation.
• In our Accountable section, Shahanna McKinney-Baldon speaks to what it means to take an accounting of the soul.
• In our Home section, the Jewish Youth Climate Movement challenges our understanding of “from generation to generation.”
• In our Loss section, Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein delves into the nature of broken-heartedness and healing.
• In our Voices section, Rabbi Gabe Greenberg explores connections between repentance, freedom and incarceration.
• And throughout the guide, there are essential rituals, prayers and reflections from our colleagues at Not Free to Desist, the Inside Out Wisdom and Action Project, and from many other brilliant organizations and individuals.
We hope that these resources offer you pathways into the power of these holidays and that they can inspire us towards taking responsibility for a more just year ahead.
Happy new year (shana tova)—may we work together towards a better year ahead.
— Sarra Alpert, Chief Institute Officer, Avodah
