Our Elul challenge theme this week is teshuvah/repent, the act and idea that is at the heart of the High Holy Day season.  On Saturday night, we will gather in-person and online for Selichot, honoring the Ashkenazi tradition of holding a service of penitential prayers and High Holy Day melodies on a Saturday before Rosh HaShanah. (In Sephardi/Mizrachi tradition, these prayers and melodies are recited throughout the month of Elul, usually late at night). Through these prayers and these melodies, our tradition imagines, the Gates of Repentance—a recurring image of the High Holy Days—begin to open. Nine years ago, the month of Ramadan coincided with the month of Elul, and I came across something written by Dalia Mogahed, the Director of Research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. She wrote: The path to God is through your weaknesses not your strengths. Go to God with your brokenness.  There is an [...]

Our Elul challenge theme this week is teshuvah/repent, the act and idea that is at the heart of the High Holy Days season.  For all of our families at Wise School and Aaron Milken Center, welcome Back to School! I love this day; even in a pandemic (maybe especially?) there is such joyous energy and excitement about what is to come. I love hearing the sounds of students reconnecting with their friends and with their teachers, breaking into new school supplies and new possibilities. And we also know that mixed in with the excitement and the possibility, there is always some nervousness and trepidation, worries about academics and social life, concerns about how the year is going to go. Those same emotions, the excitement and the worry, are meant to accompany us to the beginning of a New Year. The rabbis teach kol hahatchalot kashot—all beginnings are difficult. While the teaching appears [...]

Our Elul challenge theme this week is teshuvah/repent, the act and idea that is at the heart of the High Holy Days season.  Robin Casarjian, M.A., is the Founder and Director of the Lionheart Foundation and its National Emotional Literacy Projects. Years ago, I read something by her that has stuck with me: Forgiveness holds the promise that we will find the peace that we all really want. It promises our release from the hold that another's attitudes and actions have over us. It awakes us to the truth of our own goodness and loveableness. It holds the sure promise that we will be able to increasingly unburden ourselves from the emotional turmoil and move on to feeling better about ourselves and life. Is that how we imagine forgiveness? Each and every year, my eyes turn to the same teaching for the High Holy Days. No matter what new texts I [...]

Our Elul challenge theme this week is teshuvah/repent, the act and idea that is at the heart of the High Holy Days season.  The first stage of teshuvah, of the work of repentance, is introspection and reflection. The work of the month of Elul is known as heshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul. In modern Hebrew, heshbon is the bill at the end of a meal; here, in the month of Elul, it is a tally of the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, and all of the gray areas in between. But unlike Rosh Hashanah, the month of Elul—this month of preparation—does not feature God reviewing your deeds as a shepherd reviews their flock. No, the month of Elul is all about you, about us, about the work we need to do. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the State of Israel, taught that the primary [...]