Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have just passed. As a child the High Holy Days were always a bit of a mystery. My parents would bring my older brother and sister and me to synagogue, and being the youngest I spent most of my time playing with other kids.
As I got older I would sit with my father in our large synagogue, surrounded by older men wearing tallit and saying prayers. They would bring their fists to their chests as the list of sins to be forgiven was called out, one by one, and they would spend long periods of time during the Amidah, the silent prayer, praying on their own.
It didn’t take long for me to sense the unique qualities of our aptly named Days of Awe. When I left for college I found a nearby shul and was able to share with other students living far from home our mutual desire to reconnect with our Jewish faith and Jewish community during these very special services.
The one thing I remember most from my childhood about the High Holy Days was the blowing of the shofar. As a child it was riveting, even haunting, to hear that sound, and it remains so every year. As a child, my parents told me the blowing of the shofar was a wake-up call to examine one’s life. It was, they said, a call to be human in every sense of the term, responsible for oneself but also for others.
Over the years, however, the blowing of the shofar has taken on additional depth and meaning for me. Rather than just waiting for that wake-up call, go to your synagogue during the High Holidays with a spiritual agenda of your own. Even if you just stay home, reflect about your life and that of others. Don’t passively expect the blast of the shofar to do it all.
Instead, enter the Days of Awe boldly, with your own blast as well, and begin once again to think about your life and the effect it can have on those you love as well as humanity as a whole. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur should also remind us again and again that ethical and moral behavior can never be dismissed as irrelevant, for individuals or for governments.
As Jews, but especially as Jews who have rejected reliance on violence, we can’t be passive, waiting for anyone or any one event to awaken. We can’t depend on the annual blast of the shofar to make us continually examine and re-examine our lives. Rather, we need to select those issues — personal and otherwise — to address so that when we hear that blast from the shofar, it will not be merely a wake-up call as much as motivation to continue being as human as we can be.
With these thoughts in mind we extend a heartfelt L’ Shana Tova to all of you — Jews and non-Jews alike — from all of us at the Jewish Peace Fellowship and the Shalom online newsletter. May this be a very good year!