HAPPY JEWISH NEW YEAR!

This is always one of my favorite times of year – and no, it’s not just because the pennant races are heading down the home stretch and the football season is beginning to take shape. For those of us who are Jewish, it is a time for reflection and a time for prayer.

Of course, it’s easy enough for me to reflect and pray all year around. I can do that by myself, or I can go to my synagogue on any given Friday evening and do it with several dozen others. But none of that compares to attending a temple during the High Holidays. I adore the sensation of looking around a room and seeing the better part of 1000 people chanting in unison their love for God or commitment to their fellow human beings.

Purportedly, the purpose of the High Holidays is to inscribe ourselves for a good year by sincerely atoning for all of our transgressions. We are required to apologize directly to those people who we’ve wronged, but for “sins against God,” we need only atone during the High Holidays and all is forgiven.

I don’t believe for a second that there exists some kind of super-mind who is judging our conduct and preparing to either reward or punish us depending upon the sincerity of our apologies. Then again, such a belief is hardly necessary to recognize the value of atonement or the virtue of expressing gratitude. Few activities are more beneficial than time spent taking stock of our successes and failures in practicing humanistic ethics. When we atone for our mistakes, we give ourselves a chance to avoid repeating them. When we express gratitude for that which makes life worth living, we remind ourselves that none of those things should ever be taken for granted.

It cheapens the value of the High Holidays to think of them primarily as opportunities for us as individuals to ask God for help. Prayer shouldn’t be about asking God to help us. Prayer should be about asking ourselves for inspiration to honor God – and that means to beautify God’s world, and ours. There are few places better able to generate such inspiration than a crowded synagogue during a High Holiday service.

Sometimes during the High Holidays, I permit myself a joyous thought at the idea that I live in a county that has so many Jewish residents that every public school child gets the High Holidays off. It’s not that I want every gentile to convert. Yet the fact remains that were it not for Hitler and his henchman, and were it not for legions of men who for centuries forced Jews to renounce their faith at the point of a sword, our globe would be populated by many, many more children of Jacob. To revel in the fact that I live in a community that is hospitable to Jews is simply to recognize that each of us who is proud to associate ourselves with this rich spiritual tradition is making the strongest possible statement against Nazism. Think what you want about us, but we survive! Baruch Hashem.