The rhythms of the Jewish High Holy Days, this period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, are moving me deeply this year.
I seem to need to tell those I love that I love them more often and to let them know that I know I’ve not been perfect this last year. And I find myself acknowledging hurts I have been holding onto and opening my heart a little wider…to others and even to myself.
Perhaps the divisiveness of our current politics makes the goal of atonement more urgent. To Atone. To be “At One.”
Atonement calls us to make amends for wrongs done, for responsibilities unattended, for failures of attention to our promises and commitments.
Atonement points us to the repair of what has been broken, to mending of relational fabrics that have been stretched or torn.
Atonement is about the process and the hope of restoration.
In the Jewish liturgical year, this period comes around each year, instructing each of us that our failures and our shortcomings do not need to define us. The message is that it is possible to begin again in love.
Perhaps it is the insistence that a new start is possible that I find so compelling. We get so much encouragement to accept brokenness as inevitable. We can lose the vision, or lose faith in the vision of wholeness and compassion.
Yom Kippur serves as an insistent reminder that we need to allow ourselves to imagine a different way, to dream a better dream, or our most cynical and fatalistic fears will come true.
Rev. Victoria Safford writes of this season:
“Imagine. Something yearns in us to come round right. Something creaky, rusty, heavy, almost calcified within us tries—in spite of us and of all our fears and self-deceptions—to turn and turn…and come round a little truer. You get to choose now, you have to choose, whether and how you will participate in restoration.”
Our annual Unitarian Universalist Yom Kippur Service will be celebrated next Tuesday evening. Our new Intern Minister Mira Mickiewicz and I will lead us through the liturgy. The music promises to be extraordinary. This is a prayerful and participatory service. This is not a service just for those who identify as Jewish. Not in the least.
If you are feeling the need to acknowledge shortcomings and find a space in your spirit to make a new start, I hope you will join us in Eliot Chapel at 7 p.m.
Blessings in this new church year.
Bill