This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“All are judged on Rosh Hashanah and the verdict is sealed on Yom Kippur,” says the Tosefta, an early compendium of talmudic teachings.

Choose life so that you may live.

The Sabbath is a time when we inhabit ourselves this way. This may be the real reason so few Christians or Jews observe the Sabbath anymore. Work, commerce, and our usual frantic rush of activities are all devices we use to distract ourselves from ourselves, to keep from looking at who we are, to keep us from fully inhabiting our lives. Perhaps the

neither the rabbis nor Moses cared a fig about history. They weren’t historians; they were spiritual leaders, and spiritually, the only question worth asking about any conflict, any recurring catastrophe, is this: What is my responsibility for it? How am I complicit in it? How can I prevent it from happening again?

Heaven thinks that the poor are to be helped, not blamed. But the primitive impulse to blame the poor for their plight persists.

We should eat to the point of satiety, but not beyond that point. We should eat only what our soul desires, only what our body requires, and not what our unconscious desires bid us to eat.

all these things—fullness, decline, destruction, renewal, tearing down, rebuilding—are actually part of the same process, points on a single continuum, consecutive segments of a never-ending circle.

Thank God for this one run up the river, this blessed, silvery sliver of a moment in which we may express our divine gift or we may not.

while a balanced budget is a perfectly legitimate social goal, it is totally irrelevant where social welfare is concerned, at least according to Jewish law. By Jewish law, the only thing that may be considered when helping the poor is the need of the poor. We are not allowed to say, We will not care for the poor because the budget won’t be balanced