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

How did God create the world? Through speech. God said, Let there be light, and there was light. God said, Let there be dry land on the waters, and there was dry land. The one exception was us. We were created by breath.

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

Our behavior is stored forever in our children’s hearts. A good question to ask ourselves as we plunge into the process of Teshuvah on Rosh Hashanah is this: What would we read about ourselves if our own children wrote a book about who we were? How does our family see us?

Moses and the rabbis insist that we take responsibility for what is happening to us. Moses and the rabbis insist that we acknowledge our complicity in the things that keep happening to us over and over again.

Forgiveness, it has been said, means giving up our hopes for a better past.

Teshuvah, a Hebrew word that we struggle to translate. We call it repentance. We call it return. We call it a turning. It is all of these things and none of these things. It is a word that points us to the realm beyond language, the realm of pure motion and form.

The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe, but a will to wonder.

That’s why we were created: to be the way we are and not some other way.

They resisted every impulse to criticize him.