Saying Goodbye to the Summer and Greeting a New Year

September has arrived and as shocked as we might be, we have reached the preparation of our High Holiday season. Rosh Hashanah is around the corner and thus as we close out our summer with the Labor Day holiday we get ready for another new year in Cape May County. We begin to pack away our beach umbrellas and fold our beach towels and purchase our books and dust off our laptops and before we know it our summer is only a distant memory. As we pack up our play toys of the summer we begin to assemble the needs of serious work now that summer has ended we prepare to greet a new year.
As the fall approaches we Jews think about Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and we must ask ourselves ‘what have we done to come to terms with the New Year?’ and more importantly, with our memories of the year gone by. This is the time when we need to take a few moments to think about the year past and where we stand in our relations with others. As individuals we become tied to our opinions, often refusing to budge or even empathize with others. We often put our egos where our humility should be. Learning to become more excellent human beings involves being able to say that we have been wrong. It involves saying that we are sorry for the slights and the jabs, for the pig-headedness we have displayed in the past and for our unwillingness to bend and see things a different way from the approach we normally have been using.
Our sages admonished us that those who arrive at this holiday season filled with themselves and with an overabundance of pride will not engage in the benefits of what the Yameem Nora’eem (High Holiday Season) can bring: a sense of forgiveness and renewal. It is impossible to have that sense when one cannot admit having done anything wrong, having said nothing insensitive, and not being able to admit that there, indeed, were other ways a collective task or problem could have been approached. “My way or the highway” is the antithesis of these holidays and sadly has become a norm in our society. It reveals one’s arrogant sense of self perfection over a pursuit of becoming an excellent human being. We improve ourselves by returning to God in the act of Teshuvah, return.
Teshuvah, at its heart, involves a self perception of one’s essential brokenness in the universe and the never ending struggle we all go through to fit into this world, to have our thoughts and ideas be acceptable, to work cooperatively within a system even as we sacrifice a certain amount of our egos to do so, to recognize that none of us is perfect but that each of us is striving to cling to one another in faith and that we’re all trying the best we can to make our way to God. During the holiday season we need to know that we all need to cut each other some slack and prepare ourselves to be willing to forgive others and give more of ourselves.
The month of September we prepare for slichot and we learn to forgive as we enter the early stages of our holiday prayer by getting our minds ready for Tshuvah. At the same time, we must make ourselves more forgivable and be willing to forgive, even when its difficult.
As we prepare to embrace God with our prayers for forgiveness we are given the opportunity to change. The acts of asking for forgiveness are to put our bodies into action and this is why giving is so important. When we embrace the love of God we see that the greatest gift that can be given is often the gift of forgiveness. Now is the time to give the tzedakah (charity) of forgiveness to ourselves and to those around us and try to start our lives with a new heart.
This year our New Year comes later than previous Rosh Hashanahs, so late in September that we have extra time to prepare our minds and hearts for the judgment of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This unique month of September we are given this extra time to set aside old angers and make peace with old enemies and try and find our charity to finally forgive. On Slichot we ask God to forgive our mistakes but first we must forgive others and make our hearts ready to receive God’s embrace.
This is the final act of tzedakah that we can give the world, a second chance for a relationship with us. We ask God to give us another year so we begin this by taking it upon ourselves to give others a new opportunity to come back into our lives. We come together as a community to pray, so let us do it out of love and not spite, let’s rebuild bridges that have fallen and build new relationships that seem distant from us. This is the greatest act of giving a person can do, rekindling a flame in someone that had appeared burnt out due to bad feelings.
This High Holiday season we think of those in our community who have left us and who we won’t get a chance to make peace with because the time has run out. Don’t let any more time run out, try to make the chance for peace in your heart and embrace the true meaning of Teshuvah and prepare yourself for another year gone by.
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz is the spiritual leader Beth Judah Temple in Wildwood. He welcomes your comments at dvjewish@rof.net