I am in awe

A good year to all, of course, including those who are not Jewish and I wish those who fast on this solemn day an easy one.

I am not religious but having been raised in the Jewish tradition I am still awed by and in love with the sights and sounds of it.

Kol Nidre is sung the evening before the day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish lunar calendar.  Jewish holidays begin on the evening before the day they are  celebrated.  Kol Nidre, I have always thought, is one of the most beautiful chants in Judaism sung the night before.  It means literally "All Vows."  It is a most plaintive and solemn chant sung at the beginning of the end of the Days of Awe -- 10 days beginning on Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year) and ending on Yom Kippur dedicated to prayerful repentance for ones sins and a promise not to man but to God to do better.  It is said on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed asking the giver of all life to bless us with another year of it.

These days are dedicated to thought and reflection.  It is for us to take a kind of inventory of one's less laudable actions hoping on Yom Kippur one will be forgiven for them by a higher power who we ask to inscribe us in the Book of Life.  Kol Nidre is a song to make null and void all previous vows made not to men but to God.  They are vows we are permitted to erase and new ones, better ones made. Yom Kippur is a plea to a higher being no matter whom you think that being to be which has a dictate over the life and death of all. I wish all a long life, a good life, a happy life and that those unhappy times we all face in life we do so by our search for meaning in them.

In the concentration camps during the Holocaust -- the murder of the 6+ million Jews of Europe -- no matter the tortures inflicted by their cruel masters, no matter that death hovered around them like a dark fog bringing to those who were its prisoners -- most of them -- the slap of it but not by the prisoners' own hands.  Most wanted to live.  The question to me always was why with torture, sickness and sadness all around them did they choose not death but life.  Why was suicide for them usually not an option?   The German 19th century philosopher Schopenhauer tells us the strongest force in all humanity is "the will to live" and they tried to do so.  Some overcame the most bestial conditions and lived.  I am in awe of that. 

When I look around our nation and, indeed, the world hate is spewed from every corner of it.  Our nation has devolved into two camps who will not even talk to each other and whose leader promotes and basks in his discordant conduction.  How can the life of a nation prevail when hate courses through its veins poisoning our life-giving awe inspiring democratic system threatening to end it?  We must -- all of us -- try to do better and rescue it.  I am in awe of this life, this planet and the decent human beings that occupy it risking their own lives to save others.  A relative whom I loved died of ALS.  Even with his torturous affliction his license plate read "I luv 18."  It is significant, because it is the numerical value of the word Chai in Hebrew, which means life.   He loved life no matter the vicissitudes of it.

I am in awe of this planet, I am in awe of all life that surrounds it, and I am in awe of us who to strive to do better and sew a tapestry of love and not hate; of unification and not division.  I am in awe of that.  May those who strive to make a fairer, more just world be inscribed in the Book of Life.