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.
 |
