Thru Other Eyes

Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement, 2012 - My prayer

Tomorrow night, Tuesday night, the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement begins. A day to make final reckoning with our behavior and our relationships with the people and the world around us. One last chance to forgive and ask forgiveness from those we have hurt and those who have hurt us. One last day of fasting, prayer and introspection before God enters his final judgment in our individual Book of Life.  With great humility, we appeal to God for another year. Another opportunity. Another chance.

You know, seems like all three major monotheistic religions have these important and central holidays and/or rituals that focus on coming clean with our behavior and asking for, giving and receiving forgiveness. Those holidays or rituals when we honestly examine our behavior. Check out the bad stuff. Acknowledge the good. Committing to ourselves and to our God to do more of the good stuff. The Jewish version started with Rosh Hashanah, our New Year,  followed by ten introspective days of awe and finally culminating with Tuesday night's Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement. For Muslims, I believe many of the same themes are present in Ramadan and in the holiday at the end of the fasting month -Eid al fitr. And for Chrisitans, there's confession I guess.

As I think about it, these holidays and rituals must either be...

Rosh Hashanah 2011 - Shana Tova -- Happy New Year

There are many themes that are relevant for Rosh Hashanah and the ten days of awe that follow, cluminating in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The image that comes this year to my mind is that of the holiday candles we light as the sun begins to set on 'Erev Rosh Hashanah' - the evening that Rosh Hashanah begins. There's a lot of darkness in the world these days. And we are the only ones who can drive out the darkness and bring in the light.

I wish each and every one of you a Shana Tova - a good New Year - and may it be a year of sweetness, health, happiness and most of all, a year of light.

Nationale Dodenherdenking (Remembrance Day) 2011

Tonight at 8 PM we celebrate Remembrance Day in honor of all our citizens who died in WW-2 and in any armed conflict since then. In Amsterdam, one of the sub-themes of Remembrance Day this year is generating awareness of just how Jewish the city was until almost all her Jewish residents were shipped off to the concentration camps where very few came back from.

A database has been created of all the 21,662 houses in the city where Amsterdam's 62,000 Jews lived who died at the hands of the Nazis. The neighborhood where we live was apparently one of the most Jewish neighborhoods of the city. Three of the four apartments in our building, Rijnstraat 40, were occupied then by Jewish residents, all of whom died in various camps. One of the newspapers published a special segment with all of the city's "Jewish addresses" and a poster to put in the window on Remembrance Day if your apartment was listed. The hope was that from the street it would be visibly clear just what how much the city lost in human terms when it lost her Jews.

Pre-war Amsterdam was heavily influenced

Pesach - Its time to celebrate Freedom

Tonight Jews all over the world start celebrating the week long festival of Passover, or in Hebrew, Pesach. Although the holiday has many features, its primary focus is of course the story of how the ancient Israelite tribes become free from their slavery in Egypt. 

The Talmud, Judaism’s ancient book of law and philosophy, states with regard to the Passover Seder:

"In every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as if they are right now leaving the slavery of Egypt; as the Bible says, “Remember that you were a slave in the Land of Egypt.””  The Talmud’s description of the Passover Seder meal is not one of remembering the past but of reliving the transitional moment from slavery into freedom (emphasis added)." 

But what is ‘freedom’ and what are the implications in terms of responsibilities and obligations for people who enjoy freedom in a world where so many are still deprived of what we would consider the most basic human freedoms? 

Franklin D Roosevelt introduced a concept of four human freedoms that should be considered universal rights of every human being: 

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

Janis Joplin on the other hand sang, "Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose." 

Events in Eastern Europe over the past couple of decades and events in north Africa and the Middle East over the past months have shown us that individuals will face terrible dangers and personal risk to achieve their own freedom. To paraphase Janice Joplin, these people seemed ready to die for their freedom when they felt they had reached a point where they had nothing left to lose. 

Pesach is a wonderful moment to realize how incredibly blessed we are with the freedoms we enjoy. It is an excellent opportunity to consider all the people in the world who do not enjoy all, or any, of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms.

It is the appropriate moment to rededicate ourselves to standing with people of good faith everywhere who are fighting for the most elementary freedom of self-determination or for any of the Four Freedoms. 

The mistake that we who celebrate the holiday must resist is limiting our focus and attention to an inner-directed and perhaps self-absorbed celebration of our own freedom, regardless of how grandiose an event it was when the children of Israel were released from their bonds of slavery.

For history teaches us over and over again, that we can not truly be free until all are free.

 

My Thoughts on Rosh Hashanah 2009

(Note: if you'd like some appropriate background music click here.) 

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, heralds the beginning of the Ten Days of Awe. These ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, are a time of intense introspection as we contemplate our deeds in the year passed and according to tradition prepare ourselves for God's judgment.

Jewish tradition says that on Yom Kippur, God irrevocably seals our fate for the coming year in the Book of Life. As is recited in one of Rosh Hashanah's important prayers the Unetanah Tokef, "On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed."

It is in these 10 days of awe that we have the chance to intervene in the fate that God provisionally has in mind for us: "On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed." On Rosh Hashanah one could easily descend into total panic. "Oh my, look at this list of all the things I have done: the times I hurt someone's feeling, gossiped, lied, cheated, cut corners with my own morality, let others down, didn't do as much as I could have to help someone, didn't give as much as I should have to the poor and needy, didn't care as much as I should have about someone's welfare... And now only ten days to change my fate! How?!! How??!! How??!!!!"