High Holiday messages

Editor’s Note: The Pinellas Board of Rabbis invited its members to offer a short message for the Holidays. The following are from those rabbis who responded by presstime.

Our liturgy for the High Holy Days contains many aweinspiring prayers, which reflect our yearnings. The Sh’ma Koleinu is a prominent prayer during these Days of Awe. We plead to God to have compassion and mercy upon us, to “Hear our voices…” as we petition Him for life, health, prosperity and security during these difficult times. As a pre-requisite for the recital of this well-known prayer, we should discipline ourselves to listen to the voices of our loved ones and neighbors. If we do that, hearken to their needs and sensitivities, and respond as best as we can, we will become better human beings and transform our lives. Based on our merits and good deeds, may our petitions open the heavenly gates; our Creator will hear our voices and will be gracious and answer us.

Rabbi Cyrus Arfa

B’nai Emmunah, Tarpon Springs

Our High Holy Day experience can be greatly enhanced if, in addition to sharing festive meals with family and friends and worshiping in the synagogue, we engage in some serious thought. I find it very helpful to spend a little time thinking about the themes of the holy days and reviewing the way I conducted my life during the past year.

An ancient Jewish sage observed that two major purposes of the High Holy Days are to help us acquire a sense of awe of God and of God’s creation and to help us atone. My colleague, Rabbi Richard Levy has suggested that there are several things we can do during this season that give our process of introspection the direction that it needs in order to be most effective. He suggests every few days beginning during the weeks prior to the High Holy Days, we take a few minutes and quietly reflect upon the blessings that God has given us during the previous year. He suggests that perhaps we list three blessings each time, so that by the time we worship on Rosh Hashanah we can bring a list of perhaps a dozen blessings for which we are especially grateful. Rabbi Levy writes his blessings on little pieces of paper that he inserts at various places in his High Holy Day prayer book, so that expressing awe and gratitude for those particular blessings becomes part of his worship experience.

Regarding atonement, Rabbi Levy suggests we engage in a similar process where we make lists of the things we did wrong. With these lists, he suggests that we also write down the pleasure those indiscretions brought us and the pain they caused us and/or others. These lists he inserts throughout his prayer book on Yom Kippur acknowledging that confronting our sins, which is an essential process of atonement, is not easy. Our natural tendency is to avoid this painful process. Seeing them in our own handwriting in the prayer books while we worship forces us to confront them.

I plan to have these lists in my prayer book this year. I hope you will also adopt this process. I think it’s worth a try.

Rabbi Gary Klein

Congregation Ahavat Shalom, Palm Harbor

When we think about the year gone by, we know deep down that we failed to live up to our full potential. In the coming year, we yearn not to waste that opportunity ever again. The Kabbalists say that Shevarim — three medium, wailing blasts of the shofar — is the sobbing cry of a Jewish heart - yearning to connect, to grow, to achieve.

Every person has the ability to change and be great. This can be accomplished much faster than you ever dreamed of. The key is to pray from the bottom of your heart and ask God for the ability to become great. Do not let yourself be constrained by the past. You know you have enormous potential.

At the moment the shofar is sounded, we cry out to God from the depths of our soul. This is the moment, when our souls stand before God without any barriers, that we can truly let go.

Rabbi Jacob Luski

Congregation B’nai Israel of St. Petersburg

Rosh Hashanah arrives again with all of the excitement of new beginnings and all of the challenges of how we can use these coming Days of Awe to engage with our families, our friends, our communities and our world, in a way that deepens our relationships and encourages us to reach for the highest values we can embody from our sacred tradition. While I know that many of us find some of the liturgy of these holy days difficult to embrace and make our own, I also hope that we will all find ways in the next couple of weeks to continue to reflect on the year that now ends. Our teshuvah (repentance) demands that we reflect on what we have done. Our tefilah (prayer) provides us the opportunity to speak the words of truth our deepest selves need to say. And our commitment to tzedakah empowers us to continue to do the good we are longing to do for others. This is the awesome power of these days.

Rabbi Michael Torop,

Temple Beth-El, St. Petersburg

The Maggid of Dubno, an 18th century rabbi and Torah scholar taught the following tale: “A naïve villager from an obscure little town came to a large city for the first time and stayed at an inn. Awakened in the middle of the night by the loud beating of drums, he asked, ‘What is this all about?’ Informed that a fire had broken out and that the drum beating was the city’s alarm, he went back to sleep. When he returned to his village he explained to the authorities: ‘They have a wonderful system in the big city; when a fire breaks out the people beat their drums and the flames die down.’ Excitedly, they ordered a supply of drums and distributed them to the whole town. When a fire broke out soon after, the people beat their drums with all their might, and while waiting for the flames to go out, several homes burned down

A traveler who was passing through the village berated them: ‘Fools! Do you think a fire can be put out by beating drums? They only sound the alarm for people to wake up and take action!’ This parable applies to those who believe that sitting in services, listening to the shofar, and simply performing rituals without intent will ‘put out the fires of sin and evil that burn in us.’” (Excerpted from The Rosh Hashanah Anthology, Philip Goodman, ed., 1970)

Rituals guide our hearts and thoughts to contemplation and action. Everything we associate with the High Holy Days, from the sounding of the shofar, to the beautiful melodies and words of the prayers, even the messages of the sermons, serve this purpose. They are an alarm for our souls, to wake up and use this time as a true period of reflection on the years that are both ending and beginning. As Maimonides taught in a prayer we recite before the sounding of the shofar, “Awake, you sleepers, from your sleep! Examine your deeds…”

Rabbi Daniel Treiser

Temple B’nai Israel, Clearwater

Rosh Hashanah is more than a two day holiday – it is a seasonal event. Our tradition provides us with direction for preparing our hearts, minds, and souls for entering into a new year, a new time and a new beginning. For a full month before the New Year, we are called upon to engage in cheshbon hanefesh– “an accounting of the soul” and Teshvuah, where we take stock of our behaviors, thought patterns and social networks. There is a valuable exercise in looking at our lives from a “Google Earth” perspective at this time of year. From a satellite outside of ourselves, we pan over our daily behaviors and processes. As we bring the lens closer, we monitor our inner infrastructures.

In soul searching, we have the opportunity to notice what needs to change or improve, but we also have the opportunity to take stock of our successes and our accomplishments: Our strength, compassion, generosity, friendships, beauty and knowledge. We note how much we have grown over the year – intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, recalling our positive experiences - new friendships formed, good times we have spent with family, places we have explored, and lives we have enriched.

May we be blessed to engage in the work at hand – to improve and repair and to feel enjoy and savor. May be renewed and inspired by the process.

Rabbi Danielle Upbin

Congregation Beth Shalom, Clearwater

How can you pray with feeling when many of the metaphors in the machzor are dissonant to you? There is the image, God as the King enthroned on high, reading a book of life and death, who by fire and who by water. Is our merit really measured by a divine Judge who can see into our very beings and hear our prayers? So many of us hold these questions in abeyance when we come to synagogue for the High Holy Days. We come as a pilgrimage. We accept the concept of renewal and return. We absorb the fellowship of being in a congregation. But the prayer itself is not transformative.

How do we meet this challenge so that we avoid being automatons or ingenuous in the words we utter? I suggest turning to the machzor before Rosh Hashanah. Become familiar with some of the words in there and find the ones that do resonate with you. Then cultivate a theme for yourself, for this year, and make that your mantra for the Ten Days of Return. As you pray in synagogue, allow yourself to connect with the words that apply to your theme. If you are successful, your authenticity will help others reach their meaningful moment as well.

Rabbi David Weizman Congregation Beth Shalom, Clearwater