“Rather it is exceedingly near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, so you can do it.”

Transformation does not have a beginning, a middle, or an end. We never reach the end of Teshuvah. It is always going on. We are awake for a moment, and then we are asleep again. Teshuvah seems to proceed in a circular motion. Every step away is also a step toward home.

when we speak of joy here, we are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, any immersion

The real work we have to do at this time of year, I think, is to find compassion no matter what. But we have to find it for ourselves before we can be of much use to others. The real work is to look at who we really are, and to contemplate Who made us that way.

But what we are usually not aware of is how much we feel other people’s pain and how much energy we waste trying to defend ourselves against it.

The liturgy, however, makes a very different claim, namely that prayer, righteousness, and Teshuvah will not change what happens to us; rather, they will change us. We will understand what happens differently.

rest is to die, so we never permit ourselves a moment’s rest, a moment’s nefesh, a moment’s nothingness.

First of all, the Hebrew calendar is the only one in the world that is both lunar and solar. The Roman calendar, which the western world still follows, is utterly unconscious of the moon.

Everything was aspiring upward toward the light and would continue to do so until it died and fell back to the forest floor. Then Divine Intelligence, embodied in a seed cone, would begin to push all this dead matter upward again in the form of new life. The forest was a single purposeful organism, and every one of its cells, living and dead, was