days of awe

For me, this past Wednesday evening through Saturday night of the next week, I am and will be trying to mull over the people, personalities, places and particulars that have made my almost 61 years of life possible, plausible and particular. These moments in life are referred to as the Days of Awe, the days between Rosh Ha Shana and Yom Kippur; the Jewish New Year, and the Day of Atonement. By Jewish tradition these are the days when God opens the book of life for the upcoming year and closes the same book until next year.

Jewish traditions, as go traditions in most religions, are based on someone’s interpretation of a Holy Book, oral tales of history told and shared from generation to generation, family habits, and experiences gained in a life time lived. For some these traditions are based on fact, for others these are mere superstitious acts enforced by guilt and or fear of the unknown of which we want to know more. And for many, traditions are an unquestioned means of standards and morals which must have been generated from a higher power and provided us as lessons of life to mere mortals.

It is a time when many a Jewish person asks for forgiveness for his/her injustices, inaccuracies, and inabilities to help, aid, assist to the best of his/her potential. It is a time for some to reflect on their own lives and what kind of impact they have made on the world around them and those living in that world. For many it is a time to look at the lessons from the past and create pathways to the future of promise, pride and potential.

I am a spiritual man, proud of that but never so boastful as to diminish those who find no cause in a higher power, or believe that fate rules us and we have no ability to change the reactions from our owned actions. For me I find hope in moments of talking to God, minutes of seeing the positive and the millennium of knowing that potential and change can and should happen.

Something has come over me in the past few years however, (perhaps based on life experiences, being a father, a partner, seeing and experiencing bad things happening to good people, or witnessing self serving, self promoting, selfish behavior by too many people around me), which has found me wondering if in fact we are becoming a world of good versus bad, right versus wrong. I had thought I surrounded myself within the prism of the colors of the rainbow, but somehow now I seem to be treading in a world of black and white with very little room for gray.

In the past ten years this country and this world have seemed to delight in finding enemies, delight in creating division, and delight in doom saying while derailing any concept of compromise or consensus. We/they have insisted on enemies, invited bigotry, bias, racism, sexism, homophobia into our conversation, and sadly wrapped all that hatred in a Flag and our Holy Books. We/they have pounded on our chests chanting my God is better than your God, my God is the only God. And it seems to me that those who do boast of being closer to God, more righteous, more religious are the people who draw strict lines in the sand and build moats and detours for anyone perceived as different. They somehow seem to defile a God.

Whether it be the Ayatollahs, the Chief Rabbis, the Pentecostal Preachers, the Pope, the Tele-Evangelist ministers or just the average person who needs others to think for them before they react, many people who say they know God better than you or I are blasphemous in their adoration to God, making a God into a human being with frail, and fragile human emotions. They speak as if they are ordained by a God to only punish the bad (and bad is their definition), and reward not the good, but those who look, think act just like they do.

I get so frustrated with the hazardous haze that seems to have appeared over the hearts souls and minds of many in this human race. It seems pointing a finger away rather than toward ourselves is the salvation and solution and the assumed only way to find God.

During these Days of Awe, I am trying my best to find reason and rational for my being on Earth and those with whom I share this World. I am trying hard and I hope I can find the spirituality to do so. It has been a frustrating road to ride.

But I have faith and must rely on that. And since this part of the reason for the Days of Awe, I will persevere. So in honor of the potential of possibilities I wish to all my family and friends new and from my six decades of history I wish a shana tova ketiva ve-chatima tovah: ‘a good year and may you be written and sealed for a good year’. I know GOOD is out there, somewhere.