CD35: Avinu Malkenu

Today is Yom Kippur. Our egg retrieval is at 7am today. I will not be online today in observance of the Day of Atonement, but please feel free to leave your thoughts and well wishes here in the comments.

I wrote this last night – a smattering of thoughts written on the eve of our egg retrieval; my apologies if they don’t make sense – I just needed to get them out of my head.

B’Rosh Hashanah yika-teyvun…

On Rosh Hashanah it is Written.

Uv-yom tzom kippur yeychateymun.

And on Yom Kippur it is Sealed:

Who will be born and who shall pass.

“Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power… Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.”

– Abraham Joshua Heschel

“It is true that as we live our lives, on our journey we sometimes feel as if the world is a narrow bridge. The ground feels shaky and we sometimes get off balance and the risk of failure, the risk of falling is very real. And perhaps it’s too much to ask that we shouldn’t be afraid.

The issue is to know that we can’t let our fear stop us from doing what we really want to do, from being the person we truly want to become, from being the man or the woman who the world needs us to be. Once we decide that something is really important, we can’t be distracted by our fear and we can’t waste precious energy worrying what others are going to say or think about us.

Stay focused, put one foot in front of the other and get to the other side.”

– Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, Tufts Hillel High Holiday Sermon, 2011

“Here is life. Life we’re told is precious. Life is dust touched by the breath of G-d or life is chemicals that somehow know how to attach to each other – chemicals that link and bond and split and bind – and become a jellyfish pulsing in the sea, a butterfly flittering in a forest, that can form the shy gaze of a fox pup ready to play; that can become the glance of a boy carrying wood who asks his father: ‘Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’

To take that boy, that fox, that butterfly – to extinguish that life, that breath – you would think would wound the universe, would pain the Creator. We know this pain.”

– Robert Krulwich, from the Radiolab podcast, In silence.

Then Elkanah her husband said to her, “Hannah, why do you weep? Why do you not eat? And why is your heart grieved? Am I not better to you than ten sons?”

So Hannah arose after they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat by the doorpost of the tabernacle[c] of the Lord. 10 And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed to the Lord and wept in anguish. 11 Then she made a vow and said, “O Lord of hosts, if You will indeed look on the affliction of Your maidservant and remember me, and not forget Your maidservant, but will give Your maidservant a male child, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and no razor shall come upon his head.”

– Samuel 1:8-9

“I just hope – in silence.”

– Robert Krulwich

G’mar chatima tova.

May you each be Inscribed in the Book of Life.