A month has passed since our last communication. In some ways the world is a bit better, in many ways it is terribly disturbing. Nature won’t calm down, violence is on the rise. We continue in our deep feelings of distrust. The beauty of compromise seems so strange to as if to say we, humans, have very little in common and must therefore be ready to take to the streets and destroy one another.
In our last communication we spoke of the forthcoming Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year). In its celebration the deepest sense of renewal, repear, return and reconstruction is with us. We have been taught by our teachers on the tenth day of the month of Tishrei G-d awaits us. He sends forth a message: “No matter how you have missed the mark that is yours, I still welcome you to my side”. You are forgiven. Our tradition teaches us that G-d is aware of our human failings. G-d realizes we walk, we race, we stumble and we rise up and start again.
That is the message of our Holy days.
I wish you a good and healthy year.
Rabbi Harry Sky
September 3, 2010 at 12:06 pm |
THINKING REEDS ASWAY
for Rabbi Harry and the New Year
Happening, nowadays, feels
different, everyone
watching how our shoulders bend
inward as if preparing for a doorway
narrower than most,
how memory with legs
and arms and fingertips for touching well
into oncoming days
reaches out from our pasts,
though, sometimes,
darkening white clouds cotton to the blue.
The days with their easts and wests
are lit by variable sunshine
moving suddenly across the field
where the old hit places of granite
wait to shine and shine
until the sun’s strange courtesy defers
to passing cloud.
Journalists honing the cheeks of their knives
up/down on the New,
the sky daily threatening to fall,
BEFORE and AFTER wrestling
with their index fingers—
everywhere, in such a time, is hearth.
Like chassid rebbes we’ll dance
unseen in our own towns
between the towns of others,
accessing the information of roses,
the countless pixels of the human face.
The days, each one once
with its morning and its night—
“Someday,”
for us thinking reeds asway,
means NOW.