And now for something completely different.

August 10, 2018 in Hazzan Asa Fradkin

And now for something completely different….

A reflection on the High Holidays and a new RH 2nd night Mindfulness Service.

The High Holidays. The pinnacle of our yearly davening experience. It is the moment when thousands of us gather to offer our prayers to God with a communal magnitude that only happens 2 or 3 days each year.

It’s a tremendously powerful experience filled with memory, longing, fragility and loss.

On Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur we are to remember all that has transpired in our year while hoping that God remembers us for another year of life ( Zochreinu L’Hayyim).

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We experience so much in a year, and the Yamim Noraim- the days of awe- are the only time our liturgy overtly asks us to remember and to learn from the totality of this year.

Yes, the liturgy instructs us to do tshuvah for our sins, but the holidays are more than just a plea for clemency, they are an accounting- a Heshbon Nefesh- to see how our souls are faring.

And we come before God broken, knowing that we have failed and cannot even approach the perfection of the divine.  This is reflected in the liturgy as well. ( Ki Hineh KaChomer)

But it’s also in the the fragility of our bodies, our minds and the losses we endure. We are human and we must continually strive to be holy and pursue God’s likeness.

These struggles are all contained within the enormity of our HH experience. Between the meals, the family, the kids and the long hours of davening, when do we have time to reflect on the sacred nature of the Days themselves?

I offer you the opportunity to join me this year on the 2nd evening of RH to do just that. For an hour, we will put away all that clutters our lives and spend time reflecting on the year, ourselves and finding a way to seek renewal during these days of awe.

They should indeed be that; days when we can look at ourselves, at the heavens and be in awe of it all, experiencing every emotion we are blessed to call human and knowing that in these days we have uplifted ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom

Hazzan Fradkin