:: The Days of Awe ::

The 10 days beginning with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur are known as the Days of Awe (Yamim Noraim) or sometimes translated as “the Days of Repentance.” 

 This is a time for deep, not-screwing-around introspection. A time to consider the sins of the past and own, acknowledge, and ask forgiveness from others for those wrongs, before Yom Kippur. (The, hopefully righting the wrongs you committed against them, if possible, and making a sincere commitment not to do that wrong again.)

Thus the Ten Days of Awe are an opportunity for change. 

Sign me UP.
 
In 2020 our society has awakened to the fact that we as individuals and as a society have much to #atone for. From a deadly virus, to systemic racism and its violence, to environmental abuse of our one and only planet, political polarity, and so much more. We MUST be and do better.

The actions that can change our existence AND our fate are considered to be “teshuvah, tefilah and tzedakah," repentance, prayer, good deeds.

But in order to truly atone, we have to be willing to acknowledge and embrace our imperfections.
 
The ancient alchemist and philosopher Hermes Trismegistus spoke of examining a “perfectly-imperfect” existence here:

“Rise above all time and become eternal, then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible, deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science. Find your home in the haunts of every living creature, make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths. Bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity. Think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven, think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave. Grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together. Then you can apprehend God. But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say ‘I know nothing, I can do nothing, I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven, I know not what I was, nor what I shall be,’ then what have you to do with God?”

 
Basically? The Days of Awe are a time for healing.
 
But in order for us to heal, we must be willing to be wrong. Sometimes really wrong. (And I know I know: for some of you/us, being wrong can feel equivalent to emergency heart surgery, or swallowing a jarful of bees.) But no human in perfect— it is in the endeavoring that we experience enlightened growth as a constant, evolving practice.

May your next few days be filled with both repentance AND awe...
They are both there if we seek them.