Holiday Happenings

9 Tishrei 5783 - October 4, 2021

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Here we are in the midst of these Days of Awe.  And our machzor offers us the words to say when we do not know what words to say.

We may be deeply sorry.  We may be deeply angry.  We may be deeply hopeful.  We may be deeply sad.  We may be deeply grateful.

But, these days of soul-searching can find us entering a spiritual place that exists beyond words.  The realm of the soul feels wholly different than the mundane world in which we usually dwell.

Similarly, though we may try to talk with God, we also understand that God only fully exists beyond human imagination and language.  Everything about the beyond is wider, deeper, quieter, louder and more endless than we can conceive.

This is why our tradition has created so much art and prayer and text in which the Holy One is named so very many ways.  Our Rock. Our Redeemer. The Holy One.  Adonai.  Elohim.  Everpresent One.  Hidden One.  El-Shaddai.  Shechinah.  Ein Sof (the Infinite One)…  The list goes on—our tradition says there are seventy names of God.  And, seventy is a number meaning the full panoply of possibility.

We are bound by the limits of human thought, much as we are bound by time and space.  And we are bound by language.  But, when we want to tell of the full array of something huge, we talk about “everything from A to Z.”  Certainly, we do not mean only 26 items; we do not mean an alphabetical list.  We mean, everything that can be conceived—and for humans, that has to happen in language.

This alphabetization of our expression is also a tool we use on these Days of Awe, for much the same reasons.

The machzor (our high holy day prayerbook) lists an “alphabet of sins” in our “Vidui” (Confessional) portion of our worship.  This is not a succinct list of all our actual sins…though it covers a lot, and as a community our deeds probably collectively represent each one.

But alphabetic acrostics can be a guide for our own personal worship and reflections.  As you engage in the quiet moments of high holy day prayer, we invite you to use the alphabet and its all-encompassing aspect to help you march through the deeds of your year.  The process of teshuvah exists beyond words.  But, nonetheless, we can use language to draw closer to the enormity of this transformative task.

Rabbi Shoshanah Tornberg