Elul Reflections - High Holy Days 2024
Rabbi Segal
With the beginning of the final month of the Hebrew calendar, the month of Elul, we recognize that the High Holidays are one month away. The Yamim Noraim- the Days of Awe. Now is the moment to begin our end of year accounting, looking at where we’ve gone off course and at relationships that need repair.
It has been an incredibly challenging year. No sooner did we finish dancing with the sifrei Torah on Simchat Torah, then word came to us of the unbearably horrific events of October 7. The specter of that day has haunted us all through 5784, and the virulent antisemitism that accompanied it continues to leave us incredulous.
It has been a year of anguish and pain. A year we would like to forget and a year that we wish had never happened. For many of us, this year can’t end soon enough.
Is there anything we can look forward to? Any hope for the year ahead? Any vision for what these High Holydays could bring into our hearts and into our lives?
This is the question our Temple Chai staff is reflecting on as we enter into the month of Elul. Each Monday and Thursday, one of us will share our personal dream of how Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur can inspire us.
Watch your email and with every blessing for a year of peace!
A prayer from Mishkan HaLev: Prayers for S’lichot and Elul
Our Mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope – not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); not the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is Gonna Be All Right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, of truth-telling about your own soul first of all and its condition; the place of resistance and defiance, from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we’re seeing, asking them what they see.
Rabbi Bonnie Koppell
It has been an incredibly challenging year. No sooner did we finish dancing with the sifrei Torah on Simchat Torah, then word came to us of the unbearably horrific events of October 7. The specter of that day has haunted us all through 5784, and the virulent antisemitism that accompanied it continues to leave us incredulous.
It has been a year of anguish and pain. A year we would like to forget and a year that we wish had never happened. For many of us, this year can’t end soon enough.
Is there anything we can look forward to? Any hope for the year ahead? Any vision for what these High Holydays could bring into our hearts and into our lives?
This is the question our Temple Chai staff is reflecting on as we enter into the month of Elul. Each Monday and Thursday, one of us will share our personal dream of how Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur can inspire us.
Watch your email and with every blessing for a year of peace!
A prayer from Mishkan HaLev: Prayers for S’lichot and Elul
Our Mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope – not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); not the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is Gonna Be All Right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, of truth-telling about your own soul first of all and its condition; the place of resistance and defiance, from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we’re seeing, asking them what they see.
Rabbi Bonnie Koppell
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