Holidays & Theology

The intent I pray with during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur feels very heavy and cumbersome. Throughout those two holidays specifically, I feel very weighed down by all the talk of repentance and “returning to G-d” and that my fate is being written and sealed. I worry that I have not been able to do a good enough job not only as a Jew, but as a Jewish leader in my community, that I have not helped those around me enough in their Judaism.

Our Father, our King, my Rabbi? by Maya Ungar Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are arguably the most God-centered holidays of the Jewish calendar. Surely the other shloshet haregalim, Passover, Sukkot and Shavuot, also discuss God, but in my opinion, it is more about what God has done for the people of Israel, and less about the relationship itself. Passover is all about God redeeming the Jewish people from Egypt, Shavuot is about God bestowing the Torah to us, and Sukkot is abo

The time when God is most on my mind, unsurprisingly, is the High Holiday season. God is hard to get away from in conservative Jewish services during this time of year. During this season I glean the most meaning from ruminating on myself, how to return to my highest self, use this time to reflect on who I am, who I was, and who I will be.

To me, a meaningful high holiday observance aspires to honor the work of teshuvah by contextualizing the seasonal liturgy, its crescendos and crashes and variations, through music and ritual and language and space, in such a way that its moral depth and spiritual force are as compelling today as they were to the generations that shaped and compiled it.