OPINION |
The 10 days between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) have a few alternate names. One, the High Holidays (or High Holy Days if you're a Reconstructionist Jew like me), acknowledges the solemnity of the time; one, the Days of Awe, acknowledges our wonder at standing, vulnerable, before G-d.
But my favorite is the Days of T’shuvah, or the Days of Repentance, because of the opportunities these days give for connection. You see, G-d can forgive our sins against G-d — but not the sins we have committed against each other. And so, the rabbis teach us to reach out to friends and family we have wronged over the past year during the Days of T’shuvah, so that we can wipe the slate clean before G-d seals our fate for the coming year in the Book of Life.
I’ve been asked many times why an otherwise rational person would embrace so closely, out of all the traditions available to her, the one thing in Judaism most calculated to cause frustration. After all, people are busy. It’s embarrassing to apologize. Sometimes, your friends are a little afraid of your suddenly outwardly religious self.
So … why?
Three reasons, really. The first is that, although I am not always the world’s most religious Jew, Yom Kippur is the only time in the entire calendar when I believe as I stand in temple that I am trembling before a very real, very judgmental G-d who looks exactly like the king on the throne many of us imagine. The second is that I am 100% about the traditions in Judaism that tell us how to be better human beings. And the third, and probably the more important, answer is that — G-d or no G-d — the Days of T’shuvah offer us a real chance to wipe the slate clean, to begin again, to imagine our lives any way we want them to be.
T’shuvah, as you've seen above, is usually framed as “repentance.” Literally translated, though, it means to return — but to return with a physicality often missed in the translation. More fully, t’shuvah means to re-turn; to turn again toward something we have walked away from.
Thus, in the context of our traditions, it has come to mean the ability to turn back to oneself and the ways in which one can exist as a whole human in a very complicated world — to tap into the circle of life, if you will — and, most beautifully, it has also come to mean the opportunity to create something new out of our broken opportunities.
We are now, it seems to me, in a period very similar to the Days of T’shuvah — six days bridging one holiday (Christmas) and another (New Year’s Day) in which we are suspended between the merriment of time with family and friends and the inescapable knowledge that another year, with its demands and its disappointments, is fast approaching.
But, while the Days of T’shuvah encourage a willing suspension of disbelief that we can truly become more connected to others, the days between Christmas and the Gregorian calendar’s New Year seem like … well, kind of a missed opportunity.
Many of us are out of the office this week with nothing to do except make resolutions we’ll soon break, make the best of the after-Christmas sales, make plans for a New Year’s Day brunch. Make everything except the thing most important, and the thing we might, finally, have time to make — a re-turn toward a more meaningful life.
The number 10 is powerful, but the number six holds equal mystique. The principles of numerology say that the number six means love, beauty, and harmony; Judaism and Christianity teach us that G-d created the world in six days; there are six pillars of faith in Islam and six perfections in Buddhism; and so on.
Six feels like a great number to create a new ritual around, doesn’t it? I wonder what the world would be like if everyone adopted the six days between Christmas and New Year’s Day as a time of t’shuvah, or re-turning, toward each other. To reach across the room, the street, the city, the many miles separating us, to say, “I have wronged you. Please forgive me.”
Today is the first day of the six days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Judaism teaches that we have three chances to ask for forgiveness; after that, the person who will not forgive is guilty of bearing a grudge. Three chances; six days. Why not start now? The opportunity to do a new thing has got to be better than standing in line to buy yet another sweater.
