Days of Awe: Wrestling with the Known and Unknown

A friend at work asked me if I am ready for the Jewish holidays. I guess.


This year, we are going to a different congregation in Flatbush..Personally, I vary between spiritually-looking-forward-to-the-Days-of -Awe (a lot of reading, contemplation, anticipation in the weeks before) to “please leave me alone”—this year I am in leave-me-alone-mode…

That is what strikes one most about the "fall Jewish Holidays" more properly known as the Days of Awe. Certainly, it is the sense of humanity, in this case represented by the subgroup of the Jewish people, appearing before the might and spiritual complexity of the Creator with awe and dread. Or in the modern sensibility, our contemplation of our brief and fleeting existence in a Cosmos that seems to neither require nor care much about us. Or, perhaps in a post-modern sense, our contemplation of our identity, which exists simultaneously in conflict with and allegiance to the power relations of a Supreme Being who may or may not exist but on whom we may choose to rely, as a spiritual talisman of sorts, to thank for getting us and those we love through the year past, and to help guide us through the unknown days ahead in a too-be-sure perilous world filled with other beliefs and believers.



However, despite this year's preliminary sense of distance, I can already see that it is beginning...Based on past experience, usually once I am at services, that Yiddishkeit starts to slowly seep into my soul…by Yom Kippur it usually connects...and there I am, looking around at My Better Half and our growing kids at the services, and I might be overtaken by a powerful wave of emotion, as I contemplate the blessings and pains of the year gone by and anticipating the unknown that exists in whatever time that lies ahead. 
I imagine it is a different and curious experience for me, a Fellow Traveler, than for those who are Born Jewish…but for everyone reading this, Jewish or not, for today and the next week, best wishes for health and happiness, and also moments of awareness, contemplation and understanding in the year ahead.

These caught my attention:

Emerging cultural practices in Judaism. Link here

If Christopher Hitchens Met Primo Levi would they agree about G-d?  Link here