This week’s Torah portion contains one of the most soaring verses in the entire Torah.

And now, Israel, what does Adonai your God ask of you, but to revere Him, to love Adonai your God, and to walk in His ways.

For the rabbis of old, the Hebrew contained a powerful secret. They taught that every use of the word v’atah, “and now,” refers to teshuvah, to the word we translate as repentance.

The Torah’s question is placed here, said the sages, to remind us that the Days of Awe are coming, that we need to look inside ourselves and find the ways that we’ve failed.

But as I read the verse this year, there was another voice inside me, a voice saying, “You can only do so much.” All of us have made mistakes. All of us have had moments when we failed to work in God’s ways. But most of us have done our best.

The High Holidays call on us, asking us to look inside ourselves, to try to become better people, and to forgive those who hurt us. But more than anything else, the High Holidays call on us to forgive ourselves, to admit that we are only human.

Years ago, I served as gabbai on Yom Kippur afternoon. The reader was a native Hebrew speaker. But that day, he was nervous, and he made one mistake after another. I’d known him for years, and I knew that I could calm him down by gently, lovingly teasing him. So I began to tease him, right there on the bemah.

In the end, he did a wonderful reading. But the rabbi became white as a sheet. “How could you?” he was thinking. “How could you tease someone on the holiest day of the year, with the Torah right in front of you?”

So I leaned over and spoke into the microphone, so that everyone could hear.. “Nu,” I said, “if God feels that I have done something wrong, then I’ll apologize, and God will forgive me.”

That is the meaning of the High Holidays, that God will forgive. As Jonathan Sacks teaches:

Beneath the solemnity of Yom Kippur, one fact shines radiant throughout: that God loves us more than we love ourselves. He believes in us more than we believe in ourselves. He never gives up, no matter how many times we slip and fall.

Each of us can, by a single act of kindness or generosity of spirit, cause a ray of divine light to shine in the human darkness, allowing God’s presence, at least for a moment, to be at home in our world.

More than Yom Kippur expresses our faith in God, it is an expression of God’s faith in us.

How do we begin the process of teshuvah? We start by forgiving ourselves. And find one thing that you can do better, one spark that can bring God’s light into the darkness. And remember that God will forgive you. Each of us can bring light into the world.

Shabbat Shalom,
Art