REsources for Living
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I’ve been thinking about the Days of Turning, the ten days between Rosh Hashana (September 28th this year) and Yom Kippur. Rosh Hashana is the Jewish New Year, and like any New Year celebration it marks the opening of new possibilities, of the chance that we and the world around us will be better than last year.
But here’s the kicker. People who celebrate the new year on January 1st have a whole year to keep—or forget about—the resolutions that they so optimistically made when the year began.
The changes you pledge to make for Rosh Hashana, however, don’t have so much time to get stale and ignored. You see, ten days later (those ten Days of Turning) comes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. And tradition says that on Yom Kippur God writes down in the big Book of Life who deserves a good year, and then closes the book. Bam. Not opening for another year. So you only have ten days to make good on your resolutions if they’re going to count in your favor.
Okay, the Book of Life does sound just a little bit like Santa Claus’s list of who’s been naughty and nice. But here’s the thing. God, it seems, is not necessarily interested in the kinds of resolutions that people most often make in January. You don’t get into the Book of Life by promising to go to the gym or eat more vegetables or lay off the Krispy Kremes. Frankly, God couldn’t care less (although in the Jewish tradition God appears to be interested in a bunch of other rules about what you eat, but that’s a whole different story).
No, the way you get written in the Book of Life is to make things right with the people around you. During the Days of Turning the faithful are expected to think carefully about who they have quarreled with, insulted, ignored or generally not treated right, and then to go and apologize and work things out. The Days of Turning are about asking for forgiveness.
They are also about offering forgiveness. Making things right is a two-way street. If someone comes to you sincerely and apologizes for having wronged you and asks for forgiveness, your job is to forgive them—within that period of ten days, not just sometime eventually down the line. And I’m thinking that God, holding that big book, pen in hand, probably knows whether you really mean it when you say “I forgive you.”
Wow. That seems like asking an awful lot. I mean, just because a holiday rolls around and you’ve eaten your apples dipped in honey for a sweet new year doesn’t mean that you’ve gotten your heart and mind ready to forgive someone who did something awful to you. Think about this. It’s pretty easy to just forget about a resolution if you have a whole year to get around to it, and it’s even easier to assume that you’ll just leave a damaged friendship alone until you’re over the hurt or you feel like the other person has been punished enough. But when is that time going to come? Wouldn’t during these ten days be as good a time as any?
I’ve always assumed that the Days of Turning are called that because it’s a time to turn away from the negative things you’ve done, or to turn toward the people in your life with whom you need to fix things. But maybe it helps to think about the Days of Turning in a different way. Say you are walking down a path through the woods, admiring the trees and bushes around you. Suddenly, the path takes a sharp turn. All of a sudden, your point of view changes. You see things from a new angle. It turns out that what you thought was a really big tree is actually two trees growing close together, and the fallen log now shows itself as a tangled mass of exposed roots. The things you have already seen are changed by looking at them in a new way.
What if the Days of Turning are a way of choosing to take a turn on your life path so that you see things from a different angle? What if you shifted your point of view to try to see what was going on in your friend’s heart and mind when they hurt you? What if you learned to forgive yourself by seeing that mistake you made (the one that just makes your skin crawl) from the perspective of your dog, who loves you absolutely, no matter what? What if you looked at a tough situation from the perspective of ten years down the road, and asked yourself what you want the relationship to be like in 2021?
Maybe the Days of Turning are days of deliberately choosing to see things in a new way, looking with an eye toward finding happiness and justice and peace rather than self-righteous anger. The view might be pretty great from there—maybe even good enough to peer into the Book of Life and see your name written there for an excellent year to come.
- REsources for Living - December 1, 2020
- A Fond Goodbye - December 1, 2020
- REsources for Living - November 1, 2020
