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cellioTonight was S'lichot (or, for the more traditional, the beginning of S'lichot), the pennatential prayers that more-or-less "open" the high-holy-day season. (Tradition is that you recite these prayers every night until Rosh Hashana; our congregation only does them communally on the first night.) Nice service, some moving text, and some pretty music. (And now I've got a melody running through my head that I don't know all the words for, and this is text that's not in the regular weekday or Shabbat services that I have texts for, and I can't remember the words. Oh well.) I missed S'lichot at my congregation last year because I was out of town for a conference.
We are supposed to spend the month of Elul (which started a couple weeks ago) and especially the time from now through Yom Kippur making amends for the wrongs we've done. During my first year of observance this really helped to focus me and mend some bridges and stuff. Now, a few years later, I'm finding that my biggest problem is in identifying the places where I need to make amends -- not because I think I'm perfect (far from it!) but because I've tried to fix problems as they come up rather than letting them wait for Elul, and that means what's waiting now is the cases where I've been clueless and am not aware that I've wronged others. The process of trying to figure that part out is much more challenging even than, for instance, picking up the phone to apologize to someone I haven't spoken to in several years (which happened twice that first year).
I feel like I'm not making an awful lot of sense. Maybe it's time to go to sleep.
We are supposed to spend the month of Elul (which started a couple weeks ago) and especially the time from now through Yom Kippur making amends for the wrongs we've done. During my first year of observance this really helped to focus me and mend some bridges and stuff. Now, a few years later, I'm finding that my biggest problem is in identifying the places where I need to make amends -- not because I think I'm perfect (far from it!) but because I've tried to fix problems as they come up rather than letting them wait for Elul, and that means what's waiting now is the cases where I've been clueless and am not aware that I've wronged others. The process of trying to figure that part out is much more challenging even than, for instance, picking up the phone to apologize to someone I haven't spoken to in several years (which happened twice that first year).
I feel like I'm not making an awful lot of sense. Maybe it's time to go to sleep.
(no subject)
Date: 2001-09-09 09:22 pm (UTC)