October 29, 2016

Now that the holidays of Tishrei are behind us, I would like to take a moment to thank each of you for making my first holiday season as rabbi of KITC so special. So many of you helped in setting up the room, preparing food for kiddushes, leading davening and leyning, shopping and cooking, and the list goes on. We were especially blessed to be joined by Rabbi Ari Weber as our High Holiday chazzan, and to have so many friends and family come in to celebrate with us from out of town.

Many of us, I know, are breathing a sigh of relief with the return to a more normal schedule without Yontif meals to prepare or long holiday davening. At the same time, we may also be feeling a certain sadness at leaving behind the special holiday season with all the opportunities for prayer and celebration it affords. For the 30+ days since we started saying Selichot, we’ve been living in a state of heightened intimacy with our Creator. It can feel like a bit of a letdown to return to ordinary life and ordinary weekday prayers, although realistically, we cannot sustain the level of intensity of the High Holiday season all year.

Perhaps we can find a way to bring some of the kind of heightened spirituality of the holidays forward with us into the rest of the year. Rather than returning to our mundane, pre-holiday level of existence, perhaps we can infuse our regular lives with the “holiday spirit.” When we dwelt in the sukkah, we were dwelling in the presence of God—the Shekhinah. Let’s strive to hold on to a sense of God’s presence in our lives even now that we’ve moved back into our houses. Maybe we can take some of the awe and contrition expressed by the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and bring that spirit into all our interactions—to try to retain a sense of humility and reverence each day of our lives.

By letting the spirituality we find each year during the High Holidays set the bar for the year to come, we can change our experience of the cycle of the holidays from a simple oscillation between more holy times and less holy times, to one of ratcheting up to higher and higher and levels of holiness. There will always be ups and downs in our spiritual lives, but if we can manage to hold on to some of what we find during the moments of spiritual elevation and carry that with us when we come back down, then slowly over time, we may transform our spiritual lives. And with time, and with help from God, we may find that the ordinary days of our future have the spiritual power of the Yom Kippurs of our past.

May we each use this Shabbat as an opportunity to reflect on what lessons, experiences, and perspectives we are taking with us into the new year.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Garth Silberstein