Teshuvah

The First Steps in Teshuva: A Process of Deep Return/Rebalancing/Centering

Considerations before Dying

Writing and regularly updating a legal will, an ethical will, a living will, and power of attorney for finance and health care; be sure to specify in your living will your intention to fulfill the mitzvah of organ donation.

Acquiring the deed to your kever, grave

Genesis 3:19: “For you are dust and to dust you will return.” Jewish tradition views humanity as created from earth, so we are responsible for the rapid return of our body’s remaining nutrients to the earth to support the cycle of all living things. Most traditionally, this is done within 24 hours. It is customary to pre-arrange a grave for yourself; many do this in late mid-life. Organizing a family plot with a pre-paid perpetual care contract reduces stress on future generations and creates a genealogical cluster of grave markers that may become meaningful to those who come long after you.

Who is in the minyan of your life? Who is in your inner circle of friends and family?

This is one of the spiritual questions of Sukkot. While we focus on personal ethical transformation during most of the High Holy Days, Sukkot primarily takes place on our home turf, in the back yard or balcony, where we build that unique work of Jewish art - the Sukkah.

Even people who live in mansions go out into the yard and take their meals in the intentionally fragile sukkah. A sturdy sukkah is an oxymoron, in my opinion. We are taken to the root awareness of the impermanence of life deliberately by building a sukkah that can't stand all year.

While images of matters such as the earthquake disaster in Turkey bring this point dramatically into our eyes. The sukkah makes us sit in our awareness.

Jews take collective responsibility for the moral targets that get missed in life. At least ten days before Rosh HaShannah prayers called Selihot are added where, having empathy for ourselves as only human, we admit personal and collective ownership of the full range of problematic human behaviors:

ashamnu
We are guilty (spiritually desolate and distant from our higher selves)

bagadnu
We have betrayed (our loved ones, the community, the planet)

This page was created after receiving letters from a) a woman in rural Romania, b) a homebound man and his wife, c) friends who felt very uncomfortable in the local synagogue, and d) friends whose children were unwilling to go back to synagogue due to boredom.

This review by Rabbi Goldie Milgram first appeared in the Philadelphia Jewish Voice

We were studying under a huge maple tree outside the United States when it became increasingly clear from the workshop participants’ comments that a traveling rabbi had sexually abused quite a number of women in the region over a period of years. Some had gone to him asking a deep spiritual question and were shocked by the kind of "outreach" they received. Others were young girls accepting a loving hug from a clergy person only to experience a horrific violation of their physical boundaries. All believed themselves special, "the only one." Some were sworn to secrecy. More could be said, let's just say it was becoming clear that a Jewish clergy person had left an international trail of hurt.