Shabbat Messages

I hope you are feeling refreshed and renewed here at the start of this New Year. With the spiritual work and power of Yom Kippur behind us, we are ready to start the cycle of the year again with a fresh, clean slate.

…unless you’re like me, still thinking of that one person I didn’t find time to apologize to. And then there’s that vice I have, that last year on Yom Kippur I said I’d work on, and this year on Yom Kippur I said I’d work on, but I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do differently. And there’s the lingering sense that there’s something or someone I’ve forgotten completely.

I have good news: despite the rich pageantry of our Neilah service at the end of Yom Kippur, which ceremonially marks the Closing of the Gates of Atonement that have been open since Rosh Hashanah, there are long-standing Jewish traditions that say the gates are actually a little open for a little longer.

The 16th-century Kabbalists in Tzfat held that repentance is possible until Hoshanah Rabbah, the last day of Sukkot. This idea leads to the Yiddish greeting for this time of year, “A gutten kvittel!” where we wish each other “a good scrap of paper!” The image is, if we’re able to apologize or make a change in this time, it would be like folding up a piece of paper the size of a receipt through the gates, effectively changing our fate.

While these images help us dramatize and internalize the work of repentance and repair, we know that work is ongoing. I haven’t found a source for this quote, which maybe means it came with the Torah from Mount Sinai: “As much as God cares what we do between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, God cares what we do between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.” There is always the chance to reach out to that friend, to ask someone for help making a plan, to think about how we aren’t living up to our values, and think about what we want to do differently.

While the High Holy Days give us an opportunity to focus on how we want to be better, we have that opportunity every day. As we read in the midrash, “The gates of prayer are sometimes open and sometimes locked, but the gates of repentance are always open.”

Shabbat shalom–and a gutten kvittel,

Ben Poor
Rabbinic Intern