Tishrei 9: The Melting Heart

There are many things to say about Yom Kippur, which begins tonight at sundown.   Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.  We remove ourselves from the distractions of the material world and spend one whole day in prayer, traveling inward toward our purest spiritual selves and our true home in Gd.

But I still have some Rosh haShanah liturgy on my mind as I approach the biggest Day of Awe.  The Hebrew text above comes from one of the prayers we recite at Tashlikh, the ritual of symbolically casting away our sins of the past year into a body of water, which we performed nine days ago on Rosh haShanah. Although I’ve read them many times at Tashlikh in the past, these words struck me particularly deeply this year.   As I stood on the shore of Walden Pond on the first of Tishrei and contemplated the chasm between the person I’ve been and the person I want to be, this simple cry to Gd jumped off the Hebrew page at me.  In English:

Our heart melts within us and becomes like water.
What can we answer?  What can we say?

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