The spiritual task of the ten days that start the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Wednesday Sept. 20 (10 days from now) and continue to its climax on Yom Kippur is to delve seriously into what changes we need in the way we conduct our own lives and changes that our society needs. Beyt Tikkun provides a support system for taking this task seriously. Our services have all the elements of the Jewish tradition including the traditional prayers and music, but we combine those with deep inner reflection, mediation, and inner work because the goal is “t’shuvah” (returning to our hightest selves in every dimension of our lives).
Info and to Register: www.beyttikkun.org/hhd
Toward that t’shuvah goal and reflection, participants in our High Holiday services are given a work book to use in the intervening days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And we encourage you to get a “T’shuvah buddy” to check in with during these ten days so that they can enourage you and you can encourage them to go as deep as possible through this process while respecting your boundaries, your time limitations, and your own inner goals.
The genius of the Jewish High Holidays is this: it provides an opportnity for a psychological, spiritual, intellectual tune-up, a way of reconnecting to all you’ve learned in psychotherapy, spiritual practice, social activism, relationships with friends and families–and looking honestly at oneself to see how far each of us may have strayed from the beautiful being we want to be, and what steps we can take to bring us back to that highest self that we can be (without self-punishment or harsh judgment; rather with a spirit of empathy, compassion and rejoicing at the central message of the holidays: that real change is possible.
This is why we also welcome non-Jews, because they can benefit as well as Jews from this remarkable process.
So, yes, we do much of the traditional prayers and rituals and music. We dance and sing in the neo-Hasidic style, celebrating the possibility of transformation. But unlike some synagogues that some people experience as boring and spiritually stifling, or others that overcome that problem by turning their services into a community sing-along, our services are joyous yet also very serious because we recognize that the t’shuva we need on the personal level may often be life-saving, and that the t’shuva we need on a societal level is almost certainly life-saving and planet-saving for all humanity.
Please register NOW for our High Holiday celebration of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur–at www.beyttikkun.org/hhd We’d love to celebrate with you!
And you almost certainly know others who would get a lot out of this experience. So please put this info on your Facebook and/or other social media! And send an email to your friends urging them to come as well. Many people who have been turned off to whatever exposure they had to Judaism or another religion would benefit greatly from this experience if you could get them into the room! So help us reach out to them!! Urge them to read about it at www.beyttikkun.org/hhd and sign up there. And noone will be turned away for lack of adequate fund if they register by Sept 14th.