A Day of Atonement...

Synagogue in Pune, India

I am not by nature terribly religious.  I have written about his before and I am clearer than ever that for me the religious aspect of my life is much more to do with a kind of holistic spirituality and inter-connectedness all beings share.  Today, though is also one of the holiest days of  the Jewish calendar.  It is Yom Kippur. 

Though I do not go to synagague or, as is traditional today, fast for 24 hours so as to leave the mind and body clear for prayer, I do spend some time in meditative thought about my actions during the past year.  Yom Kippur marks the end of a ten day period in which we are meant to contemplate our deeds, thoughts and actions.  This seems like a good idea to me.  Often our deeds are what we are judged on and our thoughts are not something we scrutinise or remember.

Sometimes I know I can be unkind and more often thoughtless or tactless.  I am never as good as I would like to be and I believe that I judge myself more harshly than any real or more likely, imagined,  god might. I gossip and use sarcasm and harsh words when kindness and patience might achieve more.  I have a strong need to be right and therefore make others wrong.  To use the expression that Ralph coined last night I often live in 'Jewishprincessville'.

Jewishprincessville is a land never very faraway that many of my friends and I inhabit, especially when we are being lazy and inactive.  In Jewishprincessville, the women usually rule, but I have myself known some very able male citizens of this land.  The qualities of the citizens of Jewishprincessville are a tremendous attitude of entitlement and an unswerving, unshakeable sense of our rightness and the wrongness of others.  Few people are born with these qualities, but have to work on developing them.

So, today, I am declaring my home a Jewishprincessville free environment.  Equality of entitlement willbe the rule of today and I will give up the need to be right.  I am endeavouring to do this more and more.  it does not serve others for me to think I'm always right.  it makes me seem arrogant and pushy and I am not always that. I see it  doesn't serve me at all.

As it is Yom Kippur today I am trying to make amends to those I have wittingly, consciously or unwittingly and unconsciously wronged or offended.  I am keeping an open, compassionate heart today.  It is a beginning...