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Secrets
of the Jewish Year Holiday Messages and Meditations on the Jewish Year |
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I
am to My Beloved and (The following is a translated excerpt from Rabbi Ginsburgh's Hebrew book, "Ani Ledodi Vedodi Li.")
Part
1 Elul
is here, and the feel of teshuvah
is in the air. The new year is approaching, and this is the time to make an
accounting of our actions over the past year and to mend our ways. In order to
repent, though, we must be able to identify where we went wrong. If we succeed
in delving deeply enough into our hearts, we often discover that although, in
many cases, our actions were in accordance with the letter of the law, our
intentions were far removed from God. To truly rectify our sins, we must
understand exactly at what point we strayed from our relationship with God. In
the following chapters we will analyze three basic types of relationships, and
how an in depth understanding of the motivations behind these relationships will
bring us to perfect the most essential relationship that we have -- our
relationship with God. Three Types of
Relationships In
the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) prayers, we ask God to "pardon us, forgive us, absolve
us" (slach lanu, mechal lanu, kaper lanu). Each of these types of
forgiveness expresses a different type of sin and a different type of
forgiveness that we request of God. We generally liken our relationship with God
to one of three main paradigms:
Sinning
within the framework of the father/son relationship is to ignore the father, as
a child who treats his father with disdain and disrespect. Sinning
within the framework of the king/servant relationship is to rebel against the
king's directives. Sinning
within the framework of the husband/wife relationship is to be insensitive to
the inner essence of the other.
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Improve
your life
Part 1: 
