ED: The following is a excerpt from the story, “Rabbis Share Sneak Previews of Holy Days Messages” which ran in our Rosh Hashanah Sept. 7 issue.
Rabbi Denise Eger
Congregation Kol Ami
Congregation Kol Ami will focus this High Holy Days on the theme of “Imagine a New Year, Imagine a new you.” The process of teshuvah demands that we reflect and examine, confess and seek correctives to the behaviors, sins and errors that kept us from being at our best and that have kept us from fulfilling the mitzvot, our sacred obligations to God and community and family.
A significant part of the teshuvah process is also a commitment to refrain from making those errors, mistakes and sins again. But often the problem is that we cannot imagine our lives without those ingrained ways that have led us astray. So we will learn that through the unique prayers for this season how we can imagine and visualize not only a new way of being that distances us from the sins of our past but also imagining and visualizing and praying and creating a world of justice, peace and hope. We will look at the idea of prayer as visualization. We will explore reimagining our congregational mission and call on our community members to participate and engage in the transformation of their own lives and our communal life with a holy commitment to build the world anew on a foundation of chesed and emet — lovingkindness and truth.
