Yom Kippur give us a guide to reset the world

Today is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish life cycle.

It is the high point of the span known as “The Ten Days of Awe,” which began on Sept. 26 with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ends with Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles, on Oct. 10.

On Yom Kippur, the world’s Jews spend the day fasting and in repentance, as God inscribes the names of the penitent in the Book of Life for another year. It also requires people to ask for forgiveness for any wrongs they may have done to others.

The ability to forgive, and to ask for forgiveness requires a strength and grace that can’t be measured.

However, to do so is to our own benefit. The late William Arthur Ward wrote: “A life lived without forgiveness is a prison.”

The rest of us can and should take cues from Yom Kippur as an opportunity to reset the world and how we’re treating one another in it.

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We live in a culture which increasingly regards forgiveness and repentance as weakness. We have instead deemed it more important to put others in their place, to pounce on each others’ faults ― real and imagined.

Where others may see cruelty, we defend it as “telling it like it is.”

It’s as if we can’t help ourselves.

We are a country so wracked with anger, it has caused us to lose our balance and our vision.

Our house isn’t just divided, it’s on fire.

Embodying the message and the spirit of Yom Kippur requires that we embrace humility, no easy task in an age where the pursuit of fame for its own sake has more value than atonement.

We need a reset, one that begins with mindfulness, even in the midst of disagreement. Without it, we run the real risk of forgetting that we’re one nation; a people who share common dreams and hopes, even as we disagree how we go about in achieving such things.

We are in desperate need of tikkun olam, which is Hebrew for “To repair the world.”

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Though tikkun olam may sound impossible, it is within our grasp because, just as with accusations, name-calling and recrimination, forgiveness and repentance are a choice.

It isn’t complicated. It may begin as simply as resisting the temptation to offer a retort on Facebook.

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Because everything is connected, it could help to heal the earth itself.

The Torah is filled with passages that extoll the majesty and power of the earth.

From the prophet Isaiah:

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been declared to you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the foundation of the earth? He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth; its dwellers are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like tent to dwell in. He brings the princes to nothing and makes the rulers of the earth meaningless.”

In David’s 107th Psalm:

“They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters;These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.For at his word the stormy wind arises, which lifts up the waves thereof.They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep.”

Some of the destruction we’re experiencing during natural disasters has been abetted by our refusal to be better stewards. Overdevelopment, building then rebuilding in places we shouldn’t, and removing natural barriers and protections means we can’t be fully surprised when disaster lands on our doorstep.

This, too, can be remedied if we’re willing to act on behalf of the greater good. As it has often been said, we have always been a country good at doing big things. It’s how we’ve been able to produce such people as Founding Father Thomas Paine, who wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Charita Goshay: Yom Kippur gives us a guide to reset the world