Tzipiyah.com

Hello All,

I just wanted to wish you all a Shana Tova - may this year only bring joy to the whole world and bring us to the completion of the unfolding of our redemption.

Our sages teach us that, unlike for religious sins, God cannot forgive us for sins we commit against other people before they forgive us themselves. As the new year approaches and we get ready to ask for forgiveness from God on Yom Kippur, I want to ask each and every one of you to forgive me if I have ever done the slightest thing to annoy you, be it intentionally or un-intentionally.

The time of the year we are now in is a time of Tshuva. Tshuva is often translated as repentance. However, in Hebrew, Tshuva really means return. What are we exactly returning to?

We all know about the regular teshuvah – you sin, feel bad, decide not to sin again and therefore “repent”. However, there is a much deeper level of Teshuva. Rav Avraham Itzhak Hakohen Kook explains that when the world was created, God purposely create a discrepancy between his plan for the world and the outcome of the creation. The example that Rav Kook often gives is called Sod Hanesira – the secret of the separation. We are taught that when men and women were first created, they were linked together back to back. However, afterwards, God moved away from his plan and separated men and women. Now, it has become our job to re-connect with our soulmate. When we finally reconnect with our soulmate and get married to them, our connection is so much stronger because it is not a simply physical connection, but it also has a strong spiritual component. On top of that, it is a connection which was created by us, not by God – this makes it much more powerful because we are the ones who have aligned our own actions to God’s original will.

The same is true of the whole world. I won’t go into textual proofs but the text of the torah itself shows us that the world as created was different than the world as planned by God. Rav Kook teaches that the reason for this discrepancy is that the world would be created not in a static way, but as a constantly evolving world, a dynamic world which evolves towards going back to the world God wanted it to be at first.

Rav Kook thus explains that everything returns to God! Vegetation, animals, everything is slowly going back to the way God originally wanted them to be. Humanity is slowly becoming more and more moral, more and more knowledgeable - and we see this clearly today with the advancement of human rights and technological advancements. The Nation of Israel is slowly returning to becoming a holy nation on the holy land, and we have seen this process move forward very clearly and very slowly ever since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

So, where does our personal Teshuva fit in? How is this meaningful to us as individuals in this time of Teshuva?

The trick is to realize the incredible force of this general teshuva going on in all the beings in this world and to tap into this energy in order to become one with this process of return to God and participate in it. Through this “tapping in”, not only can we help the general teshuva move forward quicker, but every little resolution we take becomes more meaningful because it is not individualistic anymore but part of this absolutely incredible process of the whole world returning to God.

On this Rosh Hashana, I think we should all take a new years resolution- but we need to make sure not to let this resolution be a single resolution. We need to take this resolution in the context of tapping into this energy of the whole world going back to God. Whatever the resolution is – whether it is a universal resolution fighting for the good of humanity, a nationalistic resolution helping further the rebuilding of the Jewish nation on its land, a community oriented resolution focusing on our involvement in the community or even a simple religious, moral individual resolution in which we will work on our own individual self – by making it part of this context of the whole world returning to God, it becomes much more meaningful and powerful.

On this new year, I want to wish all of you a Shana Tovah and bless all of us to be able to make our lives meaningful by tapping into the will of God and partnering with him in a partnership for the betterment of this world, through the incredible power of Teshuvah.

I guess I have to ask for forgiveness again for making this so long and complicated lol :).

Shana Tovah