This time of year...

We try to apologize.


If I owe you an I'm sorry...


I am.


This time LAST YEAR


I wrote this...


Here's a taste:

"... But I’m interested in this chest banging, this physical prayer, this rhetoric of forgiveness. So I’ve been asking around, trying to uncover the reason for this custom. It’s called the Vidui. The Vidui is said in unison, standing, during the Yom Kippur service. While we recite the Vidui, we bang our chests. Really, the Vidui is a list of sins for which we ask forgiveness, and it’s notable that the Vidui is recited in alphabetical order, from aleph to tav. Because, “Language, the very instrument used by God to create grandeur out of chaos, can be misused by us to revert the world back to chaos” (Ismar Schorsh).


Even more interesting than the alphabetization is that we say the Vidui aloud, in first person plural. We drum on our bodies and chant it as a community, because the Vidui is not a litany of individual sins, but rather a list of communal sins. Judaism recognizes that most of us haven’t committed these particular sins, but that if one of us has committed any one of them, than we are culpable and we must all ask forgiveness for the community.


For the sin we have committed in thy sight by casting off responsibility…


Check out the whole think at Killing the Buddha!!!