Susan Bass

“Birth is a beginning and death a destination; But life is a journey, a sacred pilgrimage.” So goes the poem written by Alvin Fine. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is part of our Yizkor liturgy. This week’s parashah is called "Masei" which means "journeys." This is of course associated with the segments of the journey of the Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land. The parashah, however, tells us not so much of the "journeying" but rather of the stops they made along the way–42 in all.  Egypt was called "Mitzrayim" by the Israelites, meaning "a narrow place, or a place of confinement." Thinking in personal terms, these steps or stages can be said to mirror our own lives as we journey on our own personal "exodus from Egypt" toward our destination, which would be the spiritual counterpart of the Land of Israel.

“Mothers love and mothers hold Mothers shape the world we know, mama, ima, mama Mothers worry mothers feel Mothers know too well what’s real, mama, ima, mama And these are the things our mothers teach us…” -“Limdu Heiteiv” by Beth Schafer (WRJ’s Centennial...

It’s Shabbat. Where is the quiet? This morning, there is the sound of wind blowing across the sand and rocks. Throughout the bounty of an Israeli buffet breakfast (oy!), there I hear the cacophony of voices, the clinking of silverware and dishes, chairs scraping across the floor. No quiet here.

“Rosh HaShanah is coming.  It will be a good time to just turn the page, and start the new year fresh,” a friend said a few weeks ago.  “Then, you can focus on moving forward.  Leave all of the unpleasantness behind.”  Is it really that easy?  Is that what the High Holidays are about?  Turn the page and move on?  Are we supposed to use these ten days, these days of reflection, to honestly examine our acts of the past year, atone for them, and then just move on with our lives?  Or, are we to look for lessons, kernels of experience that we can use to inform the way we conduct ourselves and manage our lives going forward? Just as Shabbat allows us to take a break from the routine hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, perhaps we can take this time to not only break from our routine, but also to look a little deeper, to think a little longer, to ask ourselves what our role was in the successes and in the failures of the prior year.  Regardless of the outcome, it is probably most instructive to take a moment to ask ourselves, “What part did I play in that?“  When all is said and done, we really do learn more from our failures than our successes.  Maybe the growth is in finding a way to keep from repeating the same mistakes over and over.