A slightly less selfish Yom Kippur wish list

I have a confession to make before Yom Kippur: I am often pretty self-centered in my davening.

For as long as I can remember, the majority of my Yamim Noraim prayers have been devoted to my own little collection of wants, fears, plans, and anxieties. In high school, my internal negotiations with Hashem at Neilah might have sounded something like: “Please, Hashem, if I give up wearing liquid makeup on Shabbat, will You help me get above a 1550 on my SAT?”

Or: “Please Hashem, if I promise to say Birkot HaShachar every morning, can You please just tell me clearly what I’m supposed to do with my life? I would really prefer not to spend the next four years figuring it out for myself.”

It’s not that I didn’t daven for my family and community too. I did. But if we’re being honest, they were, I’m a bit ashamed to admit, just a little further down the list.

My tefillot were often less about surrendering myself to Hashem than presenting Him with a fairly detailed wish list and hoping He would approve it.

This has, thankfully, matured somewhat with age. But even now, as I enter the Yamim Noraim, I still tend to slip pretty naturally into thinking about my own goals. This year, though, I seem to have hit a bit of a roadblock.

Part of the reason is simply that I don’t feel like I am waiting for some enormous missing piece of my life.

I have an amazing husband, a good job, a steady life, and, overall, I feel pretty settled in the direction Hashem seems to be taking me. So instead of asking for some giant new thing, I find myself asking that the things I already have be protected.

Please keep the people I love healthy. Please let the things that are good in my life stay good. Please don’t let me become so accustomed to all of this that I forget how grateful I am, and how miraculous it is.

I also, comparatively, now have many more people in my life who I am davening for. I know what my friends are hoping for, what my family members are worried about, which situations people are quietly carrying around with them. The list has become much longer, and much more populated.

But I think there is another reason my tefillot feel different this year, and this is the part that I really do believe has something to do with aliyah.

Living in Israel has made it much easier for me to understand what it means to belong to Am Yisrael, as a fact of life, and in the present tense.

I have never been someone who felt particularly connected to davening with a minyan. I understood why it mattered intellectually, of course, but the collective aspect always felt more than a little distant to me.

I was one person, saying my prayers alongside other people saying theirs. I understand it differently now.

When you live in Israel, it is harder to maintain the illusion that you are entirely separate from everyone around you. You are living inside the same reality. The sirens, the elections, the wars, the arguments, the political mishaps, the tiny everyday joys and triumphs, all of it belongs to the same collective story and struggle, whether or not you personally asked to be included in the larger plot.

You are still in it with everyone else. No matter what, all Jews in this country are connected. And I think that has slowly shifted where my mind goes when I daven.

Let our enemies not be smarter or stronger than us.

Let our love for one another outshine our instinct to divide ourselves into ever-smaller camps.

Let us find a way to disagree without treating one another as enemies.

Let the people running this country make good decisions (an ambitious request, I know).

Let the physical land be fruitful. Let it continue to be a place where people can actually build ordinary, peaceful lives.

Especially after the last few years, with war and violence and so much anger between different Jewish groups within Israel, these are the things that keep surfacing in my mind.

I don’t think I suddenly became a particularly selfless person. My own concerns have not vanished in any way. I still have things I want, things I am afraid of, and things I would very much like Hashem to sort out for me.

But living here has made it harder to imagine that my fate exists in a neatly sealed container of its own. The people I am praying for are not an abstraction. They are my neighbors, my coworkers, my friends, the people sitting beside me on the bus, the people whose families are affected by the same things that affect mine.

I used to enter the Yamim Noraim thinking mostly about what I wanted Hashem to change in my life.

This year, I keep finding myself thinking about the much broader question of what I want Him to keep, repair, protect, and continue holding together for all of us.

Which is perhaps what happens when your personal, religious, political, communal, and national life (finally) start existing and growing within the same physical patch of land.

Shana Tova!