Keeping It Up

With Yom Kippur behind us, the hardest inner-work happens now. The personal commitments you made yesterday are in the balance today. 

Perhaps if you pay attention to one-at-a-time, your positive prospects will improve. Resist that urge. Insist on speaking up the next time you face a troubling remark. Try beginning your day without looking at your phone first. Most of all, do your best to be forgiving of yourself. Particularly when you misstep. Especially, the first time you do. Which, if you’re like me, is likely to happen today.  

Not because you’re weak. But because you’re human. Not only human, but rather fully human. 

This week’s portion forecasts failures up ahead. Moses’ closing poetic-verse promises we’ll stumble. Yet it includes tools and rules for how to pick ourselves up and even get better at doing so over time. 

I find fascination with the way God concludes the portion. With a reflection back onto Moses and Aaron. On their sin, for which they paid with their lives. Moses remains unable to enter the land. And Aaron’s death, from the same loss-of-temper striking of the rock, turned into a dress-rehearsal for Moses’s. 

There’s a prayer in the forgiveness liturgy (selichot) that lists the historic ways God responded to our ancestors. This year, I was drawn to how God responded to Aaron. The prayer accentuates Aaron’s capacity to atone for the Children of Israel in the plague-ridden aftermath of the Torah’s worst rebellion. It’s the most severe instance of self-inflicted damage. What fascinates me about God’s response to Aaron in the long historic list, is that it’s the only case that involves atonement (Kapara) (Num. 17:11,12). And with the day named for atonement (Kippur) just now behind us, it feels fitting to draw from Aaron’s recovery-capacity. 

Yesterday’s Sermon sought to provide some helpful tools. Perhaps the key takeaway for me today, relates to that first stumble. When it happens. When self-doubt creeps closer, try to remember Aaron who pursued peace, but never fully arrived to realize it. The same goes for inner peace. 

May you pick yourself up today and tomorrow, being forgiving, yet still expecting, of that warm inner-handshake you get to have, when you clasp the hand of your promise kept.