Rosh Hashanah: Learning Our Holiness Once Again

There is a prayer in Mahzor Lev Shalem that I return to each year: Tefillah Zakkah (A Prayer for Purity), composed by Rabbi Abraham Danziger (1748-1820). Traditionally recited at the beginning of Kol Nidre, for me it has always served as a personal check-in as I enter the New Year.

The prayer moves through the body, part by part, naming the ways each was created to serve God—and the ways we have fallen short. 

“You created me with hands, with the sense of touch, with the ability to transmit tenderness and comfort, but I have often used my hands for hurting others.” 

I love poetry. So I recognized Tefillah Zakkah as a type of blazon, a poetic form that we can also find in Shir Hashirim (Song of Songs), to describe a beloved person from head to toe. 

Tefillah Zakkah might seem like the opposite. But underneath its litany of our shortcomings, I hear another message: a love poem to our potential:

“You created me with hands, with the sense of touch, with the ability to transmit tenderness and comfort.”

“You have created me with ears so I could listen to Your world and Your word.”

“You created me with legs to walk in the paths of holiness.”

Even as we recall the ways we have misused our bodies, we are reminding ourselves what they are for. Our bodies were created to bring goodness into the world. Each of us carries that sacred potential because each of us was created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

There is a line later in the prayer that has stayed with me: we stop our ordinary work on the Yamim Noraim, the High Holidays, “to learn once again the holiness of [our] body.”

I need that reminder this year.

The past few years have asked so much of us as a Jewish community. We have carried grief and fear, antisemitism and uncertainty. We have watched a world filled with suffering and division and wondered what, exactly, is being asked of us within it. All of that gets carried in the body. And sometimes it can exhaust the very tenderness with which we were created.

That is why I am so grateful for these Yamim Noraim—for the chance to stop.

Not to turn away from the world. Not to pretend its challenges have disappeared. But to hold them in one hand while, with the other, reaching again toward our tradition, our community, and one another. To remember that we are still capable of tenderness. We are still capable of listening. We are still capable of changing things.

And then, when we return to the world, to put our bodies back to their sacred purposes.

To use our hands to open them to those in need.

To use our ears to listen—to one another and to our planet.

To use our voices to speak up with compassion.

To use our legs to walk again in paths of holiness—or, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously taught, to pray with our feet.

This is the work I hope the Tzedek Center–the Conservative/Masorti hub for social action and public policy–will help us do together.

In the year ahead, I invite you to make 5787 a year of exercising our body’s potential for good: through service, through advocacy for change, through listening across difference, through sharing our Torah. Whether you have been carrying this work for years or are looking for a place to begin, we want to be your partners. Reach out to us. Tell us what you care about and what you want to change. Let us help you build on the work you’re already doing, find partners who can help it grow, or find a place to start.

We are living in a difficult world. But we were also created with the capacity to change it.

When the shofar calls us back this new year—awakening us, from head to toe and soul and back—may it be an invitation to learn our holiness again.

And then, together, to use it.