Partners in Parasha--Congregation Beth Shalom Shabbat Shuvah

Last week in the supermarket

at an unlikely hour

I saw a woman I know.

She tried to avoid me

pretended not to remember me

but I had unwittingly trapped her

blocked her escape to the tuna fish aisle.

I just wanted to say hello

my cruelty was inadvertent

but up close I saw

her hair was in disarray

and dirty, her face

without its careful mask

of lipstick, blusher, shadow.

She was wearing a ratty old jacket

the discard of her husband or teenage son.

Nine thirty on a Tuesday morning,

dressed like that -

suddenly I knew she was out of work

and ashamed. And coming undone

there in the tuna fish aisle.

I tried as best I could

to help her cover her nakedness

but all that day and the next

she haunted me.

How strange, I thought,

how strange and how sad

that she should feel threatened, judged,

shamed by me.

The rabbis say

when you bring color to someone's face

it's as if you shed their blood.

Forgive me.

May you be restored to your full self/

Soon, speedily, in our day

And let us say amen.

Merle Feld, Supermarket Prayer

It is a sobering message to realize that we are responsible, but an empowering one as well.

There may always be French fries, and they may be engineered to be addictive and tempting, but we don't have to eat them, That does not exonerate the complicity of the food industry, but focusing on the battle that is won more handily, the one between the fries and our bellies, may be a better use of our time.

Avi Weinstein on Babylonian Talmud, Avoda Zara 17a (scorchintorah.blogspot.com)

Every morning we wake up and proclaim:

אלוהי נשמה שתתה בי טהורה היא

(Elohai neshamah shenatata bi tehora hi)

My Lord, the soul which you gave to me is pure.

How can we brazenly lie like that to our Creator, who knows the truth? The vast majority of us aren't at all pure. Did we conveniently forget all the demeaning averot [sins] which we committed just the day before?

[...]

For Teshuvah to be possible there must be something incorruptible in the human personality. Even the most hardened criminal must have some element within him which remains untouched by sin, which has never committed a crime - the neshamah. While the ruach [spirit] becomes corruped and dirtied by its sins, the neshamah was never involved in those actions. The neshamah always remained pure and unsulied, as we say each morning in Elohai neshamah.

Joseph Soloveitchik, On Teshuvah