Class 1: Arc of Holidays, Cheshbon HaNefesh - Days of Awe, Days of Transformation

It's easy to think of the Days of Awe (or, in the locution I grew up with, the High Holidays) as a pair of holidays at opposite ends of a ten-day span. Two discrete moments in time, one majestic but joyful (apples and honey!) and the other kind of a pain (hey, it's a fast day.) But Rabbi Lew makes a persuasive argument that these days make best sense in the context of a broader journey which begins with Tisha b'Av and stretches through Sukkot -- and that this annual holiday journey is a microcosm of the cycle we enact in our lives.
-Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt, The Velveteen Rabbi, https://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2006/09/seasonal_teachi.html

Rabbi Debbie Stiel
Paraphrase of "This is Real (and You are Totally Unprepared for It)"
Lew sees the Jewish calendar from Tisha B’Av which occurs midsummer through the building of the Sukkah 2 months later as providing a spiritual plot line for us. All these holidays working together help us to develop our soulfulness. We start in sadness with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple on Tisha B’Av, with the crashing down of its walls and its way of life, and we end with the finale - the joyful building of a new, fragile home – the sukkah. Let’s walk through the timeline and reflect on what each part of it has in store for us. Tisha B’Av (the 9th of the month of Av) came in late July, but we can still reflect on its lessons and follow its prescription for us now.
...
Rabbi Alan Lew uses the fall of the Temple as a metaphor for what needs to happen in our lives. Over the past year or more we have developed fortifications, heavy walls. All around us we stack up excuses, missed opportunities. In this season of turning to God, we want to crash down those walls. We want to break through. We seek to stand without any barriers or false identity before God as we start anew. Echoing the rabbinic response to Tisha B’Av, we might ask “how am I complicit in the destructions in my life?” From Tisha B’Av, and for the next 7 weeks that lead up to Rosh Hashanah, we read the 7 Haftarot of consolation. For these 7 weeks, the rabbis compiled selections from the prophets that remind us that God is forgiving. The rabbis are trying to give us courage and strength to share our true and repentant selves with God. After Av comes the month of Elul. Of course, in Elul, introspection and reflection are our constant homework. It continues the ark that began with the month of Av. Here at Temple we listen to the shofar each Shabbat in Elul. It says ‘you are walking through the world half asleep’ – wake up! Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik in his seminal work titled On Teshuvah reminds us that we create distance between us and God when we sin. During Elul, we work to decrease that gap by figuring out where we need to make amends.
...
We seek to move beyond our excuses: ‘she made me do it,’ ‘ they just make me so angry,’ ‘what does it hurt if I am not completely honest,’ ‘someone else will help out,’ ‘well it may have been mean but it was funny’ …to see our true selves. Now we come to Rosh Hashanah -we work to consciously begin again. Tomorrow we will read from the first Torah portion of the Bible – the story of creation. This sets our timeline. We are at a new beginning! We work to have beginner’s mind. … that wonderful sense of awe and hyperawareness that come with doing something for the first time. This is our first Rosh Hashanah - well, at least of this year! How will we observe it for all it offers us?
...
Rosh Hashanah returns us to our core identities. For a moment we are not mom, brother, doctor, middle-aged lady, teenager,… we strip ourselves of all the social constructs and stand plain, unobscured before God. In so much of life, we spend time building ourselves up. We can hide behind our titles. Now -do we have the courage to open to being just our actions, our thoughts, our soul – just each of us alone and God?
...
Yom Kippur is a vacated day. We empty ourselves of our usual responsibilities. It is our day of heartbreak. We hear the melody of Kol Nidre and we vow to try to speak words of truth. The pleading melodies on this day echo our sincerest desire to atone. We feel the pain of life! And we search for healing and goodness. We strive to come close to God on this holiest day. And we work for closeness to others as we seek to forgive those who have offended us and ask for forgiveness from those we have hurt. There is no more moving day, potentially, than this.
Hungry, tired, out of energy by the end of Neila on Yom Kippur – we will have marched a very long journey to truth, resilience, healing, starting over.
...
Having repented, we release the past and turn eagerly to the future! What do we do with this start of a new year? We build ourselves a NEW house – the sukkah! It can be seen as the true house. As the sukkah is shaky, so is life fragile. Lew writes, “in the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of the need (for security). The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance, one step after another.” Here – in the sukkah surrounded by gourds and vegetables and in the synagogue as we dance with the Torah on Simchat Torah - we are reminded to live life to the fullest. The pain of life is real, but so are its blessings. …So we follow the heaviness of Yom Kippur with the inner, deep joy of Sukkot. May we relish life and seek to do good while we are here! This intense period from Tisha B’Av through Sukkot is really a fractal of a pattern found throughout our life. The soul is always on this journey – tearing down walls and building them up. Always waking up to spiritual truths and then forgetting somewhat and falling back asleep. We are learning and growing and also struggling and being diminished. We can’t always live on top of the mountain, seeing everything for what it is. But we take time once a year to climb that mountain of awareness and reorient our lives to truth. On these High Holy Days may we wake up as fully as we can, that we might truly be alert and tuned in as we begin the new year.

• What might it mean for your heart to awaken?
• What (if any) parts of you (or your life) would have to “go to sleep” in order for your heart to awaken?
• What do you imagine is calling to be let into your heart?

Elul Writing Prompts from Merle Feld:
~ When do you experience yourself as most full, joyous, awake - a holy instrument? Describe what circumstances seem to make that spirit blossom; what circumstances sabotage them. Are there changes that suggest themselves to optimally enliven you?
~ Remember a particular experience this year when some aspect of “your best self” emerged - start by thinking about the past week or month to get memories stirring: you were tired but reached out to an old friend or a family member who needed support; you contributed help on a community project; you showed leadership by stepping up; you stopped talking and just listened. How did that happen? Recall a few vivid, concrete images, details. What qualities of yours were awakened?
Follow-up ~ How might you cultivate those qualities in the coming year?
(You can return to these prompts throughout the month.)

Tisha B'Av and Teshuvah pp.41-42; p.50; p.53
Tisha B’Av comes exactly seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah, beginning the process that culminates on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Tisha B’Av is the moment of turning, the moment when we turn away from denial and begin to face exile and alienation as they manifest themselves in our own lives—in our alienation and estrangement from God, in our alienation from ourselves and from others.
Teshuvah—turning, repentance—is the essential gesture of the High Holiday season. It is the gesture by which we seek to heal this alienation and to find at-one-ment: to connect with God, to reconcile with others, and to anchor ourselves in the ground of our actual circumstances, so that it is this reality that shapes our actions and not just the habitual, unconscious momentum of our lives.
...
Tisha B'Av is the beginning of Teshuvah, the process of turning that we hope to complete on Yom Kippur, the process of returning to ourselves and to God. And the acknowledgement of the unresolved in our lives, as individuals and as a people, is the beginning of the sacred power the Days of Awe grant us.
...
The walls come down and suddenly we can see, suddenly we recognize the nature of our estrangement from God, and this recognition is the beginning of our reconciliation. We can see the image of the falling Temple - the burning house - that Tisha B'Av urges upon us so forcefully, precisely in this light.

Taking Responsibility for Ourselves pp.40-46
[T]he tendency to telescope calamities around this date served to give form to a significant spiritual form, the sense that the same thing was happening over and over again but in slightly different form, and the corresponding feeling that our unresolved tendencies - the unconscious wrong turns we keep taking - carry us back to the same point on our spiritual path again and again... [W]e can regard the 9th of Av as a time when we are reminded that catastrophes will keep recurring in our lives until we get things right, until we learn what we need to learn from them.
...
[S]piritually, the only question worth asking about any conflict, any recurring catastrophe, is this: What is my responsibility for it? How am I complicit in it? How can I prevent it from happening again?
When things go bad, there is an enormous temptation to blame it on externals, on the evil of others, or on an unlucky turn of events. Spiritually, however, we are called to resist this temptation, no matter how strong it may be...
Our power in the world is considerable but also very circumscribed. It is only here and now, in this moment, in this place - in the present - that we can act.
We cannot act in the past, we cannot act in the future, and most certainly we cannot act through someone else's experience.
So from a spiritual point of view, we need to ask, What can I do here and now, in the present reality of my own experience?
...
What is the recurring disaster in our life? What is the unresolved element that keeps bringing us back to this same moment over and over again? What is it that we keep getting wrong? What is it that we persistently refuse to look at, fail to see?

Letting the Walls Come Down pp. 60-63
...Who am I really? What will be left when the walls of constructed identity come down?...The time has come to get off it, to drop the mask. After all, in seven weeks we will stand before the one who sees through all masks. The time has come to turn.
So the Torah tells us seven times. V'neifen, u-finu—and they turned, now you turn. What is required of us at Tisha B’Av is a simple turn of mind, a turn toward consciousness, a turn away from denial, from the inertia, from the passive momentum of our lives, a turn away from those things that continue to happen unconsciously, and a conscious decision to change. A letting go, letting the walls of identity crumble, and turning toward that which remains...
Tisha B’Av has a hot tip for us: Take the suffering. Take the loss. Turn toward it. Embrace it. Let the walls come down...
The walls of our soul begin to crumble and the first glimmerings of transformation—of Teshuvah—begin to seep in. We turn and stop looking beyond ourselves. We stop defending ourselves. We stop blaming bad luck and circumstances and other people for our difficulties. We turn in and let the walls fall.

6. Examine Your Frame of Perception (pp.77-78)
(With his son the entomologist, stuck in the rain on Martha's Vineyard)...
The essential act of the High Holiday season is Teshuvah, a turning toward mindfulness, and an important step in this process is a kind of turning in to examine our perceptive mechanisms, the way we see the world. It is a shifting of our gaze from the world itself to the window through which we see it, because that window, the screen of our consciousness, is not just a blank, transparent medium. Rather it is a world unto itself, a world teeming with life, and that life affects what we see. And because that life makes us see the world differently, the first step in Teshuvah is to look at the window itself.
When the shofar blows on the first day of Elul, and every morning thereafter, it reminds us to turn our gaze inward, and to place judgment at the gates of our consciousness, to shift our focus from the outside world to the considerable activity taking place in the window through which we view it.

The particularity of time (p.28-30)
Judaism believes in the particularity of time, that certain times have special properties: that Shabbat has an extra degree of holiness; that Passover is the time of our liberation; that Shavuot is a time unusually conducive to revelation. But they have special properties only when we are mindful. If we consciously observe Shabbat, Shabbat has this holy quality. If we don't, it is merely Friday night, merely Saturday afternoon. (p.28)
...What our tradition is affirming with these claims is the healing power of time. What our tradition is affirming is that when we reach the point of awareness, everything in time - everything in the year, everything in our life - conspires to help us. Everything becomes the instrument of our redemption. (p.29)
...The passage of time brings awareness, and the two together, time and consciousness, heal... This is precisely the journey we take every year during the High Holidays - a journey of transformation and healing, a time which together with consciousness heals and transforms us. And the urge to return, that primal impulse buried deep in our psyche, is the current that propels us down this river. It is the impulse that launches the healing process. (pp.29-30)

Selichot (p.94)
The Selichot service on Saturday night... serves as a kind of grand overture to the High Holiday season.

Gathering as a group (pp.109-110; p.211)
When we begin to acknowledge the fact that we are utterly unprepared for what we have to face in life, this is when the walls of the psyche begin to break down.
...
The first thing we do during the High Holidays is come together: we stand together before God as a single spiritual unit. We do this out of a very deep instinct...
We need each other now. We need each other deeply. Here in the full flush of the life-and-death nature of this ritual, here in the full flush of our impotence as individuals to meet this most urgent emergency, our need for each other is immense. We heal one another by being together. We give each other hope. ... by ourselves, ain banu ma'asim, there is nothing we can do. But gathered together as a single indivisible entity, we sense that we do in fact have efficacy as a larger, transcendent spiritual unit... (pp.109-110)
...
We are incomplete and imperfect and cannot survive without a spiritual community that can make us whole - that can give us what we need, what we don't have....
That sense of wholeness, of completion, that we have been chasing after all of our lives - but that always eludes us as individuals - is something so deep it can only be found in a whole community, in that shifting composite of need and lack and gift we create when we come together to acknowledge we need each other. (p.211)

And then second, v'hitvadu - we make confession. We open our hearts. We acknowledge the futility of our actions. We see our attempts to be cute with this life, to manipulate it, for the thin reeds they are, and we resolve to give them up. And we are able to find the courage to do this precisely because we are gathered ba'agudah achat - in one single spiritual unit...
And third, we perform this service, this ancient ritual of judgment and transformation, of forgiveness, of life and death. (p.111)

Avoiding the heart (pp.158-9)
But why does the heart require such an indirect approach? Why won't it just open wide when we ask it to? Why does it resist us so? We are sentimental about the heart, but the truth is, most of us spend a good deal of time and energy avoiding the heart at all costs. Really, we are afraid of what we might find there. We don't even know where it is or how we might find it, but somehow we understand there is a lot of pain there... The heart holds our suffering...
In either case we are inclined not to look at it. We live in a culture that conditions us to avoid suffering, and the consequence is that we live at some distance from our heart. We are not in the habit of looking at it, but of distracting ourselves from its content. As we begin the process of Teshuvah, we need to make a conscious effort to overcome the momentum of this denial and avoidance. That pain, that afflictive energy that rests on the surface of our hearts and just below it as well, will be the catalyst for our transformation.
...
This is the great gift of suffering. Intense afflictive states - anger, boredom, fear, guilt, impatience, grief, disappointment, dejection, anxiety, despair - are the great markers of our Teshuvah. By their very intensity, they call us to transformation.

God's forgiveness (pp.135-6; p.148)
Forgiveness - the desire of God to forgive us - is an irresistible force. It fills every space like the waters of a flood. It is one of the most powerful forces on earth, nothing less than the need of the world to be what it is; the need of the universe to have us be what we are. That's why we were created: to be the way we are and not some other way. It is precisely the way we are that is sacred in the first place.
And it is the nature of God to forgive. This God tells the angels in heaven, and this God tells Moses firsthand in the famous passage from the Torah that is embedded in the High Holiday liturgy: "Show me what you are like," Moses pleads with God, and God complies.
"My Name is Y-H-V-H. Y-H-V-H. I am gracious and compassionate. I am forgiveness itself." This is the very meaning of my name, God is saying, Y-H-V-H: the verb to be in the present tense. I am absolute presence, that aspect of the universe that accepts and forgives.
...
This is how God is different from Big Brother, who also knows everything we do and say, but who uses it against us. God watches the whole video with a boundless, heartbreaking compassion.

A Map of the Journey (pp. 3-4; pp.113-4)
You are walking through the world half asleep. It isn't just that you don't know how or why you got here. It's worse than that; these questions never even arise. It is as if you are in a dream...
A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten. Every day for a month, you sit and try to remember who you are and where you are going. By the last week of this month, your need to know these things weighs upon you. Your prayers become urgent.
Then the great horn sounds in earnest one hundred times. The time of transformation is upon you. The world is once again cracking through the shell of its egg to be born... (pp.3-4)
...When the shofar blows one hundred times, it blows open the gates of heaven. When the shofar blows one hundred times, it forms a bridge between heaven and earth, and we enter heaven on that bridge. When the shofar blows one hundred times, it cracks the shell of our awareness wide open, and suddenly we find ourselves in heaven. When the shofar blows one hundred times, we hear the voice of heaven in it. We experience Revelation. God's voice comes down to earth on the same bridge we used...
...
Rosh HaShanah is Yom Harat ha'Olam - the Day the World Is Born; the day heaven gives birth to the earth.
Rosh HaShanah is Yom Ha'Zikaron - the Day of Remembrance; the day we remember that our roots are in heaven, the day heaven remembers us. (pp.113-4)

A Day for Remembering (pp.10-11)
While there is no mention of Rosh HaShanah in these calendars [of the holidays mentioned in the Torah], there is a special day mentioned ten days before Yom Kippur, on the first day of the seventh month, precisely the day that would later become Rosh HaShanah. In biblical times, however, this day was called Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance...
But who was to remember what? Was it a day when God was supposed to remember us? Were we supposed to remember God? Or was it a day when we were to begin to become mindful of our moral circumstances in preparation for the Day of Atonement that would soon be upon us?
Was the sound of the ram's horn (the shofar) a mystical nexus between heaven and earth or, as suggested by the Rambam (Maimonides, a medieval philosopher and legal authority and a towering figure in the world of Jewish thought), was it a wake-up call for us... crying out to us,
"Awake, awake, you sleepers from your sleep... return in repentance, remember your Creator... look to your souls"?

Rosh Hashanah as Preparatory for Yom Kippur (pp.11-12)
...What seems to have been most clearly true of this Day of Blowing of the Horn for Remembrance is that it was both connected with and preparatory for Yom HaKippurim, the Day of Atonement.
...In order for Yom Kippur to effect atonement for us, we have to find a way from unconsciousness to consciousness; we have to become aware of our spiritual condition… Moreover, we have to become aware of the precise nature of our blunders.

The Day of Remembrance, or the Day of the Blowing of the Horn for Remembrance (or the Day of Mindfulness, for the Hebrew root zakar, as in Yom HaZikaron, suggests both remembrance and mindfulness), was the day when we began to cultivate such an awareness. So it was that by talmudic times, Rosh Hashanah had become, above all, Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, the day when we begin to see ourselves through the eyes of a consciousness beyond us. But it was not a final judgment. This judgment always stood in relation to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; [this initial judgment] could always be atoned for. "All are judged on Rosh Hashanah and the verdict is sealed on Yom Kippur," says the Tosefta, an early compendium of Talmudic teachings.

Life From the Void (p.116)
Life bursts into being out of nothing, out of the void the Torah had fallen into after the death of Moses...[when] the round of weekly Torah readings halts and remains suspended for several weeks until the long round of [fall Jewish] holidays is completed.
There is something of this feeling about Rosh HaShanah as well. Rosh HaShanah is, among other things, Yom Harat Ha'Olam - the Day the World Is Born. Rosh HaShanah is also the day that the world burst into being out of nothing, falls away, and then rises up again.

The Whole Life-Cycle in Brief (p.214)
The High Holidays are also a bridge, a compressed journey - k'fitzat ha'derech - the journey from birth to death in ten days' time. Rosh HaShanah is all about birth, and Yom Kippur is about death. Rosh HaShanah is Yom Harat ha'Olam, the Day the World Is Born, and Yom Kippur is the day we rehearse for our death by wearing a shroud and by abstaining from life-giving activities, like eating and sexuality.

Rosh HaShanah: New Possibilities (p.125; p.123)
On Rosh HaShanah, the gates between heaven and earth are opened, and things that were beyond us suddenly become possible. The deepest questions of our hearts begin to find answers. Our deepest fear, the gaping emptiness up ahead of us and back behind us as well, suddenly becomes our ally. Heaven now begins to help us. (p.125)
Without this connection to heaven, we can't make Teshuvah. We can't forgive others or ourselves without it. We can't know ourselves. These things are simply too difficult to do. Our capacities, our vision, our powers, our tolerance for pain, are too limited; our capacity for self-deception and rationalization too persistent. (p.123)

Holiness (p.127)
The Days of Awe ... convey a quality of holiness we can all feel, even if we feel it only dimly. It is precisely this holiness that helps us forgive ourselves.
These days create a context of holiness, and if we pay close attention, we begin to notice that everything in our lives is suffused with holiness, even those 'faults' we thought we had to forgive ourselves for. Even that behavior we took to be wrongful, we now realize, has a holy spark at its center waiting to be released. This is the essence of self-forgiveness.

Seeing Ourselves (excerpts from Chapter 6)
We keep trying to pose for the snapshot of our life, but at Rosh HaShanah our deepest need is to see the tape. (p.140)
...
What would we read about ourselves if our children wrote a book about who we were? How does our family see us? What would the tape reveal when our guard was down? (p.145)
...
We are sentimental about the heart, but the truth is, most of us spend a good deal of time and energy avoiding the heart at all costs. Really, we are afraid of what we might find there... The heart holds our suffering... [and] we are inclined not to look at it. We live in a culture that conditions us to avoid suffering, and the consequence is that we live at some distance from our heart. We are not in the habit of looking at it, but of distracting ourselves from its content. As we begin the process of Teshuvah, we need to make a conscious effort to overcome the momentum of this denial and avoidance. That pain, that afflictive energy that rests on the surface of our hearts and just below it as well, will be the catalyst for our transformation.
(pp.158-9)
...
We are terrified of the truth. But this is a needless terror.
What is there is already so. It's on the tape. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And we know we can stand the truth. It is already here and we are already enduring it.
And the tape is rolling. The hand is writing. Someone is watching us endure it, waiting to heal us the moment we awake and watch along... Watching with unbearable compassion. (p.150)

Self-forgiveness is the essential act of the High Holiday season. That's why we need heaven. That's why we need God. We can forgive others on our own. But we turn to God, Rabbi Eli Spitz reminds us, because we cannot forgive ourselves. We need to feel judged and accepted by a Power who transcends our limited years and who embodies our highest values. When we wish to wipe the slate clean, to finalize self-forgiveness, we need heaven - a sense of something or someone larger and beyond our self.
Though self-forgiveness may end with God, it begins with us. Self-forgiveness is difficult largely because we hold ourselves to such high standards, higher than it is possible to live up to. And it is precisely when we are hardest on ourselves that we are most tempted to bury our misdeeds - to hide from our reality, to deny weakness, to deny that we've done anything wrong. (pp.126-7)
...
To forgive ourselves, we must be willing to give up our ideas about how we might be better.
We need to give up one of our most cherished beliefs - that there is something wrong with us, that we are bad, inadequate, somehow defective and lacking in goodness. Disciplining ourselves, rejecting ourselves, beating ourselves, leads us farther away from this goodness, not closer to it. (p.130)

Death and Yom Kippur Atone (pp.28-9)
When it is invested with our awareness, Yom Kippur, the day itself, has the power to heal, to atone.
Our tradition makes precisely the same claim for death. Death, the only other time in our life when we recite the Vidui, when we bring ourselves to the point of full awareness, also atones. Death, the destination of our journey through life, also heals. Teshuvah is the little death that connects us to the big one.
Yom Kippur is the day we all get to read our own obituary. It's a dress rehearsal for death. That's why we wear a kittel, a shroud-like garment, on this day; why we refrain from life-affirming activities such as eating, drinking, and procreating. We are rehearsing the day of our death, because death, like Yom Kippur, atones.

Evaluating Life Before It's Too Late (pp.227-8; p.230)
We Jews aren't supposed to wait for the end before we ask ourselves those questions. We are supposed to ask them all the time, and especially on Yom Kippur. ... Turn one day before your death, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi tells us in the Talmud, and we never know when that day may be, so we have to turn every day... We are supposed to ask these questions all the time, and at least once a year, at least on this solemn day. What is my life really about? What is the truth of my life?
...
This is why ... we intone the funereal liturgy, "Who will live and who will die?" The rabbis wanted to bring us to the point of existential crisis. They wanted to bring us to the point of asking the crucial question, What is my life all about?

And they knew, as Rabbi Yehudah haNasi and Mayor Giuliani knew, that few of us ask this question until it's too late; few of us ask this question until the last moments of our life. So they have us stage a dramatic re-creation of our death on this day.
...
We shouldn't wait until the moment of our death to seek the answers. At the moment of death, there may be nothing we can do about it but feel regret. But if we seek the answers now, we can act in the coming year to bring ourselves closer to the our core.

Speech Will Save You (p.4)
The ten days that follow are fraught with meaning and dread. They are days when it is perfectly clear every second that you live in the midst of a chain of ineluctable consequence, that everything you do, every prayer you utter, every intention you form, every act of compassion you perform, ripples out from the center of your being to the end of time.
Anger and its terrible cost lie naked before you. Grievance gives way to forgiveness. At the same time, you become aware that you also stand at the end of a long chain of consequences. Many things are beyond your control. They are part of a process that was set in motion long ago. You find the idea of this unbearable.
Then, just when you think you can't tolerate this one moment more, you are called to gather with a multitude in a great hall. A court has convened high up on the altar at the front of the hall. Make way! Make way! the judges of the court proclaim, for everyone must be included in the proceeding. No one, not even the usual outcasts, must be excluded.
You are told that you are in possession of a great power, the power of speech, and that you will certainly abuse it - you are already forgiven for having abused it in the past - but in the end it will save you.

Kol Nidre (p.188)
...We are absolutely accountable for everything that comes out of our mouths.
In fact our ancestors took this so seriously that they instituted the Kol Nidre service to deal with it. They realized that it was a very serious thing to make a vow and not carry through with it, so here at the holiest moment of the year - here at the moment when the purity of our soul is a matter of life or death - they instituted a ritual for the annulment of vows, so that we wouldn't have to bear the guilt of misusing the power of speech.

Heartfelt Confession (pp.188-9)
The prominence of place given to speech in the Rambam's Law of Teshuvah is striking. These are the first words of this code:

"When we commit a sin, whether intention or unintentional, and then we make repentance, we are obliged to make confession [vidui] before God, and this confession must be in words. Even in the days of the Great Temple, when we brought sacrifices for our sins, the sacrifice did not atone for these sins unless we did Teshuvah, unless we made a verbal confession of them...
And what is Teshuvah? We abandon our sin, and remove it from our thoughts, and resolve in our hearts that we won't do it any more. We repent of the past, and proclaim before the knower of all purposes that we won't return to this kind of behavior again. And we need to make this confession with our lips moving; to say these things out loud that we have resolved in our heart."
...
Not only does this confession have to be heartfelt, but according to the Rambam, it must be specific, and it is praiseworthy to make confession in public as well.

Emptiness (p.222)
We need a taste of this emptiness, to give us a sense of what will go with us, what will endure as we make this great crossing. What's important? What is at the core of our life? What will live on after we are wind and space? What will be worthy if that endless, infinitely powerful silence? And what are we clinging on to that isn't important, won't endure, that isn't worthy?
...
We taste death on Yom Kippur to remind us of what we must hold on to, and what we must let go of, of who we are, and where we come from.

Acceptance (p.254)
The way of Yom Kippur is to accept our imperfection. This is what Yom Kippur is all about. We accept that to be human is to be imperfect, to be broken, and we realize that we don't have to protect our brokenness onto someone else. We don't have to try to cast it out. We can fix it. We can repair it in the context of our own lives.

Tisha b'Av: Destruction Precedes Renewal (pp.53, 55)
Fullness and decline are intimately linked. The end of one is the beginning of the other. Conversely, decline and destruction necessarily precede renewal; tearing down is necessary before rebuilding is possible...
The walls come down and suddenly we can see, suddenly we recognize the nature of our estrangement from God, and this recognition is the beginning of our reconciliation...
Even while it stood, the Great Temple was a structure that was centered around emptiness. The Holy of Holies, the Sacred Center upon which all the elaborate structural elegance of the Temple served to focus, was primarily a vacated space. It was defined that way in the Torah. The Holy of Holies was the space no one could enter except the high priest, and even he could only enter for a few moments on Yom Kippur. If anyone else entered this place, or if the high priest entered on any other day, the charged emptiness at the Sacred Center, the powerful nothingness there, would break out on him and he would die.
So Yom Kippur is, among other things, the day we enter the vacated space, even if only by proxy, the day we experience the charged emptiness at the Sacred Center.
On Tisha b'Av it is as if this emptiness has broken loose from its bounds and swallowed everything up. The Temple burns. The emptiness once confined to the center of the Temple now characterizes it completely.

The Idea of a House (p.5; pp.265-6)
The gate clangs shut, the great horn sounds one last time. You feel curiously lighthearted and clean.
Some days later you find yourself building a house; a curious house, an incomplete house, a house that suggests the idea of a house without actually being one. This house has no roof. There are a few twigs and branches on top, but you can see the stars and feel the wind through them. And the walls of this house don't go all the way round either. Yet as you sit in this house eating the bounty of the earth, you feel a deep sense of security and joy. Here in this mere idea of a house, you finally feel as if you are home. The journey is over. (p.5)
So now we sit flush with the world, in a "house" that calls attention to the fact that it gives us no shelter. It is not really a house. It is the interrupted ideas of a house, a parody of a house. According to Jewish law, this booth we must dwell in for seven days need only have closed walls on two and a half sides, and we must be able to see the stars through the organic materials - the leaves and branches - that constitutes its roof. This is not a house, it is the bare outline of a house. It is like the architectural feature called the broken pediment, the notch in the roofline of the façade of a house which leaves the mind to complete the line, and thus implants the idea of a line in the mind even more forcefully than an unbroken line would. So it is that the sukkah, with its broken lines, its open roof, its walls that don't quite surround us, calls the idea of the house to mind more forcefully than a house itself might do.
And it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offers us this. No building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us security from it. And we know this. (pp.255-6)

Full Body Joy (p.264; 267)
"You shall dwell in booths for seven days," the Torah enjoins us, "so that you will know with every fiber of your being that your ancestors dwelt in booths during their sojourn in the wilderness when they were leaving Egypt." This is a commandment we fulfill not with a gesture or a word, but with our entire body. We sit in the sukkah with our entire body. ...
Only the body can know what it felt like to be born. Only the body can know the fullness of joy, and this is a commandment that can only be fulfilled with joy. All the holidays and all their rituals are to be observed with joy, but there is a special joy, an extra measure of joy, connected to Sukkot.
...
And when we speak of joy here, we are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of deep joy.

Emptiness, Vulnerability and Joy (pp.270-1)
Once a year, after several months of reconnecting with the emptiness at the core of form, we leave the formal world behind.We sit in a house that is only the idea of a house, a house that calls attention to the illusory nature of all houses.
And there is a joy in this, a joy born of the realization that nothing can protect us. Nothing can save us from death, so it's no use defending ourselves. We may as well give up, and there is a wonderful release in this giving up.
...
Tomorrow morning I will walk around the synagogue celebrating both our power and our impotence, our miraculous capacity to bear and nurture life, and our utter dependence on God for it, and I will feel a deep sense of joy as I do, because this is the truth of my life. This is the cusp I actually stand on at every moment of my life. Every moment of my life, I am inescapably hammered into place by everything that has ever happened since the creation of the universe, and every moment I am free to act in a way that will alter the course of that great flow of being forever.
And here at the core of our life, here at its paradoxical center, there is a mysterious, inexplicable, senseless joy.