Alan Lew

It may be that all that person needs is to feel and see our presence.

I think that this is what Rabbi Alan Lew means when he writes about the high holidays as the moment when we come together and stand before God as a single spiritual unit.

We do so, he says, because we need each other deeply.

We do so because we heal one another by being together.

leaning into this lack of control.

In Rabbi Alan Lew's companion to the High Holidays, This is Real and You're Completely Unprepared, he teaches that these days can catalyze our ability to respond to everything outside of our control, allowing us to be better Jews, better drivers, and better people.

I've cracked open this book every year since first encountering it as TI's congregational read in 2015.

One of my most underlined passages focuses on one of the prayers we started with tonight, Avinu Malkenu, and three particular words, Ein Banu Ma'asim.

What are the differences between the two?

One of the points that Rabbi Lew makes is that people would often notice that somebody who was really good, who was just an absolute upstanding person during the Days of Awe, could die in the next year.

Even people who were upstanding throughout the year would die during the following year.

The theology of the days of awe is centered around the book of life, or the book of the wicked, or the book of death.

'Cause, like, we are in a different time, and it does r- call for a, a, maybe a different response, but also, like, there's something really powerful about having a rooted, grounded, ancient response that has been the response of our ancestors for so long.

And yeah, and I think, um, Rabbi Alan Lew channels it very, very powerfully in that book.

Any last comments or-

Thank you, Rabbi Liu.