Rachid Halihal, member of our High Holidays musical team, conducting a Shabbat song in Arabic.

Dear friends,

Are you sick of yourself?

Do you find yourself longing for a different internal conversation? An altered set of familiar emotional responses, anxieties, habits? An unfamiliar way of listening, speaking, sharing, relating, desiring, thinking, seeing? New jokes, fresh stories, unexpected instincts?

For a limited time, this fall TJT* promises to help you transform into A NEW PERSON. Someone you never were.

Wear your body in a new way.

Experience your mind shifting.

Sing a truly new song.

*TJT =The Jewish Tradition

This is the late-night infomercial version of what the great Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik called Teshuvah, or repentance. The Days of Awe, or the Ten Days of Teshuvah, for which we are currently in pre-season action, offer us a rare chance to create a new version of ourselves. Soloveitchik writes:

“Repentance is an act of creation – self-creation. The severing of one’s psychic identity with one’s previous “I,” and the creation of a new “I,” possessor of a new consciousness, a new heart and spirit, different desires, longings, goals – this is the meaning of that repentance compounded of regret over the past and resolve for the future.”

When we examine our actions critically the process of honest exploration can already lead us to step out of ourselves. When that happens, we open a door that can lead us to act differently, to see things from other perspectives, to new modes of behavior. When we then resolve to improve, we offer ourselves a new path. A new way to experience, receive, and act.

Maybe we will only get to be someone else for a brief second. Maybe just for Yom Kippur. Maybe we’ll get the whole ten days leading up to it. But maybe, if we put in the work, and find the opening, we will, “through teshuvah,” as Soloveitchik wrote, “create” - each of us for ourselves and all of us together - our “own I.”

Yesterday I met with Rachid Halihal, the master oud player from Morocco who will make music with us throughout these High Holidays. Rachid described a project he worked on for years, in which he would invite people from different countries, backgrounds and religions to make music together. Some were professional musicians, others had never sung or made music in front of others. There were children, seniors and everyone in between, blind people, seeing people, folks of all types. He would ask them to leave their identities, their politics, their beliefs at the door, and step into the music, where the language is that of the human heart, of sound, of listening and responding, of rhythm and melody. Rachid would work with each group, until they were ready to perform.

Above is a video of one such performance, of a traditional Mizrachi Shabbat song, Ki Eshmera Shabbat, here sung in translation into Arabic.

This evening at 6:30, Please join two of our leading musicians and me this evening at First Presbyterian Church (5th Ave and 12th street in Manhattan) for a special Shabbat of slichot, the pre-High Holidays songs and hymns of repentance that are also sung at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. If you’re ready to find that new you, it might be waiting for you there.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha

A New You