Every year I feel I have to make new insights into each of our cyclical holy days. Some years, this one for example, I’m stumped and perhaps that feeling of stumpness is at least the clue and possibly the insight itself.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in “how do I” or how does any “authority” view what goes on with a day like Yom Kippur. But perhaps as long as one maintains even that much of an externality of the chag one removes oneself from the Kedusha.

As Rabbi Ted Falcon taught me this year, we ascend the Tree of Life in the Ten Days from Rosh HaShana to Yom Kippur. We move from the realm of fully-engaged in the world to the realm of total awareness and acceptance and unity, from Malchut to Chochma.

So my wish, short but deeply felt, is that we all may find ourselves, at least for some part of Yom Kippur, so much at home that we don’t realize we’re even there as observer anymore, that as we climb we make peace with all those parts of our souls and our personalities which feel pain, frustration and lack of satisfaction until we find ourselves fully accepting what is. And may we all bring at least sparks of that experience back into our year, incorporating the purity and forgiveness of the day to ourselves and to all Creation.