High Holiday Supplement: For the Ways We Have Missed the Mark and Gone Astray—a Spur to Transformation in 2016

You don’t have to be Jewish to use this spiritual practice and can modify it to fit your own inner spiritual reality. On the Jewish High Holidays, or whenever we are doing repentance work, we take collective responsibility for our own lives and for the activities of the community and society of which we are a part. We affirm our fundamental interdependence and interconnectedness. We have allowed others to be victims of incredible suffering, have turned our backs on others and their well-being, and yet today we acknowledge that this world is co-created by all of us, and so we atone for all of it.

While the struggle to change ourselves and our world may be long and painful, it is our struggle; no one else can undertake it for us. To the extent that we have failed to do all that we could to make ourselves and our community an embodiment of our highest values, we ask God and each other for forgiveness—and we now commit ourselves to transformation this coming year, as we seek to get back on the path to our highest possible selves. We use this period of atonement to actually work on the concrete steps we will be taking to live a more holy and ethically grounded life! Otherwise it’s nonsense.

Hebrew Chant: Ve-al kulam, Eloha seh’lichot, seh’lach lanu, meh’chal lanu, kapeyr lanu.

For all the ways we “miss the mark” and betray our most loving and holy aspirations and the call of the universe for us to evolve into more conscious, ethical, environmentally sensitive, and joyous human beings, may the Force that makes forgiveness possible (Yud Hey Vav Hey) forgive us, pardon us, and make atonement possible.

Excerpt from the full version that you can find on line at www.tikkun.org/ForTheSins

Personal Lives

For the sins we have committed before You and in our communities by being so preoccupied with ourselves that we ignore the larger problems of the world … And for the sins we have committed by being so outwardly directed that we have ignored our inner spiritual, psychological, and ethical development;

For the sins we have committed by not forgiving our parents for the wrongs they committed against us when we were children … And for the sin of having too little compassion or too little respect for our parents or for our children or our friends when they act in ways that disappoint or hurt us;

For the sin of not sharing responsibility for child-rearing … And for the sin of not taking time to help singles meet each other in a safe and emotionally nurturing way, and instead making them fend for themselves in a marketplace of relationships;

For the sin of cooperating with self-destructive behavior in others or in ourselves … And for the sin of not supporting each other as we attempt to change;

For the sin of being jealous and trying to manipulate those we love … And for the sin of being judgmental or listening to (or even spreading) negative stories about the personal lives of others (lashon ha’ra);

For the sin of withholding love and support to our partners and friends, or being super-critical, failing to be empathic and generous in our caring for others and giving them the support they need to feel safe, or being manipulative or hurting others to protect our own egos… And for the sin of doubting our ability to love and both to deserve and get love from others.

Societal Issues

For the sin of allowing our elected leaders to continue to affirm the notion of economic growth as progress rather than repairing the damage economic growth has already done to our planet … And for the sin of allowing military spending and tax cuts for the rich to undermine our society’s capacity to eliminate domestic and global poverty and to give quality caring to the powerless, the young, and the aging;

For the sin of not taking the leaflets or not opening the emails of those who...