TBT Blog

Believe it or not, I’m an introvert. 

I enjoy other people (don’t worry, I love you all and my family) but I also value my alone time to recharge. Most of the way I process my life and the world is internal, and I often get stuck in my head. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but one of the problems with being an introvert, at least for me, is that it rarely occurs to me to ask others for help. It’s not that I don’t need help or even that I think I don’t need help. Most of the time it simply doesn’t occur to me to ask.

This, by the way, is just one of the reasons I’m grateful to have Rabbi Dusty as my rabbinic partner. Whenever we are problem solving, I usually recommend a related podcast for further thinking, while she usually takes our lingering, unanswered questions, and says, “let me put it out to the people on Facebook to see if anyone has a good suggestion.” This, again, would never occur to me.

And if I’m being honest, even when it does occur to me, I don’t actually like to ask for help. Somewhere along the way, I internalized the American value of individualism, which emphasizes self-reliance. Asking for help is seen as a sign of weakness, and who wants to admit their own limitations?

Enter: the High Holy Days.

Every year, during Elul, I pull out my machzor (High Holy Day prayer book) and the words of our seasonal prayers practically scream at me: 

Ashamnu, WE are guilty. Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha, the ways WE have wronged God…

The High Holy Day liturgy, and more specifically, the confessional section of the Yom Kippur service when we take responsibility and ask for forgiveness, is written in the plural.

If we are meant to spend all this time doing our own, individual, cheshbon hanefesh (accounting of our souls), why, then, would we confess our sins together, in the plural?

Many rabbis connect this fact to a message of communal responsibility.

In We Have Sinned: Sin and Confession in Judaism-Ashamnu and Al Chet, editor, Rabbi Larry Kushner, writes, “The nature of our community matters. We can be a community that learns to hurt and to hate or to love and to pardon. It is a communal ritual that establishes which one it will be.”

I, personally, may not have committed sins A, B, or C, but chances are that collectively, all of the sins have been committed by someone in the community, so collectively, we are guilty.

The idea of communal responsibility gives us a lot to think about, and, I want to add another layer to the way we think about our High Holy Day prayers: 

Judaism teaches that it’s not good for humans to be alone; we should not separate ourselves from the community. 

I think that the confessional prayers, which are arguably the most vulnerable of all Jewish prayers, are written in the plural as an act of resistance. At the precise moment when we are most likely to feel embarrassed, hide away, and indulge our instinct of self-reliance, Judaism says, “no, no. Stay here. It’s hard; it’s vulnerable; but you are not meant to do this thing, called life, alone.”

When we recite the confessional prayers in the plural, it’s one way of asking for help from the people around us - help in holding ourselves accountable, help in getting through the hard stuff, and help in asking for and receiving forgiveness.

This High Holy Day season, I invite you to show up, even when, especially when it feels hard. Maybe this is a year when you recognize a need for help. Perhaps this is a year when you have a renewed capacity to offer help to others. Being part of the Jewish community and belonging to Temple B’nai Torah is a reminder that you are not alone. May we challenge the belief that asking for help is a sign of weakness and recognize the ways in which it strengthens our community.

And may we all have a sweet and happy new year, together, here at TBT. Shana Tovah!