Tweet

@korenpublishers

@bariweiss

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @rabbisacks

Rabbi Sacks

@rabbisacks

1 Oct

THREAD -> #Succot is the festival of insecurity. It is the candid acknowledgment that there is no life without risk, yet we can face the future without fear when we know we are not alone.

God is with us, in the rain that brings blessings to the earth, in the love that brought the universe and us into being and in the resilience of spirit that allowed a small and vulnerable people to outlive the greatest empires the world has ever known.

Succot reminds us that God’s glory was present in the small, portable Tabernacle that Moses and the Israelites built in the desert even more emphatically than in Solomon’s Temple with all its grandeur. A temple can be destroyed. But a succah, broken, can be rebuilt tomorrow.

Read 9 tweets

Rabbi Sacks

@rabbisacks

30 Sep

THREAD -> #Succot is the time we ask the most profound question of what makes a life worth living.

Having prayed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to be written in the Book of Life, Kohelet (the book we read on Succot) forces us to remember how brief life actually is, and how vulnerable. “Teach us rightly to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).

What matters is not how long we live, but how intensely we feel that life is a gift we repay by giving to others. Surely this is a message that resonates even more forcefully this year as we approach Succot in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic.

Read 6 tweets

Rabbi Sacks

@rabbisacks

29 Sep

THREAD -> More than any other festival, #Succot (which begins on Friday evening) represents the dual character of Jewish faith. We believe in the universality of God, together with the particularity of Jewish history and identity.

All nations need rain (which we pray for on Succot). We are all part of nature. We are all dependent on the complex ecology of the created world.

We are all threatened by climate change, global warming, the destruction of rain forests, the overexploitation of non-renewable energy sources and the mass extinction of species.

Read 9 tweets

Rabbi Sacks

@rabbisacks

26 Sep

There is an old story that I find incredibly moving and powerful, particularly as we approach #YomKippur in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic (and which appears in my 'Ceremony & Celebration' educational resource for Yom Kippur -> rabbisacks.info/2E0XMhR).

One Yom Kippur, the Baal Shem Tov was praying together with his students, and he had a worrying sense that the prayers were not getting through, and the harsh heavenly decree against the Jewish people was not being overturned.

As Ne’ila approached, and with it the final opportunity for the Jewish people to avert this harsh judgement, he and his students increased their fervour and passion in their prayers, but to no avail.

Read 12 tweets

Rabbi Sacks

@rabbisacks

25 Sep

“Wherever you find God's greatness,” said Rabbi Yohanan, “there you will find His humility.” And wherever you find true humility, there you will find greatness.

That is what #YomKippur is about: finding the courage to let go of the need for self-esteem that fuels our passion for self-justification, our blustering claim that we are in the right when in truth we know we are often in the wrong.

Most national literatures, ancient and modern, record a people's triumphs. Jewish literature records our failures, moral and spiritual. No people has been so laceratingly honest in charting its shortcomings. In Tanakh there is no one without sin.

Read 10 tweets

Rabbi Sacks

@rabbisacks

24 Sep

What is the meaning and the source of Vidui, (confession), the prayer that begins “Ashamnu, bagdnu, gazalnu”, that we say during Selichot and Yom Kippur, beating our heart and confessing collectively our sins?

The answer is that it dates back to the Temple sacrifices, specifically to the sin offering on which a sinner confessed their sin by saying “Chatati aviti pashati”, “I have done wrong, I have sinned”, and then specified the sin.

Though we no longer have the Temple or the sin offering, Vidui, the act of confession, still exists and still has its original power, and is, according to Maimonides, the biblical core of the mitzvah of teshuvah itself. What does Vidui actually mean?

Read 10 tweets

Share this page!

Rabbi Sacks

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @rabbisacks

Rabbi Sacks

Rabbi Sacks

Rabbi Sacks

Rabbi Sacks

Rabbi Sacks

Rabbi Sacks

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Like this author's thread?