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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg.

Good Morning

Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It’s the holiest date in the Jewish year, a fast from dusk yesterday until dark tonight. It takes us from our daily round, into a deeper world where we bring our soul and conscience before God.

We ask difficult questions:
What are we? What is our life? What are we doing with it?

We admit the light of truth into chambers of our conscience we’re reluctant to open: Did I really say that? Did I cause that hurt? How can I make good?
The centre of the service is a litany of confession. Like many Hebrew prayers, it’s an acrostic, each phrase beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. This brings structure and rigour into our self-examination.

It’s the ‘b’ word which catches my conscience: ‘bagadnu – we’ve betrayed.’ It encapsulates my feeling when memories of selfish things emerge from the recesses where I’ve suppressed them and fill me with shame.

It’s what I feel when I see how we humans treat nature.

The same Hebrew word, beged, also means clothing. There’s a rabbinic legend about Nimrod, the Bible’s ‘mighty hunter’. Nimrod steals the clothes God wove for Adam and Eve to encourage the animals to trust them, even after Eden. He puts them on; the animals approach him, and he clubs them to death.

I fear that’s how we’ve treated nature, and I’m filled with remorse.

But regret and shame are met by a counter-force on Yom Kippur, an overflowing inner well of love: I love life, love people, animals, trees. So what role can I play in how we treat nature and what can I put right?

God, give us the love to mend and heal this hurting world.

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