This evening begins the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. Jews all over the world will go to synagogue and pray, beginning the yearly cycle of teshuvah, or return.
Return to what? To God and to our best selves. We review our lives and behavior over the last year and we make amends with God, with ourselves and with those we have harmed along the way. We set our intention to be better people over the course of the coming year. We set new targets and promise to try harder to hit the mark, admitting we may have missed the mark this past year.
In the process, we rededicate ourselves to our relationship with God. We deepen our bond or our relationship with the One who is within and without, We aksi ask for forgiveness and for another year of life as well as for our personal prayers to be answered during the course of the year.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi teaches that the High Holy Day period—from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance, all the way through until Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles—our prayers, rededication and teshuvah build the “God-field” for the coming year. This God-field, which is the permeable membrane between the Infinite and finite, is not the Divine itself but rather the form in which the Infinite comes to us.
Rabbi Marcia Prager recently wrote about this teaching of Reb Zalman’s and explained that it’s important to pray with love and inclusiveness, allowing your human consciousness to attract the flow of Divinity and then to return the flow with love and dedication to its Source. By becoming an open channel for Source energy in this manner, we co-create the God-field, Reb Marcia explained. In this way, we create loving harmony with one another, becoming better stewards of the earth and healers of the environment and society. “Then we will see our prayers work and produce the goods results we pray for,” she says.
I found this teaching from Reb Marcia and Reb Zalman quite striking, since it is much like what I write about in The Kabbalah of Conscious Creation. When we create from the place of wanting to give as well as receive, our desires (prayers) become manifest.
However, it’s important also to connect with God, to feel the permeability of the membrane we call the God-field. When we can feel that the Infinite and the finite, Creator and created, Giver and receiver are not separate at all—in fact are one—then we do indeed, find our prayers answered.
May we all have our prayers answered this Rosh Hashanah and in the New Year…and may we all feel our connection with Source.
L’shana tova. Happy New Year.
