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Sep

26

Some People Pay Me Dept.: Rosh Hashana 2008


Thank you to Sandy Mitchell of Cleveland.About.com for featuring my writing on Jewish holidays.  Here’s my piece for this year’s Jewish New Year.  And a teaser:

I don’t know how they do it. No, not super-moms or our candidates for president and vice president. I’m talking about our clergy – rabbis, pastors, priests – and how, week after week, they write and deliver motivational, inspirational and poignant sermons to us. And each sermon, one for each week during all the years of their service, has to be different (we’ll ignore what clergy do if they switch congregations – I’m going to hope that they don’t recycle).

Now, we know, no matter what religion we follow, that there are only so many stories in the Old Testament (aka the Five Books of Moses aka the Torah) and the books that follow. And we cycle through them every year. Rosh Hashana, although the holiday for the Jewish New Year, isn’t actually the holiday that celebrates returning to the beginning of the Torah – that’s Simchat Torah which will occur later in October.

But still, the same exact portions of the Torah come to pass at the exact same time of year, ever year. So how do they do it? How do our clergy find inspiration anew every new year, and especially in these more recent years when it feels as though a life that should be getting easier is getting more fraught with uncertainty?

The answers, sort of, are here.

L’shana tovah.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 3:55 pm September 26th, 2008 in Blogging, Holidays, Jewish, Judaism, Religion, Writing 

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