Excerpted from "Live With the Times,” by Rabbi Marcia Prager

In his preface to a paper on the Hasidic master, Tzvi Elimelech Shapira of Dinov, (d.1841) often called the B’nai Yissasschar, my colleague and friend Hillel Goelman wrote:

"We often conceive of the Jewish year as a progression of holidays/Holy Days … tied to historic episodes in our past …[or] tied to the seasonal periodicities of the earth. Certain Holy Days seem to stand alone, not tied to either. What [may be less evident is that] … the placement of the Holy Days throughout the year is a manifestation of an underlying Divine intention to make the Divine Presence manifest to our human understanding… the days themselves are not isolated oases in barren stretches of emptiness. They are heartbeats in an endless, continuing, rhythmic, pulsating flow that accompanies the breathing of the Divine Name in every moment of existence … Cosmic time, in the Jewish sense, is not a linear sequence of moments strung together… Time is a pulsating energy that ebbs, flows, and manifests in different ways … [and we] can attune to the divine energy suffusing time.”

Learning to walk the divine, energetic rhythms of the Jewish year and attuning one’s own inner rhythms to the cycles of sacred time can be of great value in growing our own souls.

Each month and each holy day calls on the soul to respond and take new risks, to feel the pulse of Divinity more strongly and open up to new possibilities.

New moons and full. Full moons and new. The cycle of the year carries us. Months are, as we see, quite literally tied to the moon. Each new moon inaugurates an energy shift we can learn to feel. Each month inaugurates both a new quality and a new experience of God to influence our actions.

-–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––