We live in frightening times. Despite everything, may this be a year of peace, a year in which we understand more deeply how essential it is to prevent violence, eschew hatred, foster understanding, and care with shared responsibility for each other and this beautiful earth.

The word I want to write about today is simply ‘us’, ‘we’. It comes in many forms in the liturgy, as anachnu, anu, or just nu at the end of a noun or verb.

The first anachnu is the plural within the singular, the ‘us’ inside the ‘me’. We all have different parts to our personality, many inner voices. On Yom Kippur we need to allow the light of conscience to shine upon them all. We mustn’t avoid the memories of which we are ashamed: how otherwise can we learn from them? Nor should we forget the good deeds we’ve done and witnessed: they are our motivation and guide. We want to leave Ne’ilah strengthened from our weaknesses and inspired in our strengths.

Around us is the anachnu, the we, of our family and friends. Most of us live by an ‘I take you for granted’ norm. Our colleagues, neighbours, people we see every day, even (perhaps especially) our own partner and children: it’s chastening to think how much we can fail to listen to them or notice. They are the core of our human solidarity, our strength and wellbeing. The eve of Yom Kippur is a time of recognition, of apology for the hurts we’ve given and appreciation for the kindness and love we’ve received. We may have more, or less, to say sorry about; but we certainly have a great deal for which to say thank you. It must not go unspoken.

Surrounding us are the congregations with whom we stand together in prayer: va’anachnu core’im, – we bow down together. On Yom Kippur we are especially aware that we are a community across time and generations. To the soul, the division between living and dead is less clear. They stand behind us and beside us in spirit, – our parents, grand- and great-grandparents, singing the same melodies, blessing us, fortifying us to bear faithfully the trust and hope, values and culture which unite us beyond the boundaries of time. As Rabbi Leo Baeck wrote to all the congregations across Germany in 1935, ‘In this hour all Israel stands before God, the judge and the forgiver’.

We stand also together with all those with and for whom we share responsibility. Al chet shechatanu, we say, ‘For the sin we have sinned’. Wherever we are, London, Jerusalem, New York, a small village, we affirm that we are answerable all together for each other, and for the homeless, the lonely, the refugees, the vulnerable and the sick. As Sadiq Kahn declared after the terror killings in Westminster and again after London Bridge, we will not allow hatred to destroy the bonds of solidarity which unite us.

Finally, we stand together as all life. Kol ba’ei olam – ‘all who enter the world’ come before God’, taught the Mishnah two thousand years ago. We know that for us to be ‘written in the book of life’, the seas, forests, rivers and fields must also be inscribed there, together with all the fishes, birds and animals they shelter and feed. We are bound together in a mutuality and interdependence deeper than we understand. When we ask ‘Zochrenu lechayyim, Remember us for life’, we ask together with all life.

Just as the wind makes every tree bend, all living being is bowed in prayer for our shared existence. May God hear us. May we hear each other. May we ourselves be helped to listen to the words we say.

Leshanah Tovah and Gmar Chatimah Tovah; may this be a year of good decrees.

Leshanah Tovah and Gmar Chatimah Tovah; I wish everyone a good year and a worthwhile Yom Kippur.

Teshuvah is a beautiful word. It means at once penitence and return. It refers to the inner process of acknowledgement, regret, remorse, apology and reparation for specific wrongs we have committed. But it also describes life’s spiritual journey, the desire to return to, or become, the best person we can, the human being we hope, strive and dream that we can be, – according to our character, gifts, limitations and opportunities.

Life has no ‘replay’ button. We may not ‘crop’ from our conscience the deeds and experiences we would rather not have committed or endured, however great the conscious, and unconscious, temptation. We can, of course, feed our soul a diet of ‘alternative truths,’ but in the end we will only poison our own spirit.

Teshuvah begins with inner integrity; with facing ourselves honestly. It offers us the opportunity to do so not in a negative spirit, not to shoot us down with recriminations or wipe our faces with our guilt. Rather, it invites us to do the most creative thing we can with the hurts committed both by us and against us: – to turn them into opportunities for insight and moral and spiritual growth.

The Talmud stresses that the deepest Teshuvah derives its energy not from the fear of the consequences if we continue to repeat the same transgression, important as such motivation often is. The best impetus to Teshuvah comes from love.

The Talmud doesn’t define what it means by that love. I believe it is linked to faith and hope, a deep trust the great majority of us want to be the best person we can, and that life has the power to draw us not just downwards towards our faults, but upwards towards our ideals. Maimonides concludes his magnificent treatise on Teshuvah with an impassioned description of the love of God, burning like a man’s love for a woman whom he cannot get out of his thoughts. This love draws us back towards what is right and just, pure and beautiful.

At the same time, the love which motivates Teshuvah must also come from us; from the environment we create in our homes, communities, schools, countries and even in the public square. This not the same as, indeed it is the opposite of, condoning wrongdoing and providing morally slippery justifications for evil. Teshuvah is only possible where there is rigorous moral integrity. In every sphere, beginning with our own heart, we should foster a spirit of conciliation and respect for all who genuinely learn from their mistakes and try to make good. For each and every one of us is part of that ‘everyone’.

We all sometimes sin and do harm (though not to the same degree or with equal consequence). We must all face the inner challenge of admitting to the centre of our conscience the hurtful acts we did and the wounding words we spoke, even though it would be easier to push them to the periphery, or beyond. We must all come to know the burning of remorse, the humility of apology, the awareness that however much we make reparation we cannot rewrite the history of our own life, or that of the persons we have wronged.

But Teshuvah allows us to do with our mistakes and transgressions the one best thing we can: to learn from them, deepen our hearts and behave towards each other with greater fairness, respect, compassion and understanding.

Leshanah Tovah and Gmar Chatimah Tovah; I wish everyone a good year and a worthwhile Yom Kippur.

Shalom certainly among the most important words in the world. It may have been the unknown author of the mediaeval Sefer Heyzirah, Book of Creation, who first used the phrase ‘toleh etetz al beli-mah, – God suspends the earth over the void.’ Today, the forces not of creation but of destruction remind us quite how perilous the future planet is, the world suspended over nothingness. Shalom – and fear of the opposite – is in all our minds.

During the ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur the final words of the Amidah, the prayer par excellence, are simplified to oseh hashalom, blessing God for making the peace, the ultimate peace which sustains the world. May this be God’s will.

It must also be our will. The Shulchan Aruch, the 16^th century code of Jewish law edited by Joseph Caro, instructs us that everyone ‘is obliged to make up with their fellow human beings on the eve of Yom Kippur’. Yom Kippur does not atone for wrongs we’ve committed against each other unless we first acknowledge what we have done, apologise and make restitution. There is no turning to God for short-cuts. We can neither evade our own conscience nor avoid our responsibilities to other people. We may not side-step the humbling requirement to apologise where we are at fault, and to try to understand and forgive, or at least let go of feelings of bitterness and revenge, where we ourselves have been hurt.

The days before Yom Kippur are especially set aside for reconciliation so that we enter God’s presence on the most holy day of the Jewish year in a spirit of integrity with our own selves and solidarity with one another. However, life does not conform to neat patterns and relationships don’t work by the calendar. The work of inner truthfulness combined with empathy and forbearance towards others is ongoing. We all live with ‘unfinished business’, the regrets, angers, incomplete conversations which are a fact of the human condition.

Dostoevsky wrote that humility is redeeming, humiliation wounding. We must not to be too proud to say sorry, including to children. Equally, we should not turn our injuries into vengeance and refuse, in the presence of genuine remorse and reparation, to forgive. No good comes of humiliating others. We are, however, not only permitted but required to stand up for truth; we should not let guilt be foisted on us for what we have not done.

There is no ‘high’ and ‘low’ in apology and reconciliation, because the person asked to forgive must also relinquish any potential pride in having ‘the right to be right’ in favour of understanding and letting go, not of the fact that a wrong took place, but of any wish to ‘get my own back’ and inflict hurt in return. Only then do our wounds become opportunities to learn.

There are situations in which we seek peace but the persons we feel we have hurt are no longer alive, or beyond all reasonable possibility of contact, or it would only inflict further injury if we burdened them with our own need for forgiveness. In such circumstances, we may talk to God, and our conscience, being specific – as we would if apologising to a person in front of us – in what we say. We may wish to have someone else present to act as our witness, if only to our own selves. The ancient tradition is to take a minyan to the cemetery who, after hearing our confession, say ‘Amen; it is forgiven you in the name of the God of Israel’.

A disturbing feature of a world of grandstanding, in which public figures are advised not to apologise, or that they will lose so much face by saying sorry that they will never survive in their roles, is that it encourage brazenness and self-justification.

A world in which it is possible to be wrong and even, where appropriate, to back down, is more likely to be at peace. For Shalom is composed of truth, integrity, courage, understanding and humility.

Leshanah Tovah and Gmar Chatimah Tovah; I wish everyone a good year and a worthwhile Yom Kippur. This week I again plan to focus on one word each day.

The period from Rosh Hashanah up to and including Yom Kippur is known as asseret yemei teshuvah, the ten days of penitence or return, when we try to rediscover and re-inhabit the best portion of our inner selves. This is a time of healing, when we seek to make whole again our relationship with our own self, with those closest to us and with those, near or far, for whom we carry responsibility as fellow beings on this earth. In so doing, we hope to open our hearts to the presence of God which flows through us all and thus to make atonement, to be less at odds and more at one with life. This is a both a demanding challenge and a privileged opportunity.

Perhaps the key quality we need is chesed. Usually translated as loving kindness, chesed comprises love, mercy, loyalty and faithfulness. It expresses the best part of the human heart. Its oppositeis anger, cruelty, callousness, rejection.

The Talmud teaches that God ‘inclines towards chesed’, especially at this season. Over and again on Yom Kippur, we repeat the chorus verse of the day: ‘God, God, merciful and gracious’. The meaning is surely that we, too, should try to deepen the kindness, love and generosity in our hearts and view the world from there.

It isn’t hard to find reasons for being irritated with people. The mind all too readily hovers over its vexations and grudges: ‘He did this to me’; ‘She did that’ – few of us would have difficulty completing the sentence. We could no doubt provide ample justification for our hostile feelings. We might well be perfectly right; we might be entitled to feel angry and hurt. But will this bring healing, to us or anybody else? It probably leads only to more entrenched resentments and more alienated relationships.

Matters can look different if we view them with generous eyes. We can step back from judgment and approach life in the spirit of understanding. ‘Perhaps they too felt unheard…’; ‘Maybe I contributed…maybe I’m also at fault’; ‘I get where she’s coming from; she’s been through so much…’ To respond in this manner takes chesed, mercy and forbearance. It makes the situation look different; it doesn’t mean that we forgive or forget everything, but it may take us to a place from where healing is possible.

Therefore, we should try to fill the internal pool of our heart with chesed. We can do so by thinking of blessings we’ve received, altruism we have witnessed, pity we’ve felt, ways in which the world is beautiful, people for whom we love and care.

The world is too full of anger and recrimination. With chesed in our hearts, we may be able to counter at least some of the hatred, bringing healing to others and ourselves.