The Way the World Ends

Tonight at sunset marks the end of  Yom Kippur, for those of the Jewish faith, the day of atonement. It is a day of repentance and fasting for personal and community/communal sins committed in the course of the last year in the hope of forgiveness-with forgiveness being the critically important aspect.

I was raised a Catholic and taught to regard Jews as (also) people of the Book (the Bible) but who limited themselves to the Old Testament and a God of Vengeance and Punishment. Jesus, as I remember, we were taught came to fulfill the Old Testament and by so doing and living, and dying, create a New Testament. I think my problem with my church became reconciling the New God with the Old Testament one-after all, what kind of a loving Deity would crucify His own Son?

Almost seventy years on and music such as this to mark the Day of Atonement has convinced me while I may have lost faith in my church, I'm not sure I've abandoned a belief in God if that's Who inspired such beauty, majesty, and ineffable sorrow in one piece of music.

Present-day Israel, surrounded on three sides by enemies and on the fourth by the sea could not be in a more precarious position than the Jewish people themselves have been since the start of The Common Era. And yet, countless persecutions later, they stand, as self-anointed as God's Chosen, and regardless of your own religious beliefs or depth of your persuasion, you have to admire their devotion to Him and their belief in His providence for them.

This prayer marks the end of Yom Kippur, a version of which I first found online over a decade ago as produced and recorded at a synagogue, perhaps the only synagogue to this day (I actually don't know), in Frankfurt am Main. That version was removed though I hope the house of worship still stands as it does so clearly in my memory when I saw it so often from the streetcar window, passing the Sud-Bahnof, on the trip back and forth to work for many of the years I lived in Deutschland. 

I traveled a long way to some nearly-forgotten point in my own past I thought I had passed out of and all it took was an act of faith, though not mine or my own, to return.
-bill kenny