The On-ramp to the High Holidays

by Jill Maidhof

We’re in the month of Elul, otherwise known as the on-ramp to the High Holidays, and I have a perfect story for the season:

Arthur Kurzweil is a Jewish author, educator, publisher, and illusionist (!) who for years took the train into New York city for work. I had the privilege of hearing him recount a transformational memory which went something like this:

“Every day I saw a fellow commuter, obviously an Orthodox Jew, studying scripture, and I finally mustered the nerve to approach him. ‘I’m so envious of you’ I said. ‘I stopped observing my Judaism for years and have only recently returned to my roots. You never left and I’m afraid that having wasted all that time I’ll never be as close to God as you are.’

The chasid responded. ‘You’re so wrong; in fact I’m envious of you! Imagine that a length of rope connects each of us to Hashem. My rope has never been severed, so it’s the same length it always was; in other words, I never knew anything else, so I didn’t make a conscious decision to return. Your rope on the other hand got cut and then you made the choice to knot it back together. Think how much shorter your rope is than mine!'”

This is a story for me, and maybe for you – those of us on the Elul on-ramp, intrigued, but feeling like we don’t know enough. We’re hesitant to participate in Yom Kippur study sessions because we’re afraid of embarrassing ourselves by asking naive questions. We know that the mistake people make on the on-ramp is slowing down when they’re supposed to accelerate. We think we’d like to do just that but we’re not sure how to start and we don’t want to make the drive alone.

We’re not sure how to start and we don’t want to make the drive alone.

I think you’ll find Chai Mitzvah to be the perfect travelling companion. No one assumes any level of Jewish knowledge or observance and we’re as anxious to learn from our life experiences as you are to learn from Jewish texts. This is because our top priority is building community and we can only do that by keeping our groups small and listening to every voice.

We invite you to you apply the insights you gain in your group by engaging in educational, spiritual and community service projects in your local Jewish community. The new year is just around the corner, the road is open, your directions are only a click away. We sure hope that you join us!