Thoughts for the 10 Days of Awe
לֹא תִשָּׂא אֶת־שֵֽׁם־יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לַשָּׁוְא You will not lift up or carry the Name of YHVH in an empty, disrespectful, dishonoring way The Holy One has entrusted to us His Name. We are His Covenant people. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we are carrying His Name to the world. For better or worse, we are always engaged in this greatest of all enterprises. The question is, do our lives, our attitudes, our facial expressions, our reactions, our conversations, our priorities, and our deeds bring honor to the Name of our Creator as we go through the world bearing that Name? Are we, through...
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The Days of Awe have reached their midpoint. There are only five of them left. Five evenings. Five mornings. Five days. This sixth Day of Awe is dedicated to reconnecting the Awestruck Heart with the sixth Prophetic Empowerment of our Bridegroom King. This empowerment is usually translated from the Hebrew to English as ‘You will not kill’ or ‘You will not commit murder’. But the prophetic empowerment was not given in English. It was given in Hebrew, and the Hebrew verb used by the Holy One is so much deeper than the English verbs ‘kill’ or...
Read MoreElul Day 35
THE PERSONAL HOLY OF HOLIES Before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the pinnacle of the Yom Kippur service was the moment when the High Priest (the Kohen Gadol) would enter the Holy of Holies. This was the only time of the year that anyone could enter this holiest of inner sanctums and only the High Priest was permitted to do so and only for a short duration. It was such an intense moment that if the High Priest was not completely pure—if he had committed even one transgression for which had had not previously atoned—he would die immediately. This was because the Holy of Holies...
Read More10 Days of Awe
More on the Ten Days of Awe. Read the following and allow it to reconnect you to the empowerment of where we belong. Let us continue to focus on WHOM we stand before. לֹֽא יִהְיֶֽה־לְךָ אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים עַל־פָּנ You will allow no things to come between you and my Face Read that again…..NO THINGS…NADA…NOTHING….NOPE! So, look around and just peruse the stuff you have around you. What do you see? Anything there that you just can’t bear to part with? Mmmmmmmm….could be a problem you know if that’s the case. If your eyes paused over something, look at it...
Read MoreElul – Day 31
Tishrei 2, Second Day of Rosh Hashana THE DAY OF CORONATION The idea of Rosh Hashana as the day when we “coronate” G-d as the King of the Universe, may be one of the strangest and hardest to accept for those of us raised in modern, democratic societies. To us kings are corrupt despots at worst, and characters out of fairy tales at best. Yet this idea is essential to the observance of Rosh Hashana, because in the language of Judaism a king is a metaphor for absolute authority. On Rosh Hashana we accept upon ourselves G-d as the one and only absolute authority who rules over...
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