One Hundred Eighty-Two Yom Kippur Today is Your sealing day, The softened wax awaits Your hand; Secure our future with Your mercy, Consider our prayer with Your compassion. We have honored and prayed to You, Faltered and stumbled, Closed and opened hands and hearts; We have called You from our souls. Alone and empty, we plead before You: Seal us for life, seal us for blessing; Gathered, we stand and sway with longing:

In 1993, I wrote my first psalm for Rosh Hashanah, and since 1995, my High Holy Day psalms have been included in the liturgy at my own synagogue, Beth Emet The Free Synagogue, and elsewhere. This is an honor and a daunting task. Some years, the words have come easily: the themes of the Days of Awe are rich with poetic possibilities. The psalm I wrote the year my daughter started college reflects the beginning of not only the New Year but of a new stage in our lives. The next year, I wrote the psalm that opened worship on Kol Nidre from my bed in the Intensive Care unit, and the words held the taste of my health struggle.

Pauline Dubkin Yearwood from the Chicago Jewish News called me the other day to ask if I had any New Year’s resolutions. She’s writing a piece for the paper and contacting members of Chicago’s Jewish community, albeit a bit tongue-in-cheek. As I thought about an answer, the melody of Kol Nidre began playing in my head: so, I could make a resolution and ten days later deny it? I guess New Year’s resolutions aren’t a particularly Jewish thing. But New Year’s aspirations maybe that’s something to consider. We are asked at the New Year to turn back to God, to be better people in the coming year than we have been. My aspirations: to once again study with others, something I have not pursued arranging; to unpile and organize all the paper that clutters my house; and to make a better effort to pay attention to those things I can do to improve and stabilize my health: exercise and nutrition. I guess it all really does mean a turning back to God: setting priorities, making the effort to improve.

I used to love to dance. To escape the four semesters of physical education required by my university - yes, I am that old, and we had dorm curfews, too - I took folk dance and ballroom dance. As a teenager, I adored the Israeli dancing I was taught at Union Institute camp and in my temple youth group.

The skies were clear last week when we were in Washington, DC, and unusual for me, I was out every night. So the waxing of the moon, especially as it rose above the familiar monuments and buildings was unavoidable. Traveling through Elul, the month of soul preparation, I watched the growing moon and pondered the sanctity of these days and the monuments we humans have built to honor and remember. There are waist-high concrete cylinders, spaced at intervals all along the streets surrounding the White House and Congress, reminders of tragedy and near-tragedy, reminders of the loss of control and respect, of guns and violence.

My father’s yahrtzeit was Tuesday. I always know how long it has been since hedied because I know my daughter’s age; he missed meeting her by 2-¹⁄₂ months. So instead,she is his namesake. She is Eve-Gerri: Eve for my grandmother Ernestine, Gerri for my dadGerald. And in Hebrew, Chava-Gevurah, "Life and Strength;" my it alwaysbe so. E.G. and my husband, Reid and I have been in Washington, DC this week. Althoughshe’s nearly 22 and a politics major, she’d never been to the "seat of power."Or the Smithsonian or the US Holocaust Memorial or the Vietnam Wall. How moving it is tosee it with her, to share her reactions and observations. I think Daddy would have _kvelled_over this first grandchild. The sorrow of what he missed mingles with the sweetness of mygrown-up daughter.

Preparing to join a local women’s study group to _daven Rosh Chodesh Elul _and to speak to them about my writing, I have been searching the World Wide Web to learn more about the month of Elul. There are many practices and traditions that can be part of one’s observance of this final month before the New Year. Elul is the time of spiritual preparation for the Days of Awe. Tradition calls for the_ shofar_ to be blown following weekday morning prayer during Elul, a kind of warm-up for the more complete sounding on Rosh Hashanah. And a wake-up call to rouse us from end-of-summer blahs. Psalm 27 is added to the liturgy during Elul. It begins "God is my light and my helper, whom shall I fear?" In Elul we begin the self-examination that marks our return to God; we read Psalm 27’s final lines: "Wait for the Eternal; be strong and let your heart take courage. Yea, wait for the Eternal."

My husband brought home our first computer in 1986 - an Apple IIE - a "Mothers’ Day gift." I didn’t touch the thing for 2 years. Then, slowly, I began using it for word processing, then to write and produce a newsletter for the local Girl Scout council. We went PC and upgraded and upgraded again, and suddenly there was the World Wide Web and Jews in cyberspace. My question posted on the bulletin board in the Judaism forum of Compuserve led to emails and bulletin board discussions with people from all over the United States, Canada, England, Israel. Now I am experiencing the fascination and frustration of "real time" interaction during my weekly chat on Healing and Prayer in the Jewish Community Jewish Life room of AOL. Lately we have been discussing courage. Where do we get the courage to survive the hand we are dealt? And how can it bring us closer to God? The conversation flows and falters and twists as several people at a time type out their comments and sorrows. Even shrouded in the anonymity of our screen names, we take a chance in sharing, in revealing and uncovering old wounds. We also take a chance that the words scrolling past us will be more than an hour’s diversion, but will offer an opportunity to explore with others our search for wholeness.

In December, 1980, I stood with my daughter, in cold rain, at the Western Wall. Weeping at the sight of it, I searched for prayers as I fingered a length of red yarn, traded for the coins in my pocket. I touched the ancient stones, this remnant, this reminder, and wondered at the emotion it had pulled from me. I was exquisitely aware that my husband stood on the other side of the barrier, that this moment could not be shared with him. I was aware of the women who stood beside me, of their murmurs, of the way their hands caressed the Wall, just as mine had done. I was aware of my daughter, a recent bat mitzvah, of her adolescent embarrassment at her mother’s tears.

Last weekend, on a beautiful, sunny, warm but not too hot day, my husband and I spent several hours wandering the paths of the Chicago Botanic Garden. It is an immense place, wonderfully and invisibly tended, the variety of growing things uncountable. What evidence of God’s power of creation! Yet, here, too, were the spent blooms, the bare ground where plants had been removed; in this month of growing things, reminders of life’s fragility. So, the month of Av, summer month of plenty tempered with the sorrow of its ninth day.