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14 Elul

13 Elul

Reconcile with the truth of your life, with the big, the bad, and the ugly. With beauty and blessing. With the tenacity of your spirit. With weakness. With betrayal. With regret. With the years that have passed. With your destiny. With the love that is trying to get in. If you reconcile with all that, you reconcile with the truth of your life.
The goal is to make peace. To make peace on earth. To make peace among the people in your world. To make peace between you and yours. To make peace with the past. To make peace in the very core of your being.
To make peace with your destiny.
Anything that stands in the way of any of that must be dealt with.
Let it go.
Let it go and it no longer has a hold on you.
Letting it go denies its power over you.
Forgiveness is learning to come to terms with the story of your life and releasing the pain of the past.

Excerpt from The Bridge to Forgiveness by Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar

12 Elul

As you choose the life of thanking and blessing, love is not an obligation to be assumed, but instead and accurate name for your desire to live as the image of God. Love becomes the guiding principle in your responses to all people, both in word and in deed. Ad the people on your most immediate circles are touched by this love, their attitudes and activities toward you will transform, in this new ambience created by the intersection of Divine light and your own light, your life's encounters will become a series of thankful and blessed exchanges -not perfect, but never bereft...Such blessing begets love, which lays the foundation for a differently ordered world.

From Thanking & Blessing by Jay Marshall

11 Elul

Our greatest problem is not how to continue but how to return. "How can I repay unto the Lord all his bountiful dealings with me?" (Psalms 116:12) When life is an answer, death is a home-coming.

10 Elul

Learning is of the soul. Whether we are asleep or awake, the core of who we are is divine. When forgiveness passes through the mind, body, and heart to the spirit, the world looks remarkably different There is an internal shift of perspective and we see things through a softer, yet sharper, lens. Mostly, forgiveness is a spiritual state of being, a way of being in the world. Forgiveness teaches and reminds the spirit of a yearning to belong, to connect, to be recognized, to love. And so, having learned all that or, at least, parts of it, we strive for an integrated self, where mind, body, heart, and spirit work together and are aligned in a common cause: the cause of our life.

 Excerpt from The Bridge to Forgiveness by Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar