Reflecting on our lives - our mistakes and how to do better is difficult. It’s difficult to do and more importantly, it’s difficult to want to do. Yet we shouldn't be discouraged. While the Torah teaches us that God is perfect and just (Deut. 32:4), it also teaches us that God regrets, God loses God’s temper, and God kvetches often. It’s no wonder that Jewish mystics envisioned a broken, shattered God for a broken world and the broken, imperfect people that live within it. Fully aware of our weakness and our flaws, they had the audacity to suggest that we, with our imperfect lives, have the capacity to heal the world, heal God, and heal ourselves in the process. Such healing is possible and the path to healing begins with reflection.
(Charlie Cytron-Walker)
Straying From the Path and Helping Others Find It
Sometimes, we stray from the path of goodness and need the help of others to be reminded of our better selves.
In The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, Jack Kornfield describes an African forgiveness ritual:
In the Babemba tribe of southern Africa, when someone does something harmful, they take the person to the center of the village where the whole tribe comes and surrounds them. For two days, they will say to the man all the good things that he has done.
The tribe believes that each human being comes into the world as good. Each one of us only desiring safety, love, peace and happiness. But sometimes, in the pursuit of these things, people make mistakes.
The community sees those mistakes as a cry for help. They unite to lift him, to reconnect him with his true nature, to remind him who he really is, until he fully remembers the truth of which he had been temporarily disconnected: “I am good.”
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