Preparing Your Heart for the High Holy Days: A Guided Journal » (New Edition)

This spiritual guided journal will help you prepare your heart and soul for the Jewish New Year. Beginning with the first day of Elul and concluding with Yom Kippur, the authors guide you through a process of introspection and "heshbon ha-nefesh," taking moral inventory. The authors suggest ways for the reader to overcome some of the familiar obstacles to faith. This is followed by forty steps to repentance, each consisting of a page of relections facing a blank page where the reader can set down his or her own responses. the authors' commentaries are drawn from Psalm 27, the traditional psalm for htis period, as well as the other writings on repentance. Each blank page begins with a "kavvanah," a verse to trigger thoughtful responses in the reader.

Publishers Weekly

To pave the way for the High Holy Days, which herald repentance and renewal, Jewish tradition encourages 40 days of introspection and self-reflection. Olitzky and Sabath, both Reform rabbis, guide readers through this process of taking moral inventory. They outline 40 steps to repentance, each consisting of a page of reflections drawn from biblical, rabbinic, medieval and contemporary sources. The facing page is blank, except for a meditation meant to trigger individual responses. Though the meditations often sound hackneyed ("healing begins when we acknowledge we are broken"; "At the end of the year we find a new beginning"), they contain kernels of truth that could transcend triteness if readers truly take their messages to heart. (June)