Wednesday, September 10, 2008

It seems like time, in preparation for the Days of Awe, to start with a few spiritual preparations posts. The following quote was sent today by a rabbi friend.

Shaping the Image of the Coming Year

My friend, Kansas City Jewish community leader Merilyn Berenbom, tells this story from her childhood.

My father was a lawyer, and he happened to have as one of his clients the well-known artist Thomas Hart Benton. Occasionally, when I was a young child, our family would visit his house, where he had a large studio, with a broad wall where he would create his famous murals. And with every mural, even while the wall was still blank, the studio would have in it sculptures and paintings. For before creating any character in the mural itself, Benton would make an entire sculpture of that individual, and do painting of that character, so as to effectively capture what it was that he wanted to create.

And so I have reflected since then about how important it is to capture a vision of what we want to create, before we go about building it.

And as we approach the beginning of the New Year, we reflect about why we are here. Throgh our prayers, through reflection, through sincere teshuvah…we are doing the work of shaping the bust, the image, of the year we seek to create. It remains for us to make the final “mural” of our lives by shaping our characters, day to day, throughout the rest of the year.

Rabbi David M. Horowitz

1 comment:

Peggy said...

Envisioning the year to come, a concept I had not thought about before. It is to me somehow different from just planning ahead, though I guess it could be that. In trying to envision I tend to think more of feelings and relationships, less concrete things than events and trips and accomplishments planned. I like this idea of envisioning and will try it. Thank you. I love so many of the inner-looking traditions of this Jewish New Year.