My harmonious message for the High Holy Days
MESSAGE FROM OUR CANTOR MAISSNER
“V’KOL D’MAMAH DAKA YISHAMAH”
And the still silent quiet voice will be heard.
With great anticipation and sweet memories of many past High Holy Day celebrations with our Temple’s family, I greet you this year again with warm wishes and prayers for health and a bright future to us all. The president of my beloved Cantorial Organization, The Cantors Assembly has shared some deep insights related to these unique and spiritual days. It is my pleasure to share some of these with you.
Our Machzor has been waiting for us all year and so has our shul family. We each possess our own flavors and colours. Each one of us comes to shul with different thoughts on our minds. We carry different memories with us. We have different ideas, thoughts and feelings. Although our liturgy is fixed, suspended in space and time and the words are the same from year to year, it just may be that each of us with our own needs relates to them personally with greater depth.
During the month of Elul leading up to the High Holy Days, we ought to evaluate who we are and what we have accomplished in the last year. We question whether we have lived up to our potential. We think about how we can enhance our own spirituality and repair the world.
The High Holy Days is a time for personal renewal. I pray that you will be inspired once again by the ancient words of our liturgy, the inspirational words from our sages, the melodies which we have come to cherish over the years, the voices of our choirs and the sound of the shofar. I feel blessed, I feel inspired to be part of this, our caring congregational family. The word inspire comes from the Latin ‘Inspirare’, which means to breathe or blow into. In other words, one who inspires breathes spiritual life into another. Together we lift up each other, even just for a fleeting moment and create a Holy community.
As your Hazzan, I am grateful that my colleagues and I have the opportunity to both inspire you and be inspired by you. We love to lead you in prayer and to bring you together in song. We are proud of each and every one who contributes to these awesome spiritual days, whether reading from Torah or Haftarah, shofar blowers, ushers, Gabbayim, singing in the different choirs all through the High Holy Days, we relish those moments when your voices radiate fully throughout the sanctuary as you sing with full hearts. We long to lift you higher.
It is in this spirit that the Rabbis and I are inviting each and every one of you who has a Shofar and knows how to blow it, to please come and bring your own Shofar to our magnificent end of Yom Kippur N’ilah service. If you are in the sanctuary you should go up to the upper balcony on either side when we begin singing the triumphant “S’U SHEARIM” and wait for the call of “T’KIAH G’DOLAH” after HAVDALLAH.
If you are downstairs in the Philip Smith hall please approach the BIMAH at the same time of S’U SHEARIM and wait for the call for “T’KIAH G’DOLAH” after HAVDALAH. We hope you will help us celebrate the end of YOM KIPPUR in this special way.
“Prayer” cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel
I wish you a warm hearted L’SHANAH TOVAH, a blessed new year,
Beny
