Bob Schwartz

From The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season by Marcia Falk:

Nothing. You began as nothing and you will end as nothing. And in between— everything, and nothing. In between—joy and sorrow, beauty and decay. Everything is yours to partake of, yours to bear. Yours to see, to know, to give birth to—and to let go. None of it is yours to have.

Not even you is yours to have. You belong to a wholeness so great you cannot even conceive of it.

No, it is not a belonging: nothing owns you. You are simply part of it. You came out of it and you will return to it. You do not ever leave it, you are part of it forever.

And this is your moment to be alive.

–Marcia Falk

3.
Whenever I am in the company of others,
May I regard myself as inferior to all
And from the depths of my heart
Cherish others as supreme.
Langri Thangpa (1054–1123), Eight Verses for Training the Mind

It is easy to regard yourself as inferior to God. The High Holidays remind us of this insistently.

It is harder to regard yourself as inferior to other people, or as Langri Thngpa recommends in his foundation text for training the mind (lojong), inferior to everybody.

You can understand inferiority to God, supreme and all powerful. But inferiority to others—all others—is another matter. First, because you think yourself demonstrably superior in a number ways to a number of others. Second, what exactly is the point of regarding yourself inferior to others? Isn’t there literally a psychological disability called an inferiority complex?

Inferiority is a way to learn absolute equality. To be knocked down a level or levels from where you believe you are. Only then, among all those others, can you live the directions of these holidays. As nothing “this is your moment to be alive.”