9 min

Halakhah and Aggadah: The Ten Stories We Tell PART TWO Judaism for the Thinking Person

    • Judaism

PART TWO of this Yom Kippur 2023 sermon, in which I share the result of my personal and rabbi experiences of the last 15 years:  that the longer we live, the shorter our eulogy becomes; that life (like scripture) is a combination of halakhah (direct description of human behavior) and aggadah (our stories in which God is an invisible character); that the main point of Yom Kippur is to learn how to retell our stories so that the way God has been communicating to us through our experiences becomes center stage, with the intimation explicit, the aspiration articulated, the perpective holy, so we live wearing the garments of holiness, with the perspective of shrouds and Unetaneh Tokef, as God writes the books of Avinu Malkeinu from the way we are telling our stories.  

PART TWO of this Yom Kippur 2023 sermon, in which I share the result of my personal and rabbi experiences of the last 15 years:  that the longer we live, the shorter our eulogy becomes; that life (like scripture) is a combination of halakhah (direct description of human behavior) and aggadah (our stories in which God is an invisible character); that the main point of Yom Kippur is to learn how to retell our stories so that the way God has been communicating to us through our experiences becomes center stage, with the intimation explicit, the aspiration articulated, the perpective holy, so we live wearing the garments of holiness, with the perspective of shrouds and Unetaneh Tokef, as God writes the books of Avinu Malkeinu from the way we are telling our stories.  

9 min