May We All Have a Good Year

Before I say "Happy New Year" and "May You be Inscribed in the Book of Life for the Coming Year", I would like to make confession of a few of my blogging sins.

So here goes…

For the sin of promising posts on topics and not following through….

For the sin of dissing my critics in the posts (I cut myself a little more slack in the Comments section – sorry I am not on a higher madregah/level yet)…

For the sin of making stupid editorial errors….

For the sin of using inflammatory and provocative language when I don't need to (but, ribono shel olam, these things really hurt me )….

For the sin of not reading my fellow-traveler bloggers enough so that I end up unwittingly repeating what they write…

For the sin of repeating myself ad nauseum….

For the sin of repeating myself ad nauseum….

For the sin of too frequent posting and not frequent enough posting….

For the sin of boring posts….

For all these sins, and many more, Dear Reader, forgive me, pardon me, and atone for me.

And now on a more serious note….

The greatest sin that we as Israeli Jews have committed, and continue to commit is depriving our Palestinian brethren of their dignity, their freedom, their human rights, and their rights to national self-expression.

But another great sin – one obviously connected to the first – is our trespassing against them in the most literal sense of "encroaching on their boundaries" (hasagat gvul, in Hebrew).

We continue to steal their land by moving our markers onto it and claiming it as ours.

After the holiday, God willing, and bli neder/without making a vow, I plan to write a post about the sin of trespassing – arguably one of the most serious sins we transgress. What is the Jewish understanding of "trespassing?" What do the sources say? And how can we read those sources so that we, as human beings, and as Israeli Jews, take the words of our tradition to heart – and extend them to include our non-Jewish brothers and sisters in the basic mitzvot of all humanity?

Well, there I go again…promising posts….

I will try to keep this one.

"Happy New Year" and "May You be Inscribed in the Book of Life for the Coming Year"