This High Holiday season is an ideal time to work on reclaiming our relationship with words.

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TORAH FROM JTS

Yom Kippur 5785

יום כיפור תשפ"ה

Sacred Words in Liturgy and Life
Dr. Shira Billet
Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought and Ethics, JTS
Shira Billet
In a 1958 lecture on prayer, Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “It takes two things for prayer to come to pass – a person and a word. Prayer involves a right relationship between those two things. But we have lost that relationship… We do not think about words, although few things are as important for the life of the spirit as the right relationship to words.”

Beyond the realm of prayer in particular, this elusive “right relationship” between persons and words is central to our ability to have relationships at all. “Words have become cliches, objects of absolute abuse. They have ceased to be commitments. We forget that many of our moral relationships are based upon a sense of the sacredness of certain words…”

What Heschel worried about in 1958 is even more true and even more concerning in 2024. Human communication, the commitment to taking words seriously and to viewing the words we write and speak as serious commitments, has become even more imperiled in an age where our words are mediated through the technologies of social media, artificial intelligence, and the crippling social phenomena of political polarization and widespread mistrust.
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The Discipline of Atonement by Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz
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