There is an English reading in the Mishnah Tefillah prayer book that I often read on Friday night. It speaks of the transition between day and night as being a pivotal moment of crossing over. I love the sense the poem creates that moving into Shabbat is a choice, as if we were on a journey from one moment of time to the next. Yet, after reading countless times, I realized last Friday Night, that in all that time I had been reading it wrong. In my head I had always read the opening line of the poem as, “this is the hour of change, The poem actually states “this is an hour of change.”
This slight difference between “the” and “an” is immense. The definite article “the” means this is it, this moment is the moment of change. “An” on the other hand, gives us other opportunities. Every hour could be an hour of change.
On Sunday, we began the month of Elul and the forty-day trek to Yom Kippur. This is the hour of change in the Jewish community, but it is not the only one. The rabbis teach us we that can do Teshuvah, repentance, every moment of our life up until the hour of our death. In this way, every hour is an hour of change. We simply need to take advantage of the opportunity.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex