Rosh Hashanah and passion

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach teaches us, that the most important thing for Rosh Hashanah is change. The essention of life is growth and moving forward. Death means stagnation and detoriation. We can come to a point in our life where we stagnate. We lose our enthousiasm for new things and show by this attitude that we are becoming passive.

Most people know these situations in life. It can be very hard to fight negative feelings or may be even depression. It takes sometimes good friends to help or even professional help. In any case we should not accept ourselves to stay in such a situation of decay, to say it in this negative way.

It is important to learn to trust God well enough and learn from Him that He is going to set us free from situations of dispair. It is against His nature to have us experience a stagnation in our growth towards freedom as God wants us to be free from bondage. (Pesach)

He wants us to be instruments for Him and spread light and life in this world. Rosh Hashanah is given by the Lord to bring us back to Him and show passion for life and in the things we do. Only the enemy of God wants us to stagnate in our lives so that we lose the opportunity to be effective witnesses for His Name’s sake.

According to rabbi Boteach it is very hard and we have to balance between extremes: we have to change but not so that others will nog recognize us any more. We have to balance our lives continually. Keeping balance I have discovered in my sportsclass, is physically also very hard. My instructor told me that it is very hard to balance our bodies. This is probably the sign of our difficulty to balance psychologal and spiritual as well. So, we have to work very hard on balancing our lives. As women we experience during our lifecycles that balancing our lives is needed all the time and it is a challenge for all of us.

It is  a great privilege to know the Lord in our life. What a comfort to know Him and include Him in all of our lifecycles and needs. All our crisises and challenges. I have experienced how much He loves us and wants to care for us. He wants to comfort us at all times. We have to surrender ourselves continually to Him without holding back. Remember: He knows us better than we ever will know ourselves. Because of this reason it is very safe to trust Him. May be you do not trust a person easily because of your past. I can say to you: God is trustworthy at all times! He loves us very much. Surrender yourself to Him!

In Gen. 1:28 we read how we are created in His Image. Boteach says that because God has created us, man has to be creative as well. Always moving forward to new things. A human being is an artist created to create new things. A human being has to live for this reason he says.

We have to be creative and watch out to enter into a life of routine and being bored. Our lives are going to lose than the most important ingrediënt: passion. According to Boteach our souls are like a burning flame. We cannot stagnate on the outside because of this flame inside of us. The burning inside has to come out.

May be if we do not watch this process carefully it can even attack our health. This is the call for Rosh Hashanah for our life besides our return to the Lord (T’shuva) and confession of our wrongdoings. The loss of passion for the things around us are an important part of this. The coming year we will be more passionate than the past year! We can no longer just watch the world but also work to show the love of God. Yeshua showed us the way with passion and love!

Shanah tova!