A German-Trained American Rabbi in Yorkshire

In the course of my rabbinical studies I have already been gifted with amazing opportunities and experiences. This summer as I study in Jerusalem at the Steinsaltz Yeshiva , however, one of the most intense of these experiences has arisen -- I was invited to sing with the choir at the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem for Selichot and the High Holy Days. Well, streaming vids are worth several terabytes worth of words, so I am posting a link to a video here -- sorry, I cannot imbed it and the site is all Hebrew -- that might help shed a little light on the nature of the experience. Several groups filmed Selichot this year at the Great Synagogue -- the sound is not great but certainly gives a little idea as to the nature of the music. For those of you that are not Jewish, and maybe even for some that are, this might be a bit of an alien experience. This video is 25 edited minutes from a 3 hour service that lasted until 1 in the morning (and unfortunately does not contain the early part

I have been thinking a lot recently about the old New Age maxim that we create our own reality. This is a thought form that has existed in many guises throughout history, but hit the global collective conscious in the 60s. The only problem is that we didn’t really create are own reality – all the wonderful energy that went into this seems to have been somehow either misplaced or re-directed into the desire to create the reality of acquisition. Either way, the concept has been nagging at me recently and demanded my consideration. As one who has struggled my entire life with at times paralyzing amounts of self criticism, I have to lay my own challenge to the maxim. On the one hand, the idea of creating one’s own reality is freeing. It means that once we begin the process of challenging and questioning with the hope of living a conscious life-- as opposed to the birth-default mode of living life purely through the will and pattern of tribe/family/faith into which “chance” brought us—