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Prepent 5774: Day 39, Continuing Onward

With the High Holidays behind us, focusing on maintaining our momentum

by
Amichai Lau-Lavie
September 15, 2013
(photoillustration Tablet Magazine, image via Shutterstock)
(photoillustration Tablet Magazine, image via Shutterstock)

Journey into the High Holidays with Amichai Lau-Lavie, founder of Storahtelling and the spiritual leader of Lab/Shul. It’s a daily dose of inspiration to get you focused and ready for the new year, featuring daily intentions, simple tasks, and tools for living better.

The day after! It offers relief and a great sense of accomplishment. We did it! Another year, another tear; moving on with life. Yom Kippur this year was a huge high for me. And although so many highs are often followed by a low, I want to make sure I keep up my momentum and maintain my focus in the coming days.

Jewish tradition helps with that goal. The first thing one is encouraged to do once Yom Kippur is over is to start building a sukkah. It’s a temporary shelter, a symbolic home, and a shrine to the transient here and now.

On this second-to-last day of our journey towards a more focused and present self, I pause to honor the journey, grateful for my learning along the way and committed to upholding at least one of my new year intentions, nailing it to the wall of my sukkah.

Prepent Day 39: Take a moment to build, fix, or create something—if only symbolically—that represents the shelter and sacred protection you want over your head and in your heart for the year ahead. Pause to celebrate gratitude, honoring this lucky life. Here’s a lovely poem by Gerald Stern to help jumpstart our journey on the shore of the new year:

Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?
Lucky life is like this.
Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that.
Lucky life. Oh lucky life.

One more day to go.

Follow along with the Scroll’s daily Prepent series here.

Amichai Lau-Lavie is the founder of Storahtelling, and the spiritual leader of Lab/Shul, an emerging New York City congregation.