Throughout my rabbinate, I often recited this verse as a benediction at the end of a Shabbat service.
This year, after completing 40 years in the rabbinate (so far) and making the move from New Mexico to Kansas with my wife Rhonda, I began to wonder whether this is a blessing related to time or place.
If it is a blessing related to a location or to our journeys from one place to another, it serves the same purpose as the T’filat Haderech, the traveler’s prayer, which seeks God’s protection along a physical path.
If it is a blessing related to time, it enables us to see the years between life’s major milestones as containing the potential for growth in our knowledge, wisdom, and experience. With each opportunity we take to learn something new, our essence changes. We arrive at a new perspective and, if we are brave or curious, we will continue that process of personal enrichment.
The High Holy Days provide us with an opportunity to admit our missteps and to try to forgive ourselves, to make certain that necessary apologies have been offered, and to resolve to practice the values that lead us to become our best selves, with our self-knowledge enhanced by our introspection at this solemn time on the Jewish calendar.
As the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are called Aseret Y’mei T’shuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance/Return, perhaps we should paraphrase the above verse from Deuteronomy: “Blessed shall you be in your goings, and blessed shall you be when you return.”
May 5782 be, for everyone, a year of growth and blessing.
By Rabbi Larry Karol
Special to The Chronicle