Answering the Once-a-year Jew

I

imagesIn a letter to Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, a former student he calls “Sarah” grapples with her indecision over whether she should continue to attend Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur eve. Having discarded the Torah observance of her youth to intermarry, she still feels drawn to this one last vestige of Jewish practice.

Sarah confesses that she feels like a hypocrite, and she wonders whether she angers God by standing before Him on the Day of Atonement when she is not even fasting, and when her whole life is a rejection of His commandments.

In his column in Mishpacha Magazine, Rabbi Feldman invited readers to offer their own responses.  Here is mine:

Dear Sarah,

You ask in your letter whether God sees you as a hypocrite for coming to shul on Yom Kippur.  Your question contains its own answer.
Read the whole article here.

, ,

  1. #1 by Sender Axelbaum on December 3, 2014 - 9:43 pm

    A deeply insightful and loving response. Yosher Koyach

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: