High Holiday Wisdom

We're here with Menachem Brunswig, here in the Five Towns. What is your Yamim Nora'im High Holidays idea? >> One of the most meaningful parts of the Yamim Nora'im is that we are establishing or reestablishing our relationship with Hashem, which is really the inner point and the essence of Judaism. So, these days are about really getting to have an opportunity to reorient ourselves towards not only the story of our lives, but to the storyteller. And to get to know the storyteller through the story. And that excites me. And that means I'm not stuck in the mud. >> You mentioned you said the Days of Awe, right? It's like awesome. And a lot of people don't feel awesome about this time. Why do you think that became such a common [music] feeling towards the High Holidays? >> We're influenced by a lot of things, by the culture that we're surrounded by, by bad translation. It's easy to see why people make the mistake of thinking that the only way to interpret those [music] ideas is through a negative lens. But I found for myself and for the people that I try to share with that that You're not stuck in that. I'm not stuck that way. I know life is serious. I take life [music] seriously. I try not to take myself too seriously. And that means to move forward with flexibility and to move forward not from a place of being jumbled inside, to move forward with faith and trust that uh Hashem has carried me and has given me the strength and resilience to go through whatever came and he's going to carry me and and give me the strength to walk through whatever's going to come, no matter what it is, as serious as it is. But we don't have to be meshugeneh about it. We can be relaxed. We can be faithful. We can be trusting and trustworthy. And uh and we can walk forward with a simcha that we don't live alone. We live with Hashem. Hashem walks alongside us. And we can turn to him for strength.