This past Saturday night, during Selichot services , I led members of our congregation in our first recitation of “Ashamnu ,” the confessional acrostic that we accompany by striking our hearts.

There will be many recitations of the confessional to follow in the coming weeks. Yet it is the first — said late at night, and not, in my community, in the midst of a great throng but instead in an intimate circle — that always moves me the most. I have long loved Selichot, which on the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah begins a cycle of prayers for forgiveness. It is an experience that, for me, offers an invitation into the heights of the holidays themselves, but without the attendant rabbinic pressures — and it is often a highlight of my own Jewish year. So it was this week.

And then I we

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