Eternal light is in the storehouse of life. “Light from the darkness!” said God, and it was so. Or olam b’otzar chayim, orot m’ofel, amar vayehi.

We are the storehouse of life, and the eternal light resides within each of us.

In the account of creation, we are taught that light was created the first day, but the sun was not created until the fourth. The eternal light, Or olam, was this first light of transcendence. It is knowledge and clarity, purity and joy. When we use light as a metaphor, it is this light that we speak of.

Each of us is a repository of life. We are where life is stored, and this eternal light rests inside each of us, waiting for us to manifest it with our actions. When we act justly, we bring this light into the world, answering God’s dictum, “Light from the darkness!” When we help another, we bring the “and it was so” into the present, an ongoing creation of light in darkness.

On Rosh Hashanah we are reminded that God may have created the light, but it is up to us to dispense it from our treasury of life.

One of the spiritual practices I suggest that Jews take on during Elul is reading over the machzur, the prayerbook for the High Holidays. The prayers are somewhat different from the daily or Sabbath prayers, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically. If we are encountering them for the first time in a year when we try to pray them at Rosh Hashanah, we are all too likely to find ourselves trying to figure out what those prayers mean, rather than focusing on what we want them to mean in our lives. So, I suggest reviewing the prayers during this month of Elul.

I, myself, also try to review the prayers. It’s not that I don’t remember them: I can recite many of them from memory. Rather, I review them to see what they say to me this year. The words of the prayers may not change year to year, but I do. The words of prayers only have meaning when someone prays them, and that meaning can shift depending on who we are and what we need at that time of prayer. So I review, to see what the prayers have to say to me this year.

All of this is by way of introducing what I hope will be a series of blog posts over the next month, in which I explore various of the prayers for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I hope these will be of interest whether or not you are Jewish, whether or not you believe in God. At the very least, it should be a view of how one rabbi engages with prayer and finds new meaning in ancient words. But if this isn’t your cup of tea, rest assured I’ll be back to my normal random musings come mid-September.

I am a much better photographer than I was. Family members and some friends tell me I’m a great photographer. I know better. I take a nice photo, but I’m not even among the top ranked of the amateurs I know (see Neil Schulman, for example, or Aaron Hockley). They are truly amazing photographers. I am at the point where I am willing to call myself a good, but not exceptional, photographer.

As with most photographers with cats, or frankly, people with cats, I take pictures on my cats. They tend to make interesting subjects, and, more relevantly, they’re around (by the way, that also explains why when, during rabbinical school, a class assignment was to work on our “free-form blessings,” I was chasing the cats around trying to get them to sit still for a misheberach–they prefer to be photographed than blessed).

In January, three new cats entered our lives. Two of them are mainly black with a little bit of white. For months, now, I’ve been frustrated by this. Do you know who first decided that black cats are bad luck? I am positive it was the first person who tried to take a portrait of one. Getting black features to appear against a black body is just not something that works well for a camera, whether film or digital.

Today, therefore, is a triumph for me. I finally managed to take some decent shots of the black and white cats. The first photo is of Rosie. The second photo is of her brother, Dancer.

I admit, I may have cheated just a bit in converting the pictures to black and white. And someday, I will succeed in getting a good color picture of the cats, without too much noise showing up in the fur. But for now, I’m feeling quite clever and pleased with myself. I am also very pleased with Rosie and Dancer, who were patient subjects. Nom Nom, who took off the instant I got the camera out, I’m somewhat less pleased by, but I’ll get his photo, too, one of these days.

All of this makes perfect sense: after all, death is the big bugaboo, that which we fear above all else. But why?

From a religious point of view, if one believes in an afterlife, then death should bring rewards, or at least peace (at least for those who have led good lives, and who truly believes that they have done more evil than good?). For those who do not believe in an afterlife, death should simply be seen as a cessation. I suppose for that small minority of religious believers in an afterlife who think they have done great evil, death is something to fear. Yet it is, almost universally, feared.

Is it the unknown? The fact that death is the barrier beyond which lies the great undiscovered? If so, one would expect that there would be those who would see it as an adventure, the next frontier to be explored.

When faced with death, we, as humans, twist and turn to try to avoid it. We will go to great lengths and discomfort to prolong our lives even a little bit. We accept great pain, unhappiness, physical infirmity, rarely wondering if that is actually better than death.

There is an old Jewish joke: A man is complaining about how hard his life is. How he works three jobs for just enough money to feed himself, he hurts all the time and has no hope for the future. He tells his friend, “it would be better had I never been born.” His friend replies, “ah, but how many are that lucky? Maybe one in a million!”

As humans, we seem to be hard-coded to seek life. No doubt this is good for the survival of the species. But I have to ask, is it good for us as human beings? How much suffering is created because we fear death? I don’t know what the answer is, but I believe our current attitudes aren’t serving us well.

The Polar bear was definitely among the most photogenic of the animals we saw that day. In fact, there were two polar bears wandering around together. And by together, I mean at the same time, but not really ever getting around to acknowledging one another’s existence.

As everyone knows, I’m a cat person, and that extends to the less domesticated of the cats who are present at the Zoo. The ocelot, a small cat, despite a name that sounds like it should belong to a marine invertebrate, was a challenging subject. He was walking quickly, and often not where I wanted him to. Did I mention that he’s a cat?

A much easier photographic subject is the rhododendron. It stood completely still, for which I was very glad.

I’m particularly pleased with the texturing of the flowers in that photo.

In the gallery below, you can find a few more photos: Elephant, warthog, sunbear.

All in all, a day at the zoo.

This realization is not meant to free us from the obligation to live our lives in the best way we can. Rather, it is to acknowledge that no matter how carefully we may plan, we cannot force our lives into a certain path. When push comes to shove, there are elements of life that are beyond our control.

Tonight, I come face to face with that need to surrender. No matter how hard I may try to fall asleep, I seem to remain awake. And so, I surrender, and admit that I cannot force sleep to come. And write one of the five or so blog posts running through my head.

Tisha B’Av marks the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem. It is a day of mourning and lamentation. It is a day that I often have trouble relating to, seeing as I don’t actually want to go back to a Judaism that is based around the Temple in Jerusalem. Yet this year, the sense of mourning  destruction is resonating with me.

I find myself feeling like there are a lot of us mourning a vision of our world that seems to have been destroyed. There was an optimism to American life and worldview that seems to have gone, and many of us are beginning to wonder if it will return. There is a sadness present, both in those searching for work, and those who are employed but remain fearful of what the future will bring.

We are facing an unknown future, as did the Jews following the destruction of the Temple. They didn’t know what it meant to be Jewish without a Temple in which to make sacrifices. We aren’t sure what it means to be  American without a limitless economic horizon stretched before us.

Yet Judaism transformed, and became something far more vibrant than it had been. And America also has the potential to be revitalized. It does, however, require a willingness to accept that the world is changed.