It’s time. Time for God to come back inside from wandering in the fields and get down to business. Time for God to start scribbling all of our names in the Book of Life.

Or in that Other Book. The one we don’t mention, but whose name looms large as we contemplate the meaning of life, how we got where we are today, and where, oh where, do we go from here?

I’m not feeling it.

I’m not interested in being Judged by the One True Judge. Not ready to spend hours contemplating where I’ve gone wrong. Or what terrible sins I might or might not have committed.

Rabbi Alan Lew wrote a book called This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared about the Jewish High Holy Days. That’s pretty much how I feel. Completely unprepared and stumbling into the holidays, trying to tear my heart open.

But my heart isn’t in it.

My heart hasn’t been in synagogue Judaism for several years. I rarely attend services. I let Friday nights and Saturday mornings slide by as if they are normal, mundane. Prayers, lovely expressions of gratitude that once captivated me, seldom fall from my lips.

Except for Modeh Ani. “I am grateful.”

“I am grateful to you, Breath of Life, for you have returned my soul to me with great faithfulness.”

Every morning. It is so much a part of me that it comes without thought, without consideration of God or belief. It is a pure expression of gratitude for being awake, alive, myself.

It is perhaps ironic that, given my current state of mind regarding synagogue services, I applied for and was offered a High Holy Day pulpit at a tiny synagogue in a small, rural town in western Tennessee.

I visited this synagogue nearly 40 years ago. Only once or twice, because it was far from where I lived. But it was a shelter from the storm that tore me from a world I understood and tossed me into a sea of ignorant and casual antisemitism.

Their version of Judaism was different from mine. But they were there. In the middle of a world that boasted churches on virtually every corner.

When I learned two weeks ago that they needed a last-minute replacement rabbi, my heart cracked open.

I had to apply.

My prayer today is that the crack in my heart opens wide, letting the words and melodies of these days enter, settle, and reverberate within me.

The prophet, poet, and songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote:

“There is a crack, a crack in everything;
That’s how the light gets in.”

Cohen’s lyrics came from a heart that longed for hope, for meaning, and yes, even for grace in a broken and imperfect world.

I won’t be perfect when I step into Congregation B’nai Israel. But I pray that I will be enough.

That the people there will awaken to possibility and hope. That I will, too.

That the prayers and melodies of these Holy Days will illuminate our lives, open our hearts, and let the light in.