This week, we bless each other with Shana Tova – we wish each other a year of goodness.
The kabbalistic New Year, Rosh Hashanah, starts on Wednesday night and runs through Friday. The Shabbat that comes after Rosh Hashanah is Shabbat of Ha’azinu – known also as “Shabbat Shuva”.
This is not a regular week at all. Our actions this week, mainly on Thursday and Friday up until the following Saturday, affects us for the entire year to come. We are in the seed level of the year.
During the month of Virgo, our teacher Karen Berg guides us through a daily practice in order to prepare ourselves for Rosh Hashanah. We work on being kind and share and feel the pain of other people. We look inside of ourselves and see where and when we have hurt someone or created chaos in someone’s life. We ask for forgiveness, and we want to forgive the people in our life that hurt us. After doing these actions, we are ready for the next level.
Rosh Hashanah is the New Year and is also known as Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment.
On Rosh Hashanah, the entire world is standing in front of a divine judge. This judge will decide how much Light each and every person around the world will get in this coming year, and will give it to them accordingly. When we stand in front of the judge, on one side the Opponent brings all of our negativity, and on the other side we as group use the Shofar as a weapon to remove all of our negativity from the seed level of the year.
On Rosh Hashanah we receive 3 different kinds of energy:
1. The energy of life – to give us the power to do our mission in this world.
2. The energy of abundance – so that we will get the positive energy of money.
3. Continuity – we want our actions to have blessings that will stay with us for long time.
We all want a year full of blessings, and we want to send this Light to the entire world.
The Shabbat that comes after Rosh Hashanah is called Shabbat Shuva, which means ‘to go back in time’. During this Shabbat, we are still in the process – while the universe is open – of going back in time and removing any action of negativity from our past.
On Wednesday night, we will enter a period of 21 days in which we have the opportunity to draw a wealth of blessings into our life. Let me explain it in a very simple way:
Imagine that our soul is like a cup. In the last 30 days of Virgo, we look to see where the cup is dirty and try to clean it. We try to identify where this cup is damaged or stained; we look for anything that may be wrong with the cup. And then we scrub it clean.
On Rosh Hashanah, by using the power of the Shofar and engaging in all of the work that we do, the Light gives us the power to remove all unclean areas from our soul.
We will have 10 days to cleanse ourselves a bit more, and then, on Yom Kippur, we receive pure Light into our clear soul. Sukkot and Simchat Torah will then help us take all of this energy and give it the right protection, helping us to bring huge blessings into our life.
May we all be one soul, and use all of the grace of the wisdom that our teachers give us to bring Light and blessings to our life and to the entire world.
Shana Tova!
