Please bring your teshuva journals with you to Yom Kippur services on Monday morning. Also, Reb Barbara would be glad to get more rewrites of the Ki Anu Amecha prayer sent to rabbi@or-olam.org.

This section in particular:

We are arrogant, but You are merciful.
We are obstinate, but You are patient.
We are laden with sin, but you abound in compassion.
We are as a passing shadow, but You are eternal.

If you need more information about what Reb Barbara is looking for as far as a rewrite, please read this:

We remember who we are.

We will go through the next ten days thinking about those blotchy spots on our souls. We care – we care a great deal – about polishing off the shmutz, about finding the forgiveness we need to help our soul shine and sparkle again, as fresh and innocent as it was the day it was created.

The hardest forgiveness to ask for, it turns out, is the forgiveness we must grant ourselves. The hardest judgments we make are made when we judge ourselves.

Before you are your teshuva journals. Begin the very Jewish process of self-reflection with your village in mind. Imagine, please, that you are in the circle. You have done something you know to have been wrong, and your community gathers around you – not to tell you how much you have hurt them, but how much you mean to them. Write to yourself as if you were a member of that community.

What are your best and most wonderful qualities? Who are you, really? Be specific and detailed and go on at great length. Then, ask yourself: What prevents you from being more of who you really are? What can you do to be more of who you are?

Then, during these days of atonement and self-reflection, the time before Yom Kippur as we need to experience it, ask this question and write about it, at the length it requires:

Knowing how easily you could forgive others, can you forgive yourself?

Finally, please help our community with a creative Jewish act. We know it is our work, in every generation, to look at our traditions anew. Enclosed is the text of our Kin Anu Amecha, which precedes our communal confessional prayer, Ashamnu. Kin Anu Amecha first describes our relationship to God in many different ways. It ends with four sentences that I would like to ask you to rewrite in your own terms (and you can do that with the first part of the prayer, too!). I give an example of such rewrites below. Please send your versions to rabbi@or_olam.org before next Shabbat; we will read some of them anonymously at Yom Kippur.

We try so very hard and, thankfully, You know.
We do everything we can to nourish our community, and You notice!
We are burdened by our mistakes, but You remind us that we can forgive ourselves, and grow.
We delight in our loved ones, and You love us for it.