After Yom Kippur, we feel cleansed, renewed, and ready to start again. But then comes the question: what now? Somehow, it often doesn’t take long before we fall back into old habits. Throughout the year, our physical desires can pull us toward choices that weigh down the soul. On Yom Kippur, that balance is reversed. We deprive the body of its usual comforts and turn our attention completely toward the needs of the neshama. It is almost as if the soul is telling the body: Now feel what you have been doing to me all year. For one day, the body is asked to experience the exact opposite of what it normally wants—with the hope that we will come away understanding our inner struggle a little better, and enter the year with a new relationship between body and soul.

Yom KippurTishrei