In 1991, I decided to write my five High Holyday sermons for the New Year 5772 in the form of long poems. They focused on what might happen to individuals in the coming year: being born, learning, returning (in the sense of t’shuvah, the correct meaning of the word often mistranslated as ‘repentance’), growing old and being bereaved. There is a link to each of them below: the first one (‘For those who will be born in this year’) and the third (‘For those who will return in this year’) have been repeated on various occasions in subsequent years. There is a sixth poem here: my original intention was to title the fifth poem ‘For those who will die in this year’ but I lost my nerve. I finally wrote it in 2018 when the impending birth of my grandson forced me to think about death.
(apologies for the erratic line spacing in these poems -Wordpress is behaving strangely)