At the threshold of autumn, the Jewish year opens to a 10-day sanctuary of time called High Holy Days. We enter through the New Year celebration of Rosh Hashana into a period of self-reflection and realignment, to repair and restore our relationships with loved ones, community and with the Eternal. The journey culminates on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

Synagogues across the world fill to overflowing, the air resonant with prayer, on the sacred eve and day of Yom Kippur. For 25 hours we abstain from food and water and from washing and adorning our bodies with lotions. Many wear white, the color of the kittel, or death shroud.

By withdrawing from the concerns of the body, the stuff of our spiritual lives comes into focus. The goal of High Holy Days is to strip away our routine existence, with its numbness to both the joys and the injustices of our world. From the time of the writing of the Torah, the Jewish community has observed this mandate to examine and amend our thoughts and actions.

In ancient Judaism, the kohanim (priests) enabled the sanctification of our communal lives. With the destruction of the Holy Temple and our forced dispersion, the rabbis taught that the doorway to the Eternal could be found in our homes, our synagogues and our places of study. Personal prayer replaced reliance on an intermediary.

The Rabbinic Period, the second cycle of Jewish spiritual history, established our tradition of a one-to-One relationship with the Eternal. But the Nazi Holocaust compelled many of us to wonder at the very existence of the Great Mystery. This question is the central paradox of my generation of Jews.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg believes that the Holocaust has triggered the third cycle of Jewish spiritual history. We learned to find the Holy One everywhere, even in our most mundane affairs. How we treat each person we encounter, what we model for our children, what we create by the work we do, what stories we tell each other, all have profound consequences.

I believe it has become more critical than ever to attend to the challenges posed by High Holy Days, to take time to review our actions and the ethical underpinnings of our lives. It has become vital to our survival. Those with the courage to examine human history have found that under conditions of unexamined and unrestrained governmental power, times when bigotry was fostered and a deficit of consequences prevailed, human beings have acted with unrelenting cruelty and destruction, including numbness to genocide and the devastation of our Earth. We illustrate this today, for example, when we look away from the genocide occurring in Sudan.

This time of intense communal prayer and reflection encourages us to face the broken or numb parts of ourselves, as individuals and as communities. The reward for joining in the beauty and meaning of this observance is a recommitment to live a conscious life and to participate in healing our imperfect world.

Sabena Stark is a writer and member of Temple Beth Israel. This column is coordinated by Lane Interfaith Alliance to offer inspiration, share personal spiritual experiences and bring a deeper understanding of individual faith perspectives with the intention of blessing our community and world.