adinapelle.com

 “Be great in act, as you have been in thought.” Shakespeare coined humanity with this sentence. Page after page, he built the theater of life, accounting every single emotion known to man, every triumph and disappointment. He now passed on to immortality but who can forget Shakespeare?

How is my own life impacting the world? Am I leaving a print in the mass consciousness of the world surrounding me? What will happen when I die? Was my life meaningful ?

From a spiritual point of view things look simple.

For Orthodox Christians, original sin is not so much a "stain on the soul", but a condition of the world into which we are conceived and born. We are not conceived maculate, but we become maculate.

In Dostoyevsky, a character believed God had a beard and lived in the sky. Another questioned, in a very analytical way, the very concept of heaven and hell. Dostoyevsky died in 1881, so, about the afterlife, he now knows what we don’t. We read his words and feel his presence now.

Judaism, as it was explained to me over and over, has G-d looking at three areas during the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the so-called Ten Days of Repentance.  Rosh Hashanah is the day on which G-d reviews the status of his creation and determines if we merit another year in this world. This   was a very scary thought process for me when I was growing. Thinking that my life might be useless. But…..By praying with sincere regret for the past and commitment for the future, a person can erase his or her misdeeds hence improve judgment before it is sealed on Yom Kippur.

"Repentance, Prayer, and Charity can remove the bad decree” is the corner stone of Judaism I grew up with.

The gist of it, as I see it now is to think about your life, reinvent yourself and live a better, more meaningful life each year until you die. Like getting rid of the contents of your pockets before crossing an imaginary river into immortality.