As I finish out my recent travels, I think about a holiday that Jews the world over celebrated recently:  Rosh Hashanna, the New Year.  And I also consider that in a few short days, Jews will remember another special and most significant day, indeed, the holiest day of their liturgical year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
     One of the things about which I spoke on the retreat this week had to do with newness and rebirth.  We all of course celebrate New Year the first of January.  And we all take time to reflect on our lives, what we consider we did incorrectly and wrong, and what we should do to avoid doing such things going forward.  Some of us do this thinking about God, and some of us do not.  Either way, we all recognize the fact of newness and the necessity for repentance and reflection in our lives.
     What our Jewish friends are telling us, however, goes a bit deeper.  Apart from divine agency or purpose, nothing, as the Hebrew writer of Ecclesiastes observed, is new under the sun.  New years come and go, on and on and on.  Moreover, apart from divine umbra, we engage in repentance and reflection solely within ourselves, and for ourselves only. There is no higher point.  We pursue these things for our benefit and, we hope, that of our fellow human beings.
     And as far as we are concerned, God may have nothing to do with it.  What Rosh Hashanna and Yom Kippur are saying is that, rather than set newness and repentance in a purely material perspective, we should instead set God at the center of how we think about them.  Otherwise, our newnesses will merely reflect what has already been, the mercurial and repetitive expressions of finite existence, and our repentance will no more than express what we think about ourselves in our own world or, in other words, demonstrate our loyalty to the root meaning of the English word "idiot," a person who sees everything through her own eyes and does not wish to entertain the insights of anyone else's.  We are only looking at the inside of our personal box.
     So, yes, celebrate every point of newness, and yes, rejoice in every new year.  And yes, take time to meditate on mistakes and shortcomings.  Yet remember that such practices really only become viable to us when we recognize our utter inability to do either effectively and fully without the fact of a personal and omniscient God.
     After all, God is the ultimate point.