No one teaches you how to do teshuvah or to navigate the yamim noraim when you have self abusive tendencies. Just know that your friends and community members who deal with these things are not in need of being told how wrong or bad they have been, but need to take this time to rebuild and reaffirm their relationship with themselves. Their lives depend on it.
A conversation about how to honor people, the Torah, and the nuances of public vs. private life turns into a conversation about how we define frum -- about what makes an observant person observant.
And here’s where I start to get uncomfortable.
My whole life I had it backwards. It took a moment, just one small talk, to make me realize how wrong I was: Yom Kippur is the happiest day ever.
