Adonai, open up my lips that my mouth may declare your praise…

It’s the high holy days, the beginning of the new year when we ask to be rewritten into the book of life and atone for the wrongdoings of the past year. I’ve always felt autumn is more of the season for the new year than January, maybe because my birthday is in it, so I have been trying to account for my many failings and flaws lately.

I haven’t felt very good about myself, although I don’t know how much of that is due to my lack of employment and reliance on my parents. I know I am supposed to honor my mother and father but when I live with them, when Mom works at home and complains I see her as a “playmate”, when Dad demands I “use my brawn” whenever anything needs lifting or dragging and sticks his nose up at the prospect of helping me out physically ever while regularly bemoaning “i’m tryin’ to help!” when it feels like pestering and nagging, it’s extremely difficult. I’m lucky I have them, I’m aware of that. I remind them that I love them often with both words and actions, Mom more often because she’s around more.

The future just looks so bright I feel like staring at the sun, risking blindness if I try for too long. I don’t want to be Not In Education Employment or Training (a NEET, the discord server I’m in calls us) through the twenty fourth year of my life but I don’t want to work at a job I’ll hate even though that’s probably a rite of passage. I don’t know what I’m doing. Half the time I don’t feel like I’m doing anything but wasting time on Reddit or writing words very few people will read.

Being Jewish is scary in a world where Israel is bombing multiple countries and everyone has always and will always associate Israel with Jews. My neighbors have children in Israel, can you keep them safe at least? I know that part of the world is not exactly easy for you to enact influence, what with free will being such a human right you’ve given us and propaganda having infected generations of citizens, so I’m just going to contain that part of this prayer to selfishness. Keep my cousins and neighbor’s kids alive.

May we beat the weapons of war into ploughshares and don’t stop. Keeping beating them into musical instruments! May whoever next attempts to wage war have to beat them back into ploughshares first. That was a poem in the Siddur I memorized as a child and still agree with.

Thank you for letting me live in a world where the beauty of nature still exists, even amidst civilization. Seeing the viceroy butterflies and bumblebees and every creature that could possibly live on a goldenrod this summer has helped keep me sane. Even witnessing death and then life reborn from death has been beautiful, like when the ant colony was dragging a dragonfly a hundred times its size across the sidewalk and I not only had the chance to see it but to video it for others on YouTube to see as well. People liked it! People also disliked it, but still, I brought joy to someone who otherwise wouldn’t have been as happy. Maybe.

Please let me live to eat apples and honey again next year. Thank you, amen.