
The addition of the bedtime sh’ma, the daily/weekly practice of t’shuvah, along with two essays on t’shuvah, brings to completion this project on the cycles of t’shuvah.
This project began with “Yom Kippur Kattan and the Cycles of Teshuvah,” which has been available on the ALEPH ReSources Catalogue for several years.
In 2000, the rabbis of B’nai Jeshurun in New York City asked if we could prepare a booklet of R. Zalman’s teachings on t’shuvah for their upcoming High Holidays. We offered the full text in the ALEPH ReSources Catalogue under the title A Guide for Starting Your New Incarnation:: Teachings On The Modern Meaning of T’shuvah.
Reb Zalman mentioned that there are three units to the cycles of t’shuvah and I wanted to complete the trilogy by adding in the daily/weekly bedtime sh’ma as a t’shuvah practice, which Reb Zalman left to me.
Now, a decade since his passing, we have completed the trilogy on t’shuvah. Hassidut is largely a t’shuvah focused approach to Jewish practice. The Hassidic approach is through the joy of recognizing when we have moved away from the Holy One and then return to God’s compassionate presence.
Note: On page 3, we embedded a sound file of Reb Zalman singing the words on the page. This will play in Adobe Acrobat Pro, but not likely in Adobe Reader. This zip file therefore includes this music as a separate file in the event you cannot activate it from within the file.