High Holiday Readings

High Holiday Readings

Read by Paul Travis on Yom Kippur Day 5778

My Responsibility

  • I am responsible for my relationship to you
  • I am responsible for the way I see you
  • I am responsible for letting you see the inner me
  • I am responsible for correcting false images of me that I give to you
  • I am responsible for my judgements of you
  • I am responsible for my understanding of what you say and do
  • I am responsible for any hurts I allow myself to feel about you
  • I am responsible for any desires of needs I feel toward you
  • I am responsible for frustrations of my desires or needs toward you
  • I am responsible for any hostility I allow myself to feel toward you
  • I am responsible because I choose to be responsible
  • I am responsible because it gives me pleasure
  • I am responsible because it gives me control
  • I am responsible because it gives me freedom
  • I am responsible because it gives me relaxation
  • I choose not to be responsible for your relationship to me
  • I choose not to be responsible for your communications to me
  • I choose not to be responsible for such impossibilities
  • For if I choose to feel responsible for your happiness
  • Then I would feel guilty about your unhappiness
  • And if I shoud try to make you responsible for my unhappiness
  • Then I would feel responsible for your misery about my unhappiness
  • When I am responsible and know it, I am free
  • When I am responsible and don’t know it, I’m still responsible
  • And therefore, since I am responsible anyway,
  • I choose to be aware of the blessing of being responsible
  • What a pleasure it is to know the freedom and power of my responsibilty
  • For responsibility is love in motion
  • And responsibility is the toast of one soul to another

 

Author Unknown