Writing in the past; editing for the future

היום אחד ועשרים  יום שהם שלשה שבועות בעמר

Today is twenty-one days, which is three weeks of the omer
מלכות שבתפארת
A day of nobility in a week of compassion

With all my talk about the present, I end this week in both the past and the future.

I spent part of the afternoon going over the changes for the Kitchen's Machzor (High Holiday Prayerbook) 2.0. Machzor 1.0 was created in 8 months with the understanding that it would be revised and redesigned in a year or two. It made it two years, and will always shine as our first edition that would form the basis for all editions to come. But the time has come for the new edition, and I will spend the next three weeks immersed in the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy fixing mistakes and expanding the content.

The rest of today was spent preparing for tomorrow's classes and tutoring b'nei mitzvah students who live on opposite sides of the bay. I needed to count the next day of the omer when I finally got home. So while I'm technically in the 22nd day of the omer, this entry marks the day past.

My practice is to have one entry for each day--a goal sometimes met, sometimes not. Allowances like this are sometimes needed to make it work. And that is the message of compassion for the process as we now move into a week of perseverance.