Here is a beautiful extract of a speech about approaching Yom Kippur by Rav Melamed, author of Peninei Halacha. He says that we shouldn't only confess and articulate the things that we regret, but also the things that we are proud of. And he says that we, the national-religious community, have a lot to be proud of. We raised our children to love the land, to protect the nation, to combine Torah with work, to care about others - and they are doing it.
Wishing you all a gmar chatima tova.
Leaving the matter of interactions with your personal troll to yourself, I have always been puzzled by B'ruriah's quote of that posuq , and of all those who continue to quote her, since in the posuq as we have it now, chato-im is pointed with a dagesh chozoq. Thus it means sinners. If you're looking for sins, that word appears with a chataf patach (and thus no dagesh). So, perhaps B'ruriah (and R. Meier!?, who didn't complain about it) didn't know tanach that well, or perhaps the masoretic text we use now did not equilibrate till a few hundred to a thousand years later, or...what?
You can see the emotion from this video, and can't help but feel it. Thanks much for bringing it to our attention.
In the spirit of Yom Kippur having passed :-), I'd like to express my distaste with a lot of breast-beating going on, which, as always, is phrased as "we need to repent" but almost always means "other people have to repent." I just saw a overly-long essay on another blog about "Religious Zionists having to do teshuva." (Subtext: *My* kind of Religious Zionism is OK; the rest of you need to drop yours and adopt mine.") And let's not get started on the whole "Forgive us, hostages, for not having freed you." (Subtext: "Any of you people not screaming in the streets are responsible for the hostages still being there.")
You know what? No one's perfect, but it seems to me that certain groups have a lot less to regret than others. The Cassandras who have been yelling the truth for decades would fall into the former category. As to the hostages...no, that is just a denial of reality, which, to be frank, may be connected to the fact that the people saying it were among the anti-Cassandra forces.
Pride indeed, obviously mixed with pain.