I was raised in a secular Jewish home. My parents had both come away from Orthodox homes, in which they experienced the traditional Jewish ways as restrictive rather than nurturing. So we celebrated the 'Thou shalt's' and generally ignored the 'Thou shalt not's.'

We continued in this non-observant tradition even when we lived in Israel - where the Orthodox have manouvered politically to gain control over marriages, divorces and funerals, often to the annoyance of the majority of the population that does not adhere to Orthodox tradition.

At this stage in my life, I feel enriched by Jewish culture and traditions but remain a non-adherent Jew. I live my personal spirituality through my involvement in meditation and spiritual healing.

A recent example comes from my having omitted corrections to several errors in an article I edited for the International Journal of Healing and Caring. Here is a letter I wrote to the distressed and annoyed author (edited to preserve anonymity):

Dear 'G',

I am sorry that I've caused you distress.

In Jewish tradition, before Yom Kippur we are supposed to ask forgiveness from anyone we have wronged - before we ask forgiveness from God.

While I don't really celebrate the High Holy Days (I can tell stories from my time in Israel and elsewhere about the reasons for that), I want to explain the circumstances under which these errors occurred.

The Sept issue of IJHC was published in the midst of my selling my home, storing my belongings, relocating... promoting my newly published V3 of Healing Research (Personal Spirituality: Science, Spirit and the Eternal Soul), and continuing to arrange and follow through on lecture and workshop engagements.

So again I apologize for the troubles to which I have put you.

The errors in the recent second round of edits were due to my missing some of your notes in a narrowed text window from which I transferred the corrections to the web page.

I know how annoying these errors can be, having found several in each of my books after they were printed... And not correctable...

My consolation comes from a Muslim prayer rug I inherited from my father's home. It has a glaring error in the pattern. When I wondered out loud to him about how this could have happened in a rug produced by a family that had been doing this for generations he told me, "They do that deliberately, to acknowledge that only God is perfect."

Blessings

Dan

Here are photos of this piece of precious teacher-prayer rug which has been reincarnated into a pillow after a near-death experience with moths.