For the Yamim Noraim
The Dance of Teshuva
The Dance of Teshuva is a collection of Rav David Ebner zt"l's essays and poetry on the Days of Awe — short pieces, written for reflection in the weeks when a Jew is meant to be doing something about his or her life. They draw on the Torah of Pshischa, Kotzk, Rebbe Nachman, and the Alter of Novardok, with Thoreau and Wordsworth wandering through when they have something to add.
The reader was put together by his students, with a letter of their own introducing it, in the year after his passing.
A Partnership with 18Forty
The Dance of Teshuva is produced and distributed in partnership with 18Forty, the Jewish media and education project led by Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin. When Rav Ebner's students approached 18Forty about collecting his writings into a reader like this one, the team said they jumped at the opportunity — they'd long found that his teachings resonated with the same questions 18Forty tries to explore in its own work. Anonymous donors sponsored the printing and distribution of physical copies in Rav Ebner's memory, so that shuls across the world could have them this holiday season.
Read the full reader and download the PDF at 18Forty
An Introduction, from a Longtime Student
Ahead of Rosh Hashana, Rabbi Mijal Bitton featured the reader in her newsletter, and asked Daniel Bonner — a student of Rav Ebner's for over a decade, first in yeshiva and later weekly over Zoom until his passing — to introduce one of its essays.
Bonner describes him as an “Elul Jew”: most at home in the season of self-examination, open with his students about his own struggles in life, in Torah, and with God. He writes about Rav Ebner's insistence that a real Jewish education has to be lived, not just learned — and about the poet's ear he brought to these Ten Days of Repentance, hearing in them not performance or “fakery,” but what Bonner calls “lived aspiration.”
Read Daniel Bonner's full introduction on Substack