If "hell is other people," as Sartre suggested, then surely sometimes the opposite is also true.

As I enter my 37th holiday season I have been reflecting on what makes this time special. I think it is the way the rituals make life feel less lonely. If you participate, you have a sense of being surrounded by lots of other people doing the same thing you're doing, and you feel connected to something larger than you could ever feel on your own.

I find this comforting, and also profoundly sad, as it seems we humans can never find all that we are looking for.

Sometimes I imagine what it must be like to love everyone on earth with the same passion and tenderness that one feels for only the most special people in your life: your mother, your father, your spouse, your children. I think this might be what G_d is about, and I wonder what it would take to approach this state of being. It seems connected somehow to the deep-seated, inchoate, unfathomable longing and joy I sense at this time of year, inextricably linked, augmented, and made manifest by the music and the colorful lights with which I am working to surround myself this long Thanksgiving weekend.