From the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, until the end of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), Jews around the world engage in an intense annual period of repentance.
Balthasar seemed to know just what I was feeling: Christians, he said, often feel like a foreigner forced to speak in a language whose rules they have never learned, or a stuttering child who wants to say something but cannot.
“Students who understood very little of his lectures told me that they attended because they ‘felt better’ about themselves in his presence. ‘This is a professor to whom I can confess,’ one said.”