Hello to all my loyal listeners from every corner of the world, as well as all the newcomers who are listening to East to West for the first time. You are on the right channel. You are on East to West World Music Songbook, and this is your captain on this journey, Eitan Battat.

We are exactly in the middle of the ten days between the Jewish New Year to the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. And as we get closer to the Day of Atonement, I started thinking about what this day really means. Yeah, we every year, we stop everything we are doing. We put everything aside, including technology, which is the only day I can really, really do it for more than 25 hours straight. While we doing that, we take a look at ourself.

What did I do right? What did I do wrong? Who did I hurt? What do I regret? What do I want to do differently? And the custom is that we ask for forgiveness from each other, family, friends, etc. Aside of the custom, the self reflection is what I really want to talk about. Shouldn’t we do the self reflection more than once a year? And I would love to get rid of my phone for more than 24 hours in one year. But shouldn’t we look at ourselves before things build up, before we carry regrets for too long?

And then I come across a word that is overused: I’m sorry. We say it sometimes almost like it’s lost its meaning. It’s almost like a reflex. Someone bumps into you and you say, “I’m sorry.” We make a mistake, we say, “We sorry.” We don’t hear what someone says, we say, “We sorry.” We say the word too quickly. Maybe because it’s polite, maybe it is expected. And sometime I find myself wanting to turn around and ask someone, “Are you really sorry?” Because there is a big difference between saying the words “I’m sorry” and actually being sorry.

Being sorry mean you recognize what you did. And saying “I’m sorry” doesn’t mean you have been forgiven. The person may accept your apology, but they may still need time. Forgiveness really belongs to the person who was hurt, don’t you think? You cannot demand it simply because you said you are sorry.

There’s another kind of forgiveness I think we often neglect and don’t talk about is forgiving yourself. And I’m going to talk more about it later on. And maybe that is the hardest forgiveness of all. We all have regrets. Things that we have done, things that we didn’t do, things we could have done differently, opportunities we miss, and moments we should have picked up the phone and didn’t. Sometimes we carry those regrets for us for years. Perhaps it’s time to forgive ourselves even more.

I hope that tonight through the program we can do some of that self reflection through music. Because music, as I believe, is forgiving. You don’t have to be in a certain mood to listen to music. You can be happy, sad, reflective, remembering somebody, thinking about something, and there is a song that somehow meets you right there. Music doesn’t judge you. It waits for you. And sometimes a song says something that we have been trying to say ourselves, but couldn’t find the words.

So tonight, we are going to take that journey together. A journey through forgiveness, regrets, memories, things we wish we have done differently, forgiving other people, and perhaps the hardest one of all, forgiving ourselves.

So let’s begin. Stay with me for the next couple of hours.