”What Kind of Relationship Do I Want to Be Having?” - Constructing Our Relationships Without Superiority and Inferiority

The signature prayers of Yom Kippur are confessionals whereby everyone says together lines including "We have been guilty of slander" and "We have sinned wittingly and unwittingly."  The language is often felt to be archaic.  What does it mean for someone to say "We've slandered!"  I use examples from my own life, starting with a congregational rabbi's relationship with my community, to make it real, and then I expand to other relationships in my life, and to The Choice we all have to make:  Can I live a life of relationships in which there is no "higher" and "lower" in the relationship?  Can I live in which we're all just travellers on the earth trying to relate to each other in a real way, with no "higher" and "lower" judgments?  Our greatest power in "teshuvah," changing our lives for the better, is to purposefully ask of our relationships, "Is this the kind of relationship I want to be having?"  And if the answer is no, then I try to give a guide for changing it.  My sources are the books: Tribal Leadership, The Choice, and the essays of Natalia Ginzburg ("The Little Virtues").