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Оглавление10. 2. 14
THE FOCAL POINT of Yom Kippur is death? I thought it was All-Atonement-All-The-Time.
Your average Jew will tell you that Yom Kippur is the Day of Judgment, ten days after the new year, when we confess our sins in synagogue and feel somewhat pardoned because of it. Yet all you have to do is start talking to rabbis—or reading their books about preparing for Yom Kippur—and death takes center stage. Which upends my view of this holiday in a way that might finally make me more alert during the untold hours in synagogue.
When I say the rabbis focus on death, I don’t mean death in the sense of a morbid fixation (cue the ominous organ music): it’s death in the sense of a laser focus on life—how fragile it is, how unpredictable—which forces us to really ask ourselves, at any age: If you knew you might not get another year, who would you be today?
A friend tells me I absolutely have to read the 2003 dramatic book This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation, by the late rabbi Alan Lew, who had a pulpit in San Francisco and was often called “The Zen Rabbi” because he drew from both Buddhism and Judaism. I Google Rabbi Lew. It turns out that this pioneer of Jewish meditation died from a heart attack after—in tragic irony—a meditation session.
When I start reading his book, I’m surprised at how adamant and bleak he is about the stakes of the Ten Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. He says our very breath is in the balance. You. Could. Die. So how are you going to live? This perspective clears the nasal passages. It rattles but intrigues me.
The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them. But you don’t know which one. The ten days that follow are fraught with meaning and dread. . . . For the next twenty-four hours you rehearse your own death. . . . You summon the desperate strength of life’s last moments. . . . A fist beats against the wall of your heart relentlessly, until you are brokenhearted and confess to your great crime. You are a human being, guilty of every crime imaginable. . . . Then a chill grips you. The gate between heaven and earth has suddenly begun to close. . . . This is your last chance. Everyone has run out of time.
As I said: it’s intense. In previous years, I hadn’t grasped what Yom Kippur entailed, besides a lot of apologies. I’d put in my hours in synagogue, thinking: “This is sufficient. I’m here. I’m listening. I’m reciting. I’m starving. Dayenu.” But Lew’s writing grabs me and says: “That’s bush-league. You have to work much, much harder than that.”
“This is your last chance,” Lew insists. “Everyone has run out of time. Every heart has broken. The gate clangs shut. . . .”
I suddenly want to know if Lew is an outlier, even a little meshugenah (nuts). Do other rabbis view the holiday as starkly?
“You do not have forever,” writes Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles in Who By Fire, Who By Water, a collection of essays edited by Lawrence Hoffman on the Unetaneh Tokef prayer (often referred to as “The Who Will Live, Who Will Die” prayer). “Repent now,” Wolpe continues. “Repair now the broken relationships of your life. . . . There is little time to craft a self in this world before life is taken.”
It’s odd to admit I’m energized by this outlook, which turns out to be shared by many rabbis. Their unanimity begins to have a strong cumulative effect. I turn to the archived Yom Kippur sermons of another West Coast rabbi I admire, Sharon Brous. “STOP. EVERYTHING. NOW,” she implores in her 2013 sermon. “And ask yourself: Who am I? Is this who you want to be in the world? I know how busy we all are, but High Holy Days come and say: ‘Hit pause. This is the only life that you are given. If your narrative is choking you, or even just inhibiting you, do something about it.’”
I’m not sure what my narrative is, let alone whether it’s choking me. But I do know what Brous is getting at: Worries that hold us back. Self-doubt that saps our courage. Self-involvement that obscures another person’s pain. Anger that muddies what’s actually worth getting mad about. Ask yourself, Brous demands, whether you want this one ephemeral life to be defined by what prevents you from being bold or being good.
As I listen to Brous on my headphones, I suddenly see that the Yom Kippur themes of death and atonement aren’t as mutually exclusive as I’d first thought; they’re intertwined. The threat of mortality moves us to atone: if we realized we might die in the coming year, we might act differently, see our blessings more clearly.
What I don’t like is the notion that God will write us out of the Book of Life if we don’t hit three marks: repentance, prayer, and charity. That quid pro quo is very explicit in the unsettling Unetane Tokef poem, which we also recite on Rosh Hashanah, and which is considered by many to be a peak of the service, though it appears nowhere in the Hebrew Bible or Talmud. It was added to the High Holy Day liturgy during the eleventh century and the author is unknown.
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by fire and who by water,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague,
Who by strangulation and who by stoning. . . . [The scary litany continues a bit.]
But repentance, prayer, and charity avert the severe decree.
It’s hard to fathom that God, this week, is deciding who will die—depending on whether we’ve repented, prayed, or been sufficiently charitable. “I find that promise loathsome,” writes British Reform Rabbi Tony Bayfield, in an essay in the Who By Fire anthology. “God has decided who will live and who will die and how they will die as well,” he continues. “I may be scheduled for terminal cancer next November, and you may be scheduled for a car crash two weeks later. Do the right thing before the final gavel falls and neither the cancer nor the car crash will occur. All of my experience tells me that life doesn’t work like that.”
I’m on the fence. I refuse to believe God kills us if we sin, but I don’t think it hurts to fear that possibility. I love how plainly Bayfield refuses to accept “an all-powerful Manipulator who has a level of control over our lives that defies credulity and morality.” But I’d say a little anxiety about our fate can make us act more thoughtfully all year long.
As part of my atonement plunge, a few days before services, I attend a seminar about Yom Kippur given at Mechon Hadar, an independent learning institute cofounded by my Selichot guide, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer. Rabbi Shai Held, another cofounder and impassioned teacher, answers unhesitatingly when I ask him to tackle Yom Kippur’s grim theme of the clock running out.
“I think it’s hard—to the point of being impossible,” he says, “to do what rabbis often say in High Holy sermons: ‘We should live all the time with the realization that we might be killed in an hour.’ You know what? I’ll speak for myself: I would never get out of bed again. I mean that seriously. And by the way, if I thought that way about my children, I would lock my son and daughter in my apartment and they would never go outside. But, if we ignore that idea all the time, we do so at our own peril. And in some ways, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are about that: at least sometimes, we have to stop and realize we might not live until tonight. And what happens then? That’s the tension, right? You can’t live like that all the time. But you’ve got to live like that some of the time.”
Live like you might die some of the time. That’s my new Yom Kippur.
I already have practice because, without subjecting readers to all my demons, suffice it to say that I win the prize for Worst-Case-Scenario Catastrophic Thinking. I don’t know if that’s because I grew up with a mother who warned me not to walk under building scaffolding (it might collapse) and to avoid rock concerts (I could get trampled). She believed in the Ayin Hara (the evil eye), the idea that if things are too good, it will tempt the evil eye and something bad will be visited upon me. Mom would shoo that eye away with a spitting sound, “Tuh, tuh, tuh!” every time a misfortune was mentioned, as if to say, “God forbid that should happen to you.”
Maybe some Jews are born to believe tragedy looms. Either way, this new Yom Kippur mind-set—you could die, so live better—keeps blessings in high relief.
Before we get too maudlin about this holiday, the rabbis tell us there’s a happy coda: this rehearsal for death ends in resuscitation.
“Jews re-enact their own death,” Yitz Greenberg writes, “only to be restored to life in the resolution of the day.” It feels quintessentially Jewish to me: we collapse and then revive. We beat ourselves up and then get back in the ring. And Greenberg goes a step further on cleansing, offering a practical application: the mikveh (a bath, or a collection of water). Soul-refreshment, he writes, is sometimes reenacted literally by immersing one’s self in the ritual tank. “The removal of ritual impurity,” Greenberg writes, “is a symbolic statement of removing the stain of sin (death).”
The mikveh appears often in observant Jewish practice. Every Jewish conversion includes a body-dunking. Jewish funeral homes have a mikveh to purify the dead body. Orthodox women return to the bath after every menstruation or childbirth, though there has been feminist opposition to this ritual, because of its suggestion that women are unclean or impure. But in recent years, the mikveh has been reimagined by feminists as a powerful purge for any Jew at any time.
I make an appointment with ImmerseNYC—a pluralistic mikveh on the Upper West Side, which several people have recommended. Since renewal is epitomized by children, I invite my teenage daughter, Molly, and my niece, Maya (via text message, of course), to join me, explaining the bath’s symbolism. They text me back instantly: “I’m there!” “Let’s take the plunge.”
ImmerseNYC was founded by Rabbi Sara Luria, who was spurred by her transformative experience at Mayyim Hayyim in Boston, a mikveh created by Anita Diamant, author of the best-selling book The Red Tent. “The mikveh is for you, just as you are,” Luria tells me on the phone in calming tones before my appointment. “When you’re naked, you are just as you are. There’s nothing between you and the water. It’s like the moment you were born. There are no barriers, no pretension. We tell you to bring yourself.”
“Bringing myself” means bringing my reticence because I’m not big on nudity. I’m relieved to learn that I won’t be naked in front of anyone else. When Sara outlines the three options—the girls and I can enter the bath chamber all together and watch each other, or we can turn our backs but be in the same room, or we can submerge separately—we agree to each go it alone.
The brownstone that holds the mikveh is hard to find. It looks like any nondescript ground-floor entrance of a walk-up in New York—not well lit, no signage. That’s on purpose. There has historically been discretion-bordering-on-secrecy surrounding the mikveh: Orthodox women, who attend monthly, don’t necessarily want to call attention to their cycles or personal hygiene.
The greeter at the desk is brusque but friendly, in that no-nonsense voice that sounds like my late aunt Helen. Her unceremonial approach reminds me that, for most people, this is not a spa, but a regular, practical stop in their routine.
We’re led downstairs to a narrow hall with immaculate bathrooms sparkling with pearly-white tile and marble, each equipped with soap, toothpaste, mouthwash, shampoo, Q-Tips, cotton balls, comb, fresh towels, a white robe. We’re instructed to remove all jewelry, nail polish, perfume, body lotion—anything that could come between us and the fresh rainwater. After using every cleanser in sight, I feel as if I’ve never been so scrubbed, so consciously stripped bare. Removing anything artificial from the body is an out-of-body experience: I feel lighter, childlike, distilled.
The ritualist—also named Sarah—has another soothing voice, and she offers me and the girls a choice of printed blessings to be recited while we sink. We sit side by side on a bench, reading through the options. I pick a passage from the Yom Kippur offerings:
“May I be open to the possibility of forgiveness. . . . May my entry into these waters mark my intention to forgive myself, forgive others, and ask others to forgive me.”
It’s finally my turn to go into the closed-off wet area with Sarah and disrobe. She holds a towel up between us so I can enter the tub unwatched. The small room looks like a mix between a hotel Jacuzzi and a physical-therapy whirlpool. As I descend the steps (seven of them, for the days of creation), I note the perfect temperature of the water and wonder if the womb felt like this.
Once enfolded by clear liquid, it’s affecting to float without touching the bottom, feeling nothing but suspension, hearing nothing but the blessing I’ve selected as it’s read aloud—though admittedly I don’t hear it all when I go under. (The water is supposed to cover one’s head.)
The three successive dunks don’t take long, and I walk up the steps to retrieve my robe. When I reunite with the girls, their faces are rosy. Maya announces, “I felt seriously cleansed.” Molly adds, “It went too quickly. I should have stayed in it longer.”
It all went unexpectedly fast. Though the guide didn’t rush me, I can see that this ritual is efficient for the women who go monthly: you’re basically in and out. I half-expected cymbals, or a certificate of some kind.
As I put on my clothes, I think about how I’ll describe the whole thing to my husband when I get home. It will be hard to sum it up. I felt both inhibited and relieved. Alienated and alert. I was moved by the murmured blessings, but couldn’t hear them all. I was hit hard by the tangible symbolism of a fresh start, but aware that, when it comes to the toil of atonement, this was a drop in the proverbial bucket (or bathtub). I felt recharged, not quite reborn.
V’al kulam, Eloha s’lichot, slach lanu, m’chal lanu, kapeir lanu. . . .
For all these sins, O God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.
Death spurs atonement. We rehearse our death on Yom Kippur. Then we get to come back to life.
