Читать книгу My Jewish Year - Abigail Pogrebin - Страница 18
Оглавление10. 6. 14
I VOTE TO BRING back the goat.
On Yom Kippur, the mighty Day of Atonement, in the days of the ancient Temple, all sins were symbolically heaped on an actual goat—the original “scapegoat”—which was then sent off to some undefined land called Azazel.
“Thus the goat shall carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.” Leviticus 16:21
I needed a cloven-hoofed animal to cart my sins away on Yom Kippur, because carrying them around in my head was taxing. Praying all day was hard for me. Pounding my heart with my fist in synagogue didn’t break it open.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My Yom Kippur holiday begins at my dining room table with a big meal before commencing the fast at sundown, when the Kol Nidre service begins. Kol Nidre (“All Vows”) is the name of the focal liturgy of the service that happens on erev (eve of) Yom Kippur.
I’ve set the placemats cheek by jowl to accommodate my family clan of thirteen and ordered food from a Turkish restaurant that makes dips and kebabs. I amassed desserts because the pre-fast meal is always a nice excuse to indulge in the treats I try to deny myself the rest of the year: banana pudding, cookies, cupcakes, and—my mother’s favorite: brownies with walnuts.
Dinner is called for 4 P.M. since services start at 6 P.M. My husband, Dave, is home early from work to open the wine and help me finish setting up. Mom and Dad arrive on time; and my sister’s and brothers’ families rush in late from the office and school, apologizing for the stress they know they’ve added to the schedule. We always end up racing to say the blessings and scarf food before the sun sets and the urgent hour arrives when we have to start fasting as we clamber into cabs to get to Kol Nidre services.
The kebabs are laid out. The slivovitz is poured (Eastern European plum brandy, often compared to lighter fluid), two challahs crown the table. It’s a typical year. Except that now I’m not just the dinner host, I’m “The Wondering Jew,” who gets affectionate grief from my extended family, not to mention lots of questions as to how it’s going.
“Are you keeping up?”
“Are you overwhelmed?”
“Do you feel yourself changing?”
“Are you turning Orthodox?”
Yes, yes, yes, and no.
I tell them I’m energized, I’m learning, I’m always looking forward to the next stop on the train. I tell them I find myself feeling a kind of suspense as to where the next holiday will take me. I explain my process so far—that I try to study as many texts and interview as many experts as possible before each holiday; but once I’m in the middle of one, I try to just be in it. But I also have to always be taking mental notes, so that I can remember what I was feeling when I process it later on my laptop.
I’m especially nervous about this big one. There’s so much buildup to Yom Kippur. I’ve read and heard about what it’s supposed to feel like, how we should be wrung dry, face the people we’ve wronged, come out renewed. I’ve been immersing myself—literally (mikveh) and figuratively (books, articles, interviews, sermons)—and I’ve Elul’ed for weeks. But who knows if I’ve prepared enough.
Hosting Kol Nidre dinner is something I at least know how to do. I inherited hostess duties from my mother back in 2004, when I was writing Stars of David and had started studying Torah. Before Yom Kippur that year, I suggested to Mom that instead of her trying to explain the holiday to the kids at the table, as she did using well-intentioned readings each year, it might be more effective to play a game with everyone, or do an exercise that requires participation. She loved the idea. I came up with a Yom Kippur Quiz with questions that taught and tested basic knowledge, such as, “How many times are we supposed to ask forgiveness of someone we’ve offended before we’re off the hook? a. Once, b. Twice, c. Three times?” Answer: c. Or: “On Yom Kippur, some Jews wave which animal over their heads and then kill it and sell it, giving the proceeds to charity?” Answer: A chicken.
One year I put our family’s names in a basket and each of us apologized to the person whose name we randomly picked, for anything we felt we could have done better in that relationship. There was something tender about having to summon a mea culpa on the spot.
I’m sorry I didn’t make time with you alone last year.
I’m sorry I said you should cut your hair.
I’m sorry I snapped at you when I was carving the turkey.
I feel more and more sure that if kids have something to do, they’re more likely to remember. Frontal lessons don’t stick. I know how I felt in my teens—bored and deficient—when Mom explained the holiday basics at the Kol Nidre table. This year, in light of my holiday plunge, I’m more resolute than ever to try to connect the liturgy to real life so that, when the kids are in synagogue, at least one prayer makes sense and feels familiar.
As my family heaps hummus and baba ghanoush in our annual speed-eating ritual, I circulate a bowl filled with slips of paper and ask each person to take one. On every paper is typed one sin from the list of forty-four failings that will be read several times during services. Each line begins with “Al cheit”—“for the sin . . .”—followed by a specific offense. It was easy to find the “al cheits” online:
For the mistakes we committed before You through wronging a friend.
For the mistakes we committed before You by degrading parents and teachers.
For the mistakes we committed before You by being arrogant. . . .
I ask each person to share an example of when he/she committed the “al cheit” in their hands. The personal confessions are unvarnished:
I wished that my friend at school would get a poorer grade on a test we both took.
I lost my temper too quickly with Mom.
I treated that waiter dismissively.
When anyone at our table is stumped about whether an “al cheit” was committed, the rest of the group is eager to produce an example for him or her. It’s an exercise that makes us laugh, but also makes us confess real things. It’s hard to capture the moment when intimacy ratchets up in a room, but this is one of those times. We’re a little closer afterwards.
After cupcakes and brownies, as I start rushing everyone away from the table to get to synagogue on time, my seventeen-year-old nephew, Ethan, suddenly shouts, “Where are our commitments from last year?”
He’s remembered something I’ve forgotten: the previous year, I’d given everyone an index card to write down something they vowed to do better. We’d sealed the cards in envelopes with our names and the date to be opened: 10-3-14. Tonight was the moment of truth. I run to the cabinet where I keep things I don’t want to misplace, and when I open it, there they are: a pile of thirteen brisket-stained envelopes. We rip them open to see what we promised ourselves.
I read mine aloud, because my seventeen-year-old son, Ben, gives me permission: I’d vowed to nag Ben less and just appreciate him more. Boy, had I failed. I treasure my son beyond language; what Jewish mother doesn’t? He’s magical to me in a million ways. But I had not for a moment stopped pestering him. And on this particular Yom Kippur, when he’s applying to college, I am hit with the stunning fact that he won’t be living with us this time next year, that my on-site parenting will be finished and our face-to-face interactions will no longer be daily. How could I have spent these past precious months noodging Ben so predictably? Why do I feel compelled to ask if he’s finished the essay yet, signed up for Driver’s Ed yet, or remembered to write that thank-you note?
I show my index card to Ben, who—true to form—just gives me a knowing smile and says I’m forgiven. “I know you nag me because you love me,” he says matter-of-factly. He gives me an easy pass, and I take it. But I look at that index card, want to tape it to that stupid goat and send it off to Azazel, that vague place in the Bible to which the animal is exiled, a word that, according to some, means “for the complete removal.” I would love “the complete removal” of my screw-ups.
I’ve decided to attend the start of services at my mother and father’s synagogue instead of going with my husband and kids to mine, because I want to make sure I see how other shuls do it, at least for an hour or two. Being with Mom and Dad takes me back to the time I used to go to High Holy Day services with them in my teens, how I always felt somehow like a tag-along, aware that Mom’s synagogue wasn’t really mine, that she was heading into familiar territory, which was, to me, largely foreign.
B’nai Jeshurun (known as BJ) is a popular Conservative synagogue on the Upper West Side known for exuberant dancing in the aisles on erev Shabbat and for its erudite Argentinian-born senior rabbis, whose accents have their own mystical effect and whose sermons are often impassioned and dense. BJ rents out a hall at Lincoln Center on Yom Kippur because they’ve also outgrown their space.
This service marks the kickoff to twenty-five hours of food-free hard-core penitence. The central Kol Nidre prayer is technically not a prayer but rather a legal declaration—an appeal to a court of three judges, asking to have vows annulled so that atonement may commence. The three judges are symbolized by the cantor flanked by two Torah-carriers (or three Torahs displayed) on the bimah, and the haunting melody is sung three times, louder each time, repeated thrice so latecomers don’t miss it. Its text has been both controversial and confusing for generations.
All vows we are likely to make, all oaths and pledges we are likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our vows, pledges, and oaths be considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths.
It reads as if we’re being absolved of promises we’ll definitely break. What? What’s the point of making vows we’re sure to violate and be forgiven for? There is a common theory that the Kol Nidre “prayer” was added when Jews were in a time of extreme persecution and forced conversions. Jews needed to know that God would forgive any promises they were forced to make renouncing Judaism.
Historically, Kol Nidre has been invoked as proof that Jews can’t be trusted because it basically asserts that we promise to renege on our promises. In the mid-nineteenth century, congregations in Europe wrestled with whether to rewrite or jettison Kol Nidre. The Reform Movement took it out of its prayer book in 1844, then put it back in 1961. Some congregations today recite the Hebrew without translating it in English on the page.
So Kol Nidre is obviously a thorny non-prayer, but I look forward to hearing it this year, now that I understand its complexity. For Jews who have grown up with its melody (and despite my childhood synagogue deficit, I’m one of them), Yom Kippur is the sound of Kol Nidre. The tune is melancholy and reliable to me, and it’s beautiful to hear in BJ’s temporary sanctuary tonight—the Frederick P. Rose Hall of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Because of the amphitheater’s design, it feels like we’re embarking upon penance-in-the-round, which seems apt: we should have to look at each other when we’re thinking about hurting fellow human beings. The rabbis explain that we’re only pardoned for vows we made to God—not to another person. For those sins against each other, we have to face the people we’ve wronged and hope they absolve us.
Mom and Dad find seats in the orchestra, but—since I know I have to cut out early—I find a chair in the “bleachers,” high up behind the bimah, a perch that ends up being dramatic theater in itself. Whenever Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein (who could be cast as a tall Tevye) and Felicia Sol (a steady, focused Golde) turn to face the ark (the Torah cabinet), they are turned toward me, and I can observe their more private demeanor—eyes clenched, bodies rocking. I envy their catharsis. They look fervent and present. I imagine what it must feel like to be carried along by prayer, and wish I knew the liturgy by heart. Mom is visible across the auditorium, her eyes also closed. Dad looks indifferent, but I know he’s content to be where he is every Kol Nidre: next to Mom.
It’s disorienting to be away from my congregational home. I am not known here, and I feel like a tourist; the faces—and most of the melodies—are not familiar. However universal the prayers, every synagogue puts them to their own particular tunes, their own cadences and keys.
And yet one song, “Ya-aleh” (rise), is recognizable and, surprisingly, opens me up. I remember it from when my parents took me to BJ decades ago, and I notice now the ache of the music and the words, taken from a medieval poem, translated here:
May our voices rise up at evening,
our righteous acts arrive with the dawn,
our redemption transforms the dusk.
I love this prayer’s idea of multiple voices rising up together. Tonight amounts to a collective sorry. I like the notion that there’s always the chance to behave better when the sun comes up.
After about an hour, I feel the need to be back in the company of my husband and children. I exit one Lincoln Center auditorium and walk into another, Avery Fisher Hall a few blocks north, where my own synagogue holds overflow services. I take my place next to Dave and Ben and we begin the work of Yom Kippur, side by side. I mentally run through my missteps—moments of insensitivity, inaction, impatience. Contrary to previous years, I’m not casting about for sins. They’re all at my fingertips, thanks to weeks of advance introspection. My Elul training kicks in tonight.
I have no idea what my children or husband are thinking or regretting. But I also don’t feel entitled to ask. Though Jews atone communally, the truest confessions are private. And I know that prying can ruin the experience. So instead of glancing sideways to gauge my family’s expressions, I keep my attention on the rabbis and cantors, who gracefully move around the stage in white robes, bowing and swaying, singing and then sitting silently, hands in their laps or on their prayer books. The choreography feels as fluid and sacred as it did at BJ, but I am more connected here.
By the end of the service, the hunger rumblings have begun. As we cross Broadway to get a taxi, I calculate how many hours have passed since we finished dinner (four) and how many more remain. I’m already sinning anew, focusing on food rather than contrition.
The next day, Yom Kippur itself, is chilly and wet. I head downtown to the sprawling Javits Convention Center, the only space big enough to accommodate the massive numbers that attend High Holy Day services at what’s known in New York as “The Gay Temple”—Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), founded in 1973 as a home for LGBT Jews. The presiding rabbi, Sharon Kleinbaum, is somewhat of a celebrity because of her press-covered advocacy over the years, becoming this temple’s rabbi in 1992—in the middle of the AIDS crisis—and, more recently, protesting “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the ban on women praying at the Western Wall. In 2011 Kleinbaum was filmed while heatedly debating same-sex marriage with an Orthodox man who called the rabbi and her allies “not Jewish” while Kleinbaum just kept repeating, “I will pray for you.”
I am heartened by the hordes at CBST not only because it affirms the vitality of Jewish practice in general but of gay Jewish life in particular. It might surprise the skeptics to discover how traditional this service actually is. They cover more of the prayer book than many Reform synagogues. It reaffirms my remaining barriers: hearing prayers without elucidation still seems mechanical to me.
But I am moved by watching Kleinbaum make her way through the makeshift pews greeting people, knowing their names and those of their children. I overhear her asking after a sick relative, inquiring about someone’s new job or commiserating over the latest affront to gay people in the news. I’ve met Kleinbaum at various Jewish events, and she stops to greet me, tallis around her shoulders, yarmulke capping her hair. She looks no worse for wear after her latest imbroglio. One month ago, during a regular September service, Kleinbaum read aloud the names not only of Israeli casualties during the 2014 war in Gaza, but also of Palestinian children killed in the fighting. Several of her members resigned in anger, including a member of her board. She was vilified on social media. But she remained clear about why she chose to offer a human nod to innocent children.
I leave the cavernous Javits Center before her sermon begins; once again, I’m eager to return to my family on a holiday I associate with family. I’m also feeling a little of what teenagers call FOMO—Fear of Missing Out.
Once back at Avery Fisher Hall during the “al cheit” litany, I glance at my children to see if the prayer rings a bell from the night before. Molly gives me a side-nod of affirmation. “That’s it,” I think to myself. That’s what matters to me: my kids starting to connect the dots in a way I never did. A repetitive prayer comes to life because you recognize it. Because you unpacked it hours earlier, you now understand its purpose. Something opens up, lets you in. I glimpse that in Molly’s face in that instant—I know what to do with this prayer—and it’s priceless.
Rabbi Buchdahl’s sermon on Israel is a sensitive one, as are all Israel sermons this particular autumn because of the Gaza war. It was a summer of vitriolic Facebook postings and strained family conversations, with many Jews showing little patience for contrary opinions. A New York Times article described the land mines clergy members were navigating as they wrote their High Holy Day sermons, wanting to say something forceful without alienating swaths of their congregations. Rabbi Buchdahl’s sermon walks the line carefully and candidly. “I knew I had no choice but to speak about Israel tonight. I needed to say how high the stakes are,” she says. “I don’t know that any one sermon can persuade you that Israel should matter to you, if it doesn’t already. But I had to try.” She ends her twenty-minute speech by singing a fervent rendition of “Al Kol Eleh” (For All These Things) and as I feel myself choking up, the congregation around me is suddenly standing in a spontaneous ovation.
The worship continues with chest-pounding (we thump our hearts with our fists during the recitation of sins) and, after a small interlude, moves into the afternoon service with Central’s quietly profound custom: “Torah meditation.” It’s a chance for anyone who wishes to go up to the bimah and stand for a few moments before one of three Torah scrolls. Two lines form quietly on either side of the sanctuary.
When my family takes a turn, I am again unexpectedly tearful. We stand wordlessly on the bimah with our arms around each other, facing the swaddled Hebrew Bible—a tangible symbol of endurance. I’m flooded with my blessings. The encounter, however brief, changes my Yom Kippur afternoon, a time I used to associate with endurance.
Later, Dave and I take a walk in Central Park and grab a quick nap before the afternoon Yizkor (remembrance) service to honor the dead. As always during these High Holy Days, congregants amble in and out of the sanctuary all day long, taking occasional breaks from the proceedings. I know my husband too well to ask his thoughts on atonement this year; he doesn’t relish that kind of emotional question on any day, let alone when he’s fasting.
The final service, known as “Neilah” (locking), begins around 5 P.M. back in Central’s main sanctuary. Neilah denotes the moment when the proverbial gates close, symbolizing that we’ve run out of repentance time. It’s an unnerving idea to think that the ten focused days of deliberation are ending and we won’t know the verdict. Have we all been given another year? Can I tolerate the possibility that we haven’t?
In the dimly lit synagogue, when the final imploring prayers build to a climax, I’m simply too distracted by the fact that there are fresh bagels and fried chicken, waiting uptown, to feel duly shaken. Even though I warm to the idea of a big finale, it’s as if I’m already halfway out the door.
Breaking the fast with old friends is a tradition that Robin and I started in our twenties, when we were each newly married (both of us wed in 1993, just eleven months apart) and each tentatively starting Jewish homes. We wanted to create our own annual custom, apart from Mom’s, which would gather all our Jewish friends and acknowledge that we’re connected. So thirty-five to forty friends descend every year on Robin and Ed’s house, where the table is laden with platters and the guests contribute dessert.
Ever since our children were little—and we needed to get the kids fed and to bed—we’ve cheated the starting gun of the first bite. But this year, I want to do it by the book, waiting till the Neilah service is entirely done, even if my friends start eating ahead of me. It would feel like breaking my own rules to flee before the final word, especially because I’ve never seen the ark actually close—the symbolic shutting of God’s book.
As the ark doors slowly close, I feel that cinematic flash of panic: the drawbridge is going up before I’m surely, safely back in the castle. But then I remind myself that it’s a metaphor; I’m already either in or out of the Book of Life. Yes, the doors symbolize the closing of the gates, but my verdict is in. Standing in a pew with my husband by my side, it’s a private, profound moment of defenselessness. Our fate is not up to us.
After one last taxi ride, I’m finally among my oldest friends who are already standing around Robin and Ed’s dining table, buffet plates in hand, chewing happily, or sitting squished against each other on sofas and chairs, plates in laps, comparing lox to nova; recounting the day’s sermons and hunger trials. Kids are running around loudly with cookies in hand, crumbs sprinkling the floor. It’s chaotic and happy.
I heap my plate, though I always deliberate whether the first taste should be challah, a bagel, or fried chicken. Every cliché hits me when I eat again after twenty-five hours: food is amazing. Yom Kippur is an obvious, but weighty, reminder of want and need compared to plenty. We are so fortunate to get to eat so easily, whatever, whenever we choose.
Brushing my teeth later, it suddenly dawns on me that Elul is over. All the August-to-October introspection ends not with fireworks but with a bagel and a shmear. For forty days, I’ve done cheshbon hanefesh (“accounting of the soul”) and heard the shofar blast each morning. That trumpet now falls silent until next fall.
So why, despite forceful moments, was I largely unresponsive through the final day? Because I didn’t feel changed. There was no revelation. The words on the page didn’t reach out and grab me the way Alan Lew said this holiday should. I can hear the rabbis scolding already: “That failure is on you, Abigail.”
I should have heeded Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, who’d urged me to try the Yom Kippur ritual of dropping to the floor. This ancient tradition calls for prostrating oneself face-down to embody falling on God’s mercy during “Va’anachnu korim,” which means “and we bend at the knees.” Weiss tells me, “I think synagogues should be a place of baring the soul, taking off a lot of layers. Then you come to grips with who you really are, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with what they find.”
I would have been “uncomfortable” making a spectacle of myself, and my fellow congregants would have been alarmed if they’d seen me buckle to the ground. Prostration takes a spiritual moxie I’m still lacking.
Rabbi Paley had warned me that High Holy Day transcendence is hard for a rookie. “You can’t fully get it, Abby, because you simply haven’t read the book as many times as we have. For rabbis, the text is never repetitive because each of the words hooks into something else and we’re always seeing something new.”
I did see new things. But not enough of them. Something got in the way of complete candor or apology, except when I stood in front of the Torah for two minutes with my family.
Maybe because real repentance is too raw to do in a public place. Maybe because I’m too afraid to really consider that I, or someone close to me, might have transgressed enough to be punished.
“My life is being weighed,” writes Rabbi Yitz Greenberg; “I am on trial for my life. . . . If life ended now, would it have been worthwhile?”
I couldn’t bring myself to answer that. And no prayer forced me to.
V’al kulam eloha selichot—s’lach lanu, m’chal lanu, kaper lanu: For all these sins, O God of mercy, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.
