Pogrebin’s son, Ben, at his bar mitzvah, with Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein. (Michael Nagle)

My son’s bar mitzvah was two years ago. My daughter’s bat mitzvah will take place this spring. What, I’ve often thought to myself, will happen to their Jewish identity once they leave home? How do I make the case to stay in this–to discover the charge for themselves that I’ve found in studying Jewish text, going to synagogue, defining very personally what it means to live Jewishly?

It didn’t happen for me until adulthood. I became a bat mitzvah when I was 40, when my growing interest in Judaism made me decide to make up for lost time. I grew up in the Jewish waters of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but I never felt I truly belonged until five years ago, when I joined Manhattan’s Central Synagogue. I began to attend services more regularly at the historic Reform congregation, founded in 1872, and became involved in its community-organizing efforts.

I never used to worry about that lifeless, amorphous concept of “continuity”; it seemed to me Jews were overly worried about other Jews’ Judaism. Then my own children came into the picture. I watched their peers drop out of Hebrew school as soon as they’d crossed the seventh-grade finish line. Even my own son, Ben, despite a bar mitzvah he described as “perfect,” is on the fence as to whether to continue his Jewish studies. Many of Central’s members, when asked about their chief concerns during a recent campaign run by lay leadership, said they’d lost the battle to keep their kids connected—especially in the years between bar mitzvah and wedding.

So, these questions were on my mind when Central’s cantor, Angela Warnick Buchdahl, told me that she and the senior rabbi, Peter J. Rubinstein, were looking for ways to deepen and underscore that moment on Saturday mornings when the b’nei mitzvah have finished their Torah readings. They decided, among other changes, to add a new song that might infuse more resonance and clarity. And they wanted an original composition.

I’m a journalist, not a songwriter. (I wrote my share of overwrought guitar ballads in high school, and I take pride in my spoof lyrics for friends’ birthday parties.) But cantor Buchdahl, whose voice soars through the sanctuary each week, knew I’d begun a double life as a lyricist. My first book, Stars of David, is currently being adapted for the off-Broadway stage, produced by Daryl Roth, who last June won a Tony for The Normal Heart, and by Aaron Harnick, who nudged me three years ago to start writing lyrics for the show (and happens to be Sheldon’s nephew). Harnick paired me with the gifted composer Tom Kitt, a fellow semi-observant Jew who, soon after we met, won a Tony and Pulitzer for Next to Normal.

Buchdahl encouraged me to submit a song, making it clear it might never get sung. I was nervous about attempting any kind of text for the congregation I’ve come to cherish. But I’ve always admired Central’s mission to keep ritual as fluid as it is inviolable. And when I sat down to write, it became a personal opportunity to find the words I wished to tell my children on their b’nei mitzvah: Pause here, I’d wanted to say. Consider what this moment means. You’re joining a line of descendants who have survived against all reason. You are chanting from a book that Jews have kept vital for centuries. Investigate this tradition before you decide it doesn’t fit into your schedule anymore.

Most kids are obviously nervous on the bimah, anxious to just get through their Torah portion, focused on the party. Families get caught up in making sure they’ve ordered the personalized yarmulkes or haven’t left out an uncle from the guest list; they haven’t prefaced “the big day” with a sit-down talk about why they wanted their child to do this in the first place, what it means not just to become a man or woman, but to join a people.

I called the song “Taking Your Place” and tried to keep the lyrics simple, hoping to stave off pretension or schmaltz. Per cantor Buchdahl’s suggestion, I added a line of Hebrew from the Misheberach prayer that’s recited Saturday mornings (not the same as the prayer for healing). Late this past summer, I sent them off to Kitt, who wrote a beautiful melody.

Last week, cantor Buchdahl told me that she would be singing “Taking Your Place” in front of thousands on Yom Kippur morning, because the lyrics dovetailed with Rabbi Rubinstein’s sermon. And she would sing the song at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, no less, because that’s where Central synagogue’s services were held this year.

The fact that I was fasting only compounded the queasiness as I entered Lincoln Center last Saturday. But then as I listened to Rubinstein speak, his words focused me. He asked us to think about how we explain to our children not just why they should care about being (and remaining) Jewish, but why we care. He talked about the fragility of endurance: that the generation before us, who chose to pass on the Torah to their children, could not have been sure it would make it any further.

When he finished, the cantor approached the pulpit as Kitt’s chords began softly. Her voice poured over the packed rows, my daughter squeezed my hand, and my son, who chose to sit up high in the third tier, gave me a visible thumbs-up. After the last note, the rabbi descended the stage to embrace me in the aisle. I hugged him back awkwardly, probably a little too tight.

After the service, as I exited behind the hordes, I spotted Tom Kitt standing amidst emptying seats. He had come to hear it, too, and we looked at each other with a kind of bewilderment.

You can hear the song below, recorded in the synagogue before Yom Kippur. Whatever anyone else thinks of it, my gratitude is acute and the experience imprinted: a snapshot of how Jewish amateurs, when invited, can participate in an ancient conversation.

“Taking Your Place” for Central Synagogue
Lyrics by Abigail Pogrebin, music by Tom Kitt

Taking your place
In an enduring line.
This is the day
that you stood up to say,
“Our tradition is mine.”

You have now read the Torah.
It’s been passed onto you.
It’s our law and our story–But each telling is new.

It is said we stood at Sinai
And today, you know you’re there.
You’re the promise of a people,
a blessing and a prayer.

Taking your place
In a resilient line
This is the day
that you stood up to say,
“Our tradition is mine.”

You have now held the Torah,
forged a link to the past.
You’re the face of our future,
and the reason we last.

Lalechet bidrachav v’lishmor mitzvotav kol hayamim.
May you walk in God’s ways and may all of your days be blessings.

It is said we stood at Sinai
And today, you know you’re there.
You’re the promise of a people,
a blessing and a prayer.

You’re the promise of a people,
a blessing and a prayer.

The scene Friday night.(Photos by the author)

Friday night, as the sun went down, hundreds of Jews gathered in an open square a few dozen yards from Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street protest has taken place for the past three weeks. Led by a rabbinic intern, a chazzan, and a few others, and with no electronic amplification—the group relied, instead, on the old protest trick of forming concentric circles and having the outer layers repeat what the inner layers have said—the group davened the Kol Nidrei service. (Even Israel noticed!) The leaders sought to connect the service and its titular prayer, in which Jews ask God to release them from obligations made to Him, to the causes championed by the protesters across Broadway, whose drums and chants resounded during quiet moments, and who had been consulted beforehand. Like the protest, what emerged from this were undeniable left-wing sentiments deliberately muffled in order to maintain as large as possible a tent.

“Kol Nidrei reminds us that though we make commitments under duress, ultimately we are accountable only to the higher values of Justice and Righteousness,” Daniel Sieradski, a young Jewish writer and activist who organized the event, told the crowd, reciting a labor organizer’s midrash. (Right-wing critics would be correct to note that, if it were 100 years ago, Sieradski and the others would be inciting socialist riots on the Lower East Side; what they fail to see, here as elsewhere, is that it isn’t 100 years ago, and today you couldn’t find a minyan to form that riot.)

Today, we are thinking about a different kind of commitment made under duress. A big part of our financial crisis was caused by a banking system which misled and pressured, which up-sold and implored us to sign without reading, where fraud was rampant, and where caution was absent. Because of those external problems, many good hardworking people were steered, under a sort of duress, into financial doom while their futures were sold from the rich to the richer.

Today, as we think about how commitments must be contemplated in the context of right and wrong, of earth and heaven, we know that those notes have no moral weight, that banks can’t and shouldn’t own the futures of people who work, and that it’s time for the bankers to abandon their claims on everyday people’s futures. I will leave it to another [on this day] to think about what this means practically or what policies we should adopt as a country.

Note the clear values; note, also, the immediate disclaimer about how those values are to be implemented. (In yesterday’s New York Times, Tablet Magazine contributor Todd Gitlin expertly explored how far Occupy Wall Street’s essentially anarchist, policy-free plank has gotten them—and argues it won’t take them much further.) (more…)

Dennis Ross and Thomas Friedman. (Photoillustration: Tablet Magazine; Dennis Ross photo: Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv via Getty Images; Friedman photo: World Affairs Council of Philadelphia; details from Maurycy Gottlieb, "Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur," 1878: Wikimedia Commons )

On Saturday afternoon, just after the Yizkor service, Dennis Ross, President Barack Obama’s chief adviser on Middle East affairs, stood in front of his Conservative congregation in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Md., and made a joke about Hafez al-Assad, the late Syrian president. Assad, Ross said, always sat to his right when they met, but on one occasion he moved to take a seat on the left. “I asked him, ‘Is this a political statement?’ ” Ross recounted, as he began an hour-long seminar. “And he said, ‘No, stiff neck.’ ”

Ross, as it happened, was standing on the right side of the bimah—really a low stage in a ballroom at a Hilton hotel, appropriately decked out with an ark, flowers, and banners emblazoned with the congregation’s name: Kol Shalom. The podium on the left was occupied by Ross’ fellow congregant, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who grinned at the diplomat’s joke.

Most synagogues try to fill the dead hours between Yom Kippur morning services and the evening shofar blast with some kind of discussion—or, in recent years, yoga or meditation. Synagogues in Washington have the unique advantage of counting among their ranks people who hold what Ross’ wife, Debbie, has somewhat deprecatingly referred to as “the Big Job.” But what sets Kol Shalom apart from the capital’s other influential Jewish institutions is that here Big Job guys aren’t just members: They’re the founders.

Ross and Friedman helped start the congregation 10 years ago this month, along with a handful of families who had been members at Congregation Beth El, in Bethesda, Md. “We wanted a synagogue where there was a lay-professional partnership, where there was a learning congregation,” Marilyn Wind, the founding president and current board chair, explained to me last week. For the first half-year, the roving congregation was entirely lay-led and met in facilities rented from the 4-H Club or from churches—an experience Friedman memorialized in a December 2001 column.

Friedman, who had been at Beth El, joined Kol Shalom at the urging of organizers who were old friends from Des Moines, where Friedman’s wife, Ann, grew up. Debbie Ross explained that for her family, timing was everything. “It started right after September 11, and it was such a scary time,” she said over lunch recently. “No one knew what was going to happen, and this was something we could do, a way to use our own energy and talent to do something positive at that unsettled time.” Dennis Ross, newly in the political wilderness after years spent as President Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy, also signed up as a trustee. Other early members included Mitch Caplan, the former CEO of E*Trade, and the late New York Times columnist William Safire.

It was Safire, in fact, who was chiefly responsible for cementing Ross and Friedman’s joint ownership of the Yom Kippur afternoon speaking slot. “In 2004 or 2005, I asked Bill to do it,” Kol Shalom’s rabbi, Jonathan Maltzman, told me when we met over the summer. “I think Dennis and Tom were a little upset, and they said to me, ‘No, we’ll do it every year.’ ” Ross made sure to announce that they plan to continue the tradition next year, after Kol Shalom moves into the new sanctuary it is building in Rockville. “This is our thing, and we’re pretty protective of it,” he told me, with a slightly abashed smile.

It is, as things go, a relatively easy gig for two men who make their livings speaking extemporaneously about Middle East affairs. Both men’s wives, who said they have sweated out writing memorable blessings or the d’var Torah sermons members regularly volunteer to give—Debbie Ross gave last week’s, at the Shabbat service between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—just laughed when asked whether their husbands prepared their talks.

Ross, who was in Beltway-issue shirtsleeves, tie, and khakis and a large blue-and-white Bukhari-style kippah, kicked things off by talking about the Arab Spring. Both a panel of expert advisers convened by the Obama Administration in the summer of 2010 and, more tellingly, a group of Arab dissidents and democracy activists brought to Washington just a few weeks before the revolution began in Tunisia, had failed to anticipate the dramatic events. When his turn came to speak, Friedman—wearing a dark blue suit and satin kippah—pointed out that he’d actually gone on an Israeli television news show a year ago and warned, like Chicken Little, that a storm was brewing in the Arab world. “I said, get out of the West Bank, build the highest wall you can,” said Friedman. “I will personally come and put on the last brick, but there is a storm coming, and you need to get out of their story.” He has been on book tour, and it showed: There was much well-rehearsed talk about the flattening effects of Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.

In some ways, they make an odd pair: Ross is a clear and concise speaker but gives off an almost diffident air, whereas Friedman is an experienced showman who lobs regular sound bites, many taken from his columns. (Kol Shalom members who are regular Times op-ed readers may have recalled his unfavorable comparison of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to former Egyptian Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak from a May 24 column.) But Ross and Friedman spoke mostly in parallel, dividing up questions from the audience rather than debating each other—a mark of familiarity as much as a sign of the solemnity of the day. At one point, in response to a question about Netanyahu’s reaction to the Arab Spring, Friedman stepped in to remind the audience that Ross couldn’t say anything controversial: “I’m free to talk, while Dennis isn’t.” The envoy remained pokerfaced, while the crowd, many of whom Ross called on by name, laughed knowingly.

Soon afterward, the two stepped off the stage and went back to chatting with friends about more pressing issues, like the lemon cake Debbie Ross had baked for break fast.

CORRECTION, October 17: Friedman wore a dark blue suit, not a brown one, on Yom Kippur. This article has been corrected.

The march in Lower Manhattan Wednesday.(Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

We are ending early today for the holiday. Have an easy and meaningful fast. If you have any questions, consult us. Don’t forget, caffeine suppositories are an option. And don’t forget, also, that the best way to end your fast is with a shot of vodka.

• The Kol Nidre service tonight at Occupy Wall Street will be across Broadway from Zuccotti Park, in an deliberate effort to expand the Occupation. (If you go, try to find me and say hi.) [Forward]

• Why Occupy Wall Street is taken most seriously in the Middle East. [NYT]

• Washington Capitals forward Jeff Halpern will Koufax tonight; Coach Bruce Boudreau won’t. [WP D.C. Sports Bog]

• Nor will the Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun; the Times’ Richard Sandomir explores further. [NYT]

• It’s kind of adorable how our basic Ashkenazic break-fast foods are seen as exotic in Israel. [Ynet]

• It may be a travesty of democracy, but Russia’s Jews are pretty okay with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s imminent return to the presidency. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Calvin Trillin has a tale to tell from Toronto’s diamond district. [The New Yorker]

• Left-wing Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk set an important precedent, getting a court to allow him to register his official religious status as “without religion.” [Haaretz]

• Nukes or no nukes, Tablet Magazine contributor Bruce Riedel insists Iran will not surpass Israel’s qualitative military edge. [The Daily Beast]

• Saul Bellow on being “a Jewish writer in America.” [NYRB]

• Columbia Professor Bruce Robbins is making a movie called Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. [Kickstarter]

• For only the second time ever, centuries-old Bible manuscripts from Damascus were displayed, in Jeruslaem. [AP/WP]

Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? -Isaiah

(Paul J.S./Flickr)

Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by water and who by fire,
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,
Who shall have rest and who shall wander,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,
Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented,
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low,
Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.

—“U’Netaneh Tokef,” by Amnon of Mainz

For a while I preferred Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah,” which, like many covers, was strangely more authentic when not performed by the composer who created it, to the one Leonard Cohen himself recorded with all its production and flourish. I used to go see Jeff sing at Sin-é on St Marks Place in Manhattan sometimes, at least two decades ago, and his falsetto and acoustic guitar were a much better weapon against love and God above. And I remember when people like Tommy Mottola from Columbia Records and Clive Davis from Arista started showing up in their black Town Cars that would sit double-parked on the narrow streets outside, these guys would be taking up so much space in this small room, everyone was so skinny and grungy and they were big and fat in their pinstripe suits, and soon enough—soon enough: Who shall perish by water? Jeff drowned while recording in Muscle Shoals.

And I realized I liked the Cohen version of “Hallelujah” better than the gazillion others because it of course sounded like the High Holy Days, like an authentic attempt to connect with a time when God was real to me and maybe to Cohen too—to age 7 or so. The big bombastic chorus was most authentically shul-like. Not temple-like or even synagogue-like: I had it right the first time. That song is to Judaism what “Like a Prayer” is to Catholicism: It’s the heavenly sound of sin. And “Who by Fire” is Cohen’s rendering of Amnon of Mainz in a hipster beret with every possible way to die—it’s like the cumulative opening scenes of Six Feet Under in a song: Who by autoerotic asphyxiation? Who by driver in next car text-messaging? Who by mob hit?

OK, I lied. Leonard Cohen is not so graphic. And he’s deep. (What I really think is that he’s, like, deep) Like this: “Who by avalanche?/ Who by powder?/ Who for his greed?/ Who for his hunger?” He does not seem like a guy with a sense of humor.

I have always thought of Leonard Cohen as the Jewish Bob Dylan. Know what I mean? Cohen is Robert Zimmerman on the road not taken, or maybe he stopped short at the fork and thought: Fuck it, I’m literary, I’m allegorical, I’m liturgical, and folk music is not for me. I see Cohen as Robert Zimmerman with a different affect, what he would have been like if the coffeehouse scene and all those puritanical god-fearing peace-loving frizzy-haired farmers’ daughters and college coeds on Fourth Street had made him just a little more nauseated, if Dylan had gone urbane.

All of which is to say that unlike everyone I know, I am not a huge Leonard Cohen fan. Nothing against him, nothing for him, just not my thing. Deep down, I’m sincere. Actually, on the surface and in the middle, I’m sincere. That is not a Leonard Cohen emotion. Dylan is either downright mean or totally sweet, but Cohen is just embarrassed about getting caught with a soft spot for some girl—he’s the guy who is mesmerized at the sight of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and cries through the hill-of-beans speech at the end of Casablanca but walks around sneering and hissing so no one will know he has half a heart. He can never leave a tender moment alone: He can’t ask if someone truly cares for music without throwing in his sarcastic “Do ya?” And he cannot remind us that love is an incurable malady without saying of any elixir that “it’s all been cut with stuff,” like we couldn’t handle an uncut and overwhelming thought that heartbreak is unbearable. He cannot even report that the Grim Reaper has arrived—and may do so in many miserable ways—without reducing it to a joke, to a secretary passing the awful news of imminent death on to her bossy boss: “And who shall I say is calling?”

Where Bob Dylan is consumed with nastiness, can compose entire songs that are pretty much about what a drag it is to be with someone or anyone or everyone, Leonard Cohen likes the small jab. He’s the annoying elbow; Dylan will just tell you he needs the entire row or car or airplane or world to himself. Hence a cult following versus one of the most significant singers or songwriters or cultural figures ever.

Also: In the movie Martin Scorsese made about Dylan, No Direction Home, in all 10 hours of it, not once does it mention that he’s Jewish. And kind of the way the lack of a single female character in Lawrence of Arabia makes you notice that there is something sort of girly about Peter O’Toole, Dylan seems Talmudic and rabbinical in that epic filmic study.

Oh, but so what? The point of all this was really to say something about music and redemption, because it’s about to be Yom Kippur. I can’t stand synagogue, but I like prayer and repentance and tossing—perhaps even throwing—my sins away. I like the harshness and intensity that would ideally accompany all this atonement activity, and it makes me sad to realize that those of us who most need to connect with a big idea—like God—are the least likely to be able to manage it. God’s presence is inversely proportional to his necessity, it always seems. Complicated crazy people will tell you they believe in God, but they are usually hedging. Like, see you in heaven if you make the list.

Dr. Gregory House put it most succinctly: There can’t be an afterlife, because that means that all this is only a test.

I cannot figure out how it is that in a world that is devoid of divinity, and in which science didn’t even become spiritual until the theory of relativity, it took us so damn long to invent rock ’n’ roll, which is the way the faithless find their way into something like belief and meaning and hope. And there is no way that Vivaldi or Beethoven could have done in hours for anyone what “Rock Around the Clock” at long last did for everyone in 1956.

So, humanity had to starve for a very long time before that. The closest thing I have experienced to the exhilaration of the first time I heard “Mystery Train” is reading the poetry of the obviously deranged Yehuda Halevi. And by way of wishing one and all an easy fast, I offer you his words, in “The Home of Love,” and wish you redemption, that you may live to sin again:

Ever since You were the home of love for me, my love has lived where You have lived. Because of You, I have delighted in the wrath of my enemies; let them be, let them torment the one whom You tormented. It was from You that they learned their wrath, and I love them, for they hound the wounded one whom You struck down. Ever since You despised me, I have despised myself, for I will not honour what You despise. So be it, until Your anger has passed, and again You will redeem Your own possession, which You once redeemed.

(Jack Schoenberg)

And so we arrive, once again, at that hallowed time of the year when man bows his head to the Lord, trembling in fear, pounding his chest in regret and sorrow while tearfully begging absolution and mercy from the Creator of the Universe. This is a time for admission, for contrition. A time for swinging a chicken—or cock, as the English say—around your head. (No other hook-nosed creature, not even Jews, has suffered as much throughout history as have chickens.) It is a time for an honest taking stock of oneself—one’s failings, one’s sins, one’s mistakes, one’s errors. With one notable exception:

God.

God murders, God kills, God takes revenge, God, by his own admission, is a jealous God. God turns his head. But God doesn’t apologize. Not for war, not for disease, not for Ashton Kutcher, not for anything. We’ve been apologizing to him for years, and—nothing. Not a peep. Not a whoops, not a sorry, not a “My Bad on the whole Hitler thing.” So, seriously: No more apologies. I’m not apologizing for anything (and I say this over a breakfast of a bacon-and-egg sandwich), not for one more goddamn thing until he does, and I think all Jews, all over the world, ought to unite at last and join me: No apologies. No sorrows. Not this year.

It’s God’s turn (more…)

(Ron Regé Jr.)

Yizkor, meaning “remembrance,” is a prayer said four times a year: on Yom Kippur and Shmini Atzeret, and on the final days of Pesach and Shavuot. On Yom Kippur you ask forgiveness of sin; on Shmini Atzeret you close indoors the New Year’s reflection, asking for a greater outdoors to come, for good rain ensuring good harvest; on Pesach—commemorating the Exodus—you celebrate freedom from enslavement; on Shavuot—commemorating the giving/receiving of the law—you celebrate the culmination of that freedom in a more positive indenture—to the commandments. After which, on all four days, you remember.

It’s a telling textualization of Judaism that it’s not a sacrifice or magical act but the embalmed formality of Yizkor—“May God remember the soul of my father/mother, who has gone on to his/her reward”—that has become the primary communication between a living person and his or her deceased. Talmud tells us that the soul, though eternal, is subject to conditions that can be bettered—death cannot be worsened—through two responsibilities undertaken by a surviving heir: charity and righteous deeds. Yizkor enacts one—prayer as deed—while promising the other: “I shall give charity on my father’s/mother’s behalf.”

Zealous in our memory, we should be equally zealous with regard to our memorious technologies. By which I mean we mourners assembled to pronounce this rare prayer should be more charitable toward the fate of the book from which we read it (the word for that book is Mahzor, meaning “cycle”). The quasicyclical scroll was cut for the supersessionary codex, or book, whose materials have been sliced free, into omnimateriality, for screens (whose ancestor, the parochet or “veil,” screened the offerings of Judaism’s first worship). For modern Judaism, however, the codex—which began mass production in the late 1400s, the period of Europe’s most extensive Jewish expulsions—must be the terminant technology, unless electronic tablets, on which all information is egalitarianly accessible and divinely transitive, are to be raised above the congregation. (more…)

(Anat Even Or)

When I was a junior in college, I spent a heady semester in London, complete with an older foppish cad of a boyfriend. It was an obviously temporary affair, my first. But the boyfriend, whom I’ll call Luke, broke it off before I even left London. I was blue but not surprised. Then, during my last days before returning home to New York, Luke called. He was in Manhattan. I came home.

I remember some excellent evenings—playing pool in the East Village, drinking Pimm’s on someone’s rooftop—but by the time of my 21st birthday, a month after I’d returned to New York, we were fighting often. It was clear we weren’t going to last, but still, I couldn’t let go. Even though we were hardly well-suited, I was still a little crazy about him, all of which I explained to four of my closest girlfriends from college, all of whom I hadn’t seen in a year while I was abroad. We had gathered at my parents’ house on Long Island for my birthday weekend, and we dished about our lives. Though the relationship was certainly shaky, I was excited for them to meet Luke, who’d be joining us the next night. The only major change I noticed in any of them was that my friend whom I’ll call Justine, previously apolitical, had become an enthusiastic feminist. She inserted the word “sisterhood” into most conversations and wore a “Take Back the Night” T-shirt. (I was a year ahead of Justine, and I had already taken back the night in our college town of Ann Arbor, and while too overwhelmed by crowds to be much of an activist, I was all for it.) This was 1993; she wore that T-shirt well.

On Saturday evening, we dressed up, admired one another, and took the train to Manhattan. We met up with an assortment of people—my parents, more friends, and Luke—at a snazzy restaurant my parents had chosen. We drank plenty of champagne, and my family, friends, and Luke made witty, touching toasts. After my parents and brother went home, the rest of us continued to a nightclub with an excellent DJ; everyone was dancing. When my friend Dan said goodnight, I teased him for leaving too early, and he said something I’ve recalled many times since: “Never stay too late—one of my rules. Bad shit starts happening.” He shrugged. “It’s inevitable.” (more…)

(Liana Finck)

My favorite page of Talmud (it also happens to be the only page I know) teaches me that Gehenna, the Jewish version of hell, differs from Dante’s: It does not condemn us to abandon hope. We may, it seems, in some non-specific manner, come back from down there unless we’ve made ourselves guilty of one very particular sin. No, it’s not taking of the Lord’s name in vain. It has nothing to do with sex. And it isn’t the spilling of blood in the ordinary sense. It’s making someone blush or, as the Talmud has it, making someone blanch. The Talmud gives examples of what to not do: Don’t make a fool of the shopkeeper by asking him for the price of an item you have no intention of buying. Don’t speak about hanging up the fish (or, let’s say, your coat) in the house where someone has been hanged. In other words, we’re doomed to eternity in Gehenna unless we make ourselves responsible not only for the words we speak but how these words are heard and experienced by the person to whom we speak them.

I think the witty Talmud is having us on: You mean we must, all of us, abandon hope? Who hasn’t even once, even just since last Yom Kippur, mortified a neighbor with a careless act, a thoughtless word, or, as in the small event I want to talk about, harmed another person with an unjust thought?

Here is the story of a wrong I did a person to whom I can’t apologize because I don’t remember—may never have known—his name, for something that he never knew anything about since it happened entirely inside my own head. (more…)

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Pitom's Jeremy Brown on violin and Yoshie Fruchter on guitar. (Hannah Gopa)

Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes, the latest album from the jazz-metal band Pitom, has a title that makes explicit reference to the vidui, or confession—one of Yom Kippur’s central prayers. The vidui is a recitation of the many ways in which we sin—by robbery, by lying, by blasphemy. But while the album may flirt with sin in its raucous approach, it comes from a place of devotion. Yoshie Fruchter, the leader of Pitom, is the son and grandson of cantors, and professes an abiding love for the traditional melodies sung on Yom Kippur. The songs on the album, which was released by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, are meant to invoke the intense emotions that accompany the holiday’s centuries-old prayers. The result is rich, loud, and cathartic.

For Vox Tablet, Fruchter and Jeremy Brown, Pitom’s violinist, played a stripped-down version of the track “Neilah,” and they explained to host Sara Ivry why a jazz-metal-rock take on the Day of Atonement seemed like a good idea. [Running time: 15:09.] 

Lorin Maazel conducting Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in Duisburg, Germany, 2010. (Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images)

My father was obsessed with Gustav Mahler. I grew up with the composer’s Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies blaring constantly from the living room stereo. My brother, Andy, and I were the only teenagers in America constantly yelling, “Dad! Turn that damn music down!”

My father loved Mahler’s emotionalism and range. He loved Mahler’s passion for atypical instruments: harmonium, glockenspiel, mandolin. He loved the way the symphonies incorporate snippets of bird sounds, unpretentious folk music, and Jewish ritual melodies. He loved the humor and intensity he found in Mahler’s work. Mahler’s music messes with people’s heads—the guy was a terribly polarizing figure, much like my father. Dad was a psychiatrist and enfant terrible who ran a community mental health center; he loved working with the mentally ill and loved teasing people who expected him to be a formal, cerebral figure. It delighted him that Mahler had visited Sigmund Freud, who wrote that he admired “the capability for psychological understanding of this man of genius.”

In Mahler Remembered, Norman Lebrecht quotes the 19th-century German conductor Oskar Fried on the composer:

He was a God-seeker. With incredible fanaticism, with unparalleled dedication and with unshakable love he persued a constant search for the divine, both in the individual and in man as a whole. He saw himself bearing a sacred trust; it suffused his whole being. His nature was religious thorough and through in a mystical, not a dogmatic, sense.

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(Abigail Miller/Tablet Magazine)

Israel and the Palestinian bid for statehood have dominated this week’s news, and whatever happens at the United Nations, Jews around the world are certain to be thinking and talking about it during the upcoming High Holidays. There were other big stories this summer, too: the Arab Spring, for one, and what some see as a rejuvenation of Israeli civil society by the tent-city protesters. Tablet Magazine asked a range of rabbis from across the country—Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox; from New York to California, Florida to Illinois—what they’re planning to tell their congregations.

ON SERMONIZING

Rabbi Jack Moline
Agudas Achim, Alexandria, Virginia

I’ve been at this 30 years, and for 20 of them there’s been some crisis around the holidays that demanded our attention. In 1993 when they had the signing of the Oslo agreement on the White House lawn we all had to rewrite our sermons. But there are very few things in this world that you have to consider if you’re going to be a Jew. One is God, one is Israel, and another is your relationship to the Jewish people. So it’s my responsibility when the largest number of people come together to be Jewish to raise all of those issues. People come to synagogue on the holidays for strengthening and introspection. They don’t need my opinion. They want orientation.

Rabbi David Wolpe
Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, California

The Palestinian statehood issue is this year’s crisis, but I’m not sure it’s fundamentally different from anything that’s gone before. My father began the holidays with the state of the Jewish world on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and I’ve repeated that. And it seems to me that a great issue for human beings individually and for Israel as a country is to what extent you act on your own interest, and how much you act based on what other people think of you. (more…)

Muslims praying.(eyelash/Flickr)

The Gregorian Calendar’s date for Yom Kippur varies every year, but because it always lasts for a 25-hour period (sundown to sundown, give or take), the fast always lasts the same amount of time. Not so for Muslims and their holiday of fasting, the holy month of Ramadan. Because the fast takes place solely during daylight hours (albeit for every day of a full month), the period of time during which an observant Muslim must go without food or drink can change depending on when in the year Ramadan falls. And because Ramadan can fall at any time of the solar year—depending on the moon, it falls back roughly 11 days each year—that means that some Ramadans are more difficult than other Ramadans.

A case in point in this year. Ramadan begins today and lasts through the 29th, and while the days won’t be as long as they will be, say, next year, or the year after that, we are definitely talking about going well over 12 hours without sustenance—for 30 straight days!

In an ecumenical spirit, here is some Yom Kippur fasting advice that our Muslim friends may find helpful (caffeine suppositories optional).

Related: Fast Food [Tablet Magazine]

A Shabbat table, with a random Buddha.(TikkunGer/Flickr)

What makes this Yom Kippur different from all other Yom Kippurs? Or at least approximately 6/7th of all others? This year, the Shabbat Shabaton—the Sabbath of Sabbaths—falls on, well, Shabbat. Of course, because the yom tov is already, in a sense, Shabbat, it does not really make for a hugely substantial change to the day (unlike when, say, Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, and services seem truly endless). However, according to Rabbi Daniel Nevins of the Jewish Theological Seminary, there are a few changes. (more…)