Talking Points

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.

Rabbi Laura Geller
Temple Emanuel, Beverly Hills, California

Every year we have a contemporary-issues discussion on Yom Kippur afternoon. I have found that the advantage to doing it in that format is that you can bring in more than one voice, and it’s not a one-way conversation. Our theme this year is “coming home,” so the Yom Kippur forum will be framed in terms of coming home to Israel’s values in its Declaration of Independence, or in terms of asking whether Israel is our home enough to care what’s going on there. What responsibility do you have as a Jew to pay attention to Israel?

Rabbi Barry Freundel
Kesher Israel, Washington, D.C.

I do my year-in-review sermon on the second day of yontif. What I try to do is take the biggest issue of the year and discuss it with Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur eyes. But it’s a target in motion—because of the vote at the U.N., because we don’t know if there will be a new Intifada, because the old alliances are weakening, because the southern borders are less safe.

Rabbi Sidney Helbraun
Temple Beth-El, Northbrook, Illinois

I’m coming at it from both the standpoint of the Arab Spring and the internal movement in Israel. I heard a report on NPR a few weeks ago with a botanist who found out nitrogen can leach into plants directly through sedimentary rock, and that changes the whole nature of what people assumed about how botany works. And the researcher said, “Well, we have to throw out the textbooks.” The way science views changes of the status quo is that it’s very exciting, even if it uproots everything that your life’s work is about.

We’re always afraid of change. I’m one of the few rabbis from Chicago who did not vote for Obama but would today. He’s changed the dynamic after eight years of George Bush. Bush could not have been more in lockstep with Israel, but Gaza wound up with more missiles, and Israel wound up fighting a war.

ON ISRAEL

Rabbi Efrem Goldberg
Boca Raton Synagogue, Boca Raton, Florida

I feel like this is a pivotal time in Israel’s history. The honeymoon period where the world felt badly about the Holocaust and where people felt guilt and were willing to give Jews a pass has ended, and I think the world is returning to its animosity. We can disagree about policy all day long. If we are critical about Obama and the administration’s messaging on Israel, we need to be critical about our own messaging.

Moline: For too many people Israel has stopped being a value and become an issue instead. And the issues are always crises, which exacerbates the problem. It’s less important that we’re able to argue for or against settlements, or a unified Jerusalem, or a two-state solution than that we can make the case for Israel, period.

Geller: It is the function of the holidays and of a rabbi to remind people that Judaism is not just personal. It is a journey that happens among a people and brings us a connection to a particular place. And part of the challenge right now in North America is that for many liberal Jews, it isn’t.

Moline: It’s less to do with Israel per se than with a general disaffection with the institutions of Jewish life. But I’ve seen a polarization—people who are to the right are harder to the right, and people who are to the left are harder to the left. Maintaining the middle is very difficult.

Wolpe: Israel as a sovereign nation has to make its decisions based on internal considerations knowing that the world often judges it unfairly. But it’s dangerous for Israel to lose the sense that we have to care how the world sees us. Judaism recognizes the idea that a decent respect for mankind is a value—it’s called maras ayin. It is a Jewish value to care what other people think, and that Israel’s reputation in the world should not be a matter of indifference for us.

ON PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD AND THE ARAB SPRING

Freundel: On any issue you want to talk about, there are Jewish values, and most of the time what Judaism has to say doesn’t fall neatly into the Democratic or Republican side. So with the U.N. issue, I can talk about questions of international responsibility, and what allows you to be a player on the world stage, because there are examples in the Torah of nations that cannot. And there is in Jewish law discussions about covenants, and the two-sided nature of things—so while I don’t want to talk about policy, I can talk about attitudes in terms of how you look at people you’re in partnerships with.

Helbraun: We’re living in this world where everything is changing. Other religions are about control, but Judaism says no, we have to educate everyone, we have to give knowledge to the masses. And we’re seeing the ramifications of that—the Arab Spring is an example of people seeing they have power over their own lives. The question is how they’re going to exercise it. But you also see this generation in Israel that says, “We may not have power over the peace process, but we do have power over how we’re living our lives internally.” For decades people have said we’ll deal with religious-inclusion issues after we have peace. Well, waiting for peace is something none of us have control over, but there are other aspects of society that are 100 percent in our hands. So there’s also an awakening in the Israeli consciousness.

ON ISRAEL’S TENT-CITY PROTESTS

Rabbi Andy Bachman
Congregation Beth Elohim, Brooklyn, New York

We have hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets. That’s the largest Jewish protest movement for social justice in our lifetime. What is lost on American Jews is, hey, 6 million Jews live there and speak Hebrew every single day. There is a whole other Jewish reality going on.

Geller: It’s a watershed moment for Israel. It’s the Israeli Arab Spring, but it’s not clear where it’s going to lead—it’s easier to say, “We’re deposing a dictator” than “We’re reshaping society.” I think it’s a shift from the original vision of Israel to a different kind of social contract.

Goldberg: I use Israel as a springboard to get into questions of community. I wouldn’t tell Bibi what to do in the tent protests, but I can talk about what a reminder it is of Israel’s democracy that a quarter of a million people can protest housing prices while people in neighboring countries are gunned down for protesting in the street.

Bachman: I want to link it to the broader question of what ideas we have as a community about the organizing principles of our lives, and to what degree they translate into Jewish identity questions, and beyond that, to building a just society. I think it’s a really powerful opportunity to talk about Israel beyond the tried and true, and possibly alienating ways we engage in Israel.

Our New Year is about reflection and reassessment. Even those two words tell us we’re supposed to look back as much as we look forward—look at the “re,” telling us to turn around, to stop charging full speed ahead. And in another example of the way language informs what we do, we spend the holiday hoping to be inscribed in the book of life: two words—book, inscription—that speak of permanence. Inscribed books are weighty and lasting—they have historicity. They do not yell “whoo!”

On Rosh Hashanah, lots of us—even people who don’t spend a lot of time in shul or hunched over Jewish texts—make the effort to get to a synagogue. The tunes and prayer-poems are familiar; they’re the same every year. We sing Avinu Malkeynu, asking God to forgive our sins. The refrain is repeated so frequently that it’s easy to sing along. It’s repetitive and dirge-like, and you don’t need to know Hebrew to fall into its rhythm. We await the blowing of the shofar: The sound and the visuals couldn’t be more primal and ancient. Rosh Hashanah’s liturgy is full of descriptions of humans as meaningless little nothings cowering before the Almighty. Even if you don’t subscribe to the old-school version of the smiting Heavenly Father, the king on a throne of judgment, the text is consistent and almost reassuring. Here we are, standing with our community, sniveling in one voice. There’s no narcissism involved.

We do this every year.

But on a secular New Year, repetitiveness is the last thing we want. New Year’s Eve is when we’re supposed to go out, make the scene—and if the scene is somewhere hot and new and exclusive, so much the better. Our resolutions, too, are all about the new. They’re about hurling ourselves forward, full of superhero-like determination to become new. We swear to lose weight, to quit smoking, to find a new job, to get organized. We throw ourselves into our new, new, new lives, only to sputter out by February.

A key difference between the secular and sacred New Years is in the way each looks at time. The secular year is linear; it’s about shooting forward, like an arrow. Looking back only slows you down. That’s part of the American psyche, too. No regrets. Onward and upward. Excelsior.

But Jewish time isn’t linear. It’s circular. The same rituals, melodies, and objects scroll by again and again. They’re like a Torah being rewound or a Viewmaster clicking through familiar, tiny images over and over again. It’s not our tradition to swear to change our external selves on Rosh Hashanah; we look in rather than out. And we look back, thinking of the ways we’ve missed the mark over the past year and resolving to try to be more moral people. We don’t steamroll over our feelings of regret and embarrassment—which is what American culture generally wants us to do. Don’t dwell, our day-to-day world says. Move on. But we Jews don’t play that. We dwell. We examine our flaws as if they were scabs, and then we pick at them. We know we have to apologize to other people. We know we have to think about how to be better people. And we know that better people doesn’t mean shinier, glossier people, but rather more thoughtful people.

On New Year’s Eve, we see ourselves as failures for making the same resolution every year; once again I failed to become a size 6, I failed to learn Spanish, I failed to find love. But on Rosh Hashanah, our samenesses aren’t regarded as failings. We know everything is cyclical. Wanting to be inscribed in the book of life and thinking about what we have to apologize for are what we do every year. Every year we know we’ll have to apologize and take stock. It’s almost a relief. We’re not expected to reinvent ourselves; we’re just supposed to try to be our best selves.

This is a good lesson for parents. The secular New Year’s model really doesn’t work for parenting. It isn’t useful to vow to go fully organic, enroll the kids in violin classes, eliminate white flour, and help with homework every single night. We can’t sustain this fervor of “I will be an entirely different parent.” But the cyclic nature of Rosh Hashanah, the familiarity of the texts and sounds and the soothing childhood taste of apples and honey and the familiar, alarming spongy texture of honeycake and the kind of self-examination this holiday encourages—those are more useful models for parents to emulate. Can we do a little better? Can we remember what it felt like to be a kid? Can we appreciate who our children actually are, right here and right now, while we think about how to be the best parents to them—not some idealized version of our children, but our actual children?

My Rosh Hashanah won’t be all that different from last year’s. My husband and I will negotiate who watches the kids when, how we’ll juggle the family service and adult prayer and reflection time. We’ll spend time with my family. My kids will make construction-paper daisy chains, writing on each link the qualities they hope to encourage in themselves in the coming year. We’ll throw bread into the Hudson River. We’ll read New Year at the Pier, How the Rosh Hashanah Challah Became Round, and Sammy Spider’s First Rosh Hashanah.

But our Sammy Spider years are coming to an end; I figure we have only one or two more holiday cycles to go through with the inquisitive arachnid. The books will be passed on to another, younger family. But not just yet. This year, we’ll be stringing Apple Jacks and Honey Nut Cheerios onto cords, making edible “apple and honey” necklaces—my mom’s idea, something new. Little, thoughtful, incremental changes are doable, and more sustainable than unrealistic vows to tear everything up and launch ourselves headlong into an all-new world.

Have a good, sweet year.

Those questions may appear nebulous, simultaneously too elusive and too deep for anyone to attempt to answer seriously. But look at the landscape of Jewish life and two broad currents suggest themselves, two divergent agendas that address much more than the question of conversion alone. On the one hand, those who imagine Judaism as an exclusive enterprise advocate that the religion and its followers alike should move in ever-diminishing circles, orbiting around a small nucleus of rabbis entrusted with parsing the halachic laws. This approach is not without its merits; trying to make sense of an ancient faith in a modern world is a mighty and baffling task, and the drive inward, toward purity and certainty, is both instinctive and immensely reassuring.

But those of us who believe that Judaism’s survival also depends on its ability to adapt to the spiritual and practical challenges imposed by modernity must reject the urge to narrow our common horizons. Instead, we must examine our boundaries and beliefs and work to welcome new people, new traditions, and new ideas into the fold. To some, such talk may have the airy, hollow ring of universalist New Age spirituality. But that is not the case—as we think will be clear from the collection of essays by rabbis and writers, scholars and cooks, comedians and community leaders in Tablet Magazine’s High Holiday package. Some of these articles and essays are personal, others historical. In them, we hope each reader will find his or her own path toward answering Judaism’s essential questions, impossible and beautiful and all-encompassing—the only questions worth asking.

Judaism’s greatest sages have always plunged into the depths of doubt in an effort to find morsels of wisdom. This holiday season, two of our contributors evoke the memories of such men: Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in an essay coming tomorrow, writes about Hillel the Elder, who defined Jewish peoplehood in radically inclusive terms, and Rodger Kamenetz recalls his journey to commune with the spirit of the late Nachman of Bratslav, a 19th-century rabbi who made his home among the non-believers in the hope of showing them the merits of faith.

These rabbis—and other, less illustrious but no less righteous men and women throughout history—embody Judaism’s finest qualities. As their respective communities sought solace and comfort in closed doors and closed minds, they ventured out and struggled to expand the boundaries of peoplehood, occasionally disregarding the letter in service of the spirit. It is doubt, they realized, that makes the believer’s faith more meaningful, and it is compassion for others that makes one’s understanding of oneself more complete. Armed with these convictions, they engaged with the world; more than any enforcer of strict rules or arbiter of stern edicts, they taught us what it means to be Jewish.

As we approach Rosh Hashanah, we would do well to abandon the pointless fights that have embroiled so many of us for so long, and to insist instead that there are other, better, more urgent questions for us to be asking. We must ask how we can invite as many newcomers to partake in Judaism—as those interviewed by Joan Nathan for her food column have done—without eroding the religion’s core tenets. We must ask what forms of innovative communal structures we might erect to serve the needs of those whom consequences placed just outside the reach of tradition’s grasp, as Rabbi Andy Bachman does in a Vox Tablet podcast about, of all things, burial customs.

Most important, we must ask which of our beliefs guide us forward and which are merely vantage points to the past. And we must do so without turning denominational divides into weapons of divisiveness. In the course of recent American Jewish history, Reform and Conservative rabbis have sometimes preferred strict interpretations of Jewish law, while Orthodox rabbis have allowed room for ambiguity. Indeed, it is the Orthodox rabbi Avi Shafran who here reminds us of the inherent dangers of generalizations and collective judgments, a shortcoming from which Jews of all stripes are not immune.

Unlike Passover or Purim, Rosh Hashanah has no haggadah or megillah, no seminal text that invites us to ponder the meaning of the holiday. It is up to us to stir up debate, to ask what traditions still matter and what should be reconsidered. We hope you’ll find kindling for conversation in the articles and other content we’re publishing this week. And even if not, at the very least try the pomegranate martini.

Shanah tova, from everyone at Tablet Magazine.

Bartenura Prosecco Brut NV (Italy, $18)
You will start your Rosh Hashanah feast on a high note if you opt for Prosecco, which delivers bubbles and fun at half the price of Champagne. It may be not be as elegant as its French cousin, but this zesty Prosecco makes a fine aperitif or cuts through the richness of any tsimmes it encounters.

Goose Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2008 (New Zealand, $17)
I like to say New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc’s grassy, citrusy personality is so distinctive that it’s almost flourescent. Goose Bay’s refreshingly crisp rendition is no exception, and it harmonizes well with fish, including a forkful of gefilte with horseradish.

Daltôn Galilee Chardonnay Unoaked 2009 (Israel, $17)
Have you ever tried Chardonnay freed from its oaky, vanilla-shake shackles? Insiders have been enjoying this style for years, and Daltôn’s crisp and subtly peachy version makes their lips smack with satisfaction. Savor it with everything from seafood to salads to matzo ball soup.

Recanati Galilee Rosé (Israel, $15)
Summer may be waning, but your passion for pink needn’t. Clean and zesty, this dry, cherry-scented wine pivots between the world of white- and red-wine foods, equally at home with fish dishes as it is with more substantial fare like barbecue, lamb, or kasha varnishkes.

Tabor Merlot “Adama” Chalk Soil 2006 (Israel, $21)
The famous rant in Sideways notwithstanding, this selection proves that Merlot doesn’t have to be a wine for the wounded. Its soft, generous blackberry character and hints of coffee bean and sweet spice flatter a range of rich meals, from stuffed cabbage to stews.

Bodega Flecha de los Andes Gran Malbec 2008 (Argentina, $20)
It seems like everyone I interviewed for my new book—including John Lithgow and John Leguizamo—waxed rhapsodic for the pleasures of Malbec, and this version makes it easy to see why. Lush and ripe, it offers plenty of blackberry and blueberry fruit, joined by whiffs of coca powder and licorice, with a smooth, enduring finish. It is perfect with brisket and other richer, meaty creations.

If you have a kosher wine question you want me to answer, maybe you need a suggestion of a particular wine to pair with specific dishes, post a comment below and I’ll see what I can do to help you out

Mark Oldman is a wine expert whose new book is Oldman’s Brave New World of Wine.

Learning about food traditions is a major challenge in every mixed marriage, but perhaps more so when one partner is Jewish and the other must learn from scratch how to navigate both kashrut and the culinary customs that characterize the cycle of holidays that kicks off anew next week, with Rosh Hashanah.

“When you grow up outside the tradition you don’t know the holidays,” said Colleen Fain, 63, a community volunteer in Coral Gables, Florida, who converted to Judaism when she got married more than 40 years ago. “You have to learn the rituals, and it’s hard to pass that down when you are not familiar or comfortable with them. The convert has to work really hard to understand the customs so they unify the family.”

For Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, 54, who converted when she married writer Tony Horwitz, Judaism was a natural progression. “I didn’t know any Jews growing up,” Brooks said over a glass of wine on the porch of her Victorian home on Martha’s Vineyard, far from Australia, where she was born and raised. “For some reason my father was a lefty Zionist Socialist who got caught up with the Zionist movement, even though we were not Jewish. It rubbed off on me.” As a teenager, Brooks started wearing a star of David because “of my rabid history reading, especially about the Shoah to express identification with the Jewish people.” Conversion seemed “like the natural thing to do,” she said. It was a move “much more about history than faith, I wasn’t going to be the end of the line of a faith that survived so many years.”

Brooks knew Jewish deli food in New York and Ashkenazic cooking from Tony’s family, but she likes the Middle Eastern cuisine of Israel best. “When I lived in Cairo as a writer, I kept visiting Israel and loved the Levantine-inspired food,” she said. For breaking the fast after Yom Kippur, she goes Sephardic, sometimes serving Poopa Dweck’s Syrian brisket with fruit from her cookbook Aromas of Aleppo and other times harira, a rich Moroccan lamb-based vegetable soup often used to break the fast during Ramadan, which she first tasted when she was in Morocco in the late 1980s. “It was the only thing that got me up in the morning,” she said. “You feel like you have been fed with that.”

Brooks speaks passionately about cooking. When she doesn’t get challah from her son’s class at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, where the students make it, she bakes it herself. “I like to get my hands in the dough, and I get some of my best novelistic ideas when making challah,” she said. “I chew over the issues from my morning’s writing and sometimes gnarly plot points resolve themselves. Turning the compost works well too.”

Tom Ashe similarly follows the Jewish rituals of his spouse, Joanne. The son of a police officer from Queens, Ashe converted when he married Joanne 33 years ago. The couple cooks together (during the holidays he plays the role of assistant; the rest of the time he’s in charge) and rarely host fewer than 10 family members on weekends in their home in Placitas, New Mexico. “Since I am a convert, each holiday brings back memories of when I was in my mid-20s and chose Judaism,” said Ashe, 58, a real estate developer. “They are definitely my holidays too, and I look forward to the foods, the smells, and the traditions. The Jewish palate is more eclectic than what I grew up with as a young Protestant boy in Queens. Jews have the whole world, from Middle Eastern to Asian foods.”

Although the Ashes still pull out Joanne’s mother’s recipes for the holidays, they occasionally tweak dishes, as in a delicious smoked brisket holiday recipe more reminiscent of the far West than Eastern Europe.

Veronica Goode knew nothing about Jewish customs growing up in Venezuela and had to learn everything—from Shabbat candle-lighting rules to what ingredients to include in a holiday meal. “Cooking Jewish is a real shock,” said Goode, 36, a social work student in Washington, D.C. “When I got married, I didn’t know how to cook anything Jewish, even brisket, so I called my step mother-in-law.” Veronica now makes her recipes with lots of onions, tomato paste, and long cooking. Her one complaint: “I haven’t learned to make matzoh balls yet.”

Goode underlined a lament I have heard from many converts I meet at book signings and other events. Judaism is intimidating, and they need a gentle soul to mentor them through the traditions.

“The best thing to do is to ask friends and relatives for recipes and don’t be afraid to try them,” said Fain. When she first wanted to make kugel, for example, she asked her sister-in-law, Sally Ann Epstein, who had a family recipe from a cousin for help. Fain was not afraid to ask, Epstein was flattered, and now making that kugel—a dairy version more appropriate for a break-fast—is a family tradition. “If I had married someone else, I wouldn’t know how to make kugel or brisket,” she said.

Imagine life without that!

HARIRA (MOROCCAN VEGETABLE SOUP)
Adapted from Geraldine Brooks

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 large onions, diced (about 4 cups)
3 cloves garlic, crushed
2-inch knob of ginger, peeled and grated
3 celery stalks, diced
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut in rounds
2 zucchini, diced
8 cups good lamb, beef, or vegetable stock
12-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 19-ounce can chick peas,
1 cup barley
1 cup chopped fresh mint
2 cups chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon cardamom or to taste
1 teaspoon cumin or to taste
Pinch of saffron
Salt to taste
¼ teaspoon white pepper or to taste
1 teaspoon hot red pepper or to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper or to taste
½ cup vermicelli noodles, broken up

1. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pot and sauté the onions, garlic, ginger, celery, carrots, and zucchini for a few minutes.

2. Add the broth and the tomatoes and bring to a boil. Then continue to simmer for another 20 minutes.

3. Add the chick peas and the barley, half the mint and half the cilantro, the cardamom, cumin, saffron, salt, and the three kinds of pepper. Continue to simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes, adding 1 to 2 cups water or as needed.

4. Add the vermicelli and continue simmering about 5 minutes or until the pasta is cooked. Stir in the remaining mint and cilantro. Adjust the seasonings to taste and serve.

Yield: 10 to 12 Servings

BARBECUED SMOKED BRISKET
Adapted from Tom and Joanne Ashe

5- to 6-pound Grade-A choice brisket
6 sliced garlic cloves
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 sliced onions
¼ cup liquid smoke
1 bottle Heinz Chili Sauce
1 16-ounce can tomatoes
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 cup of wine or enough to nearly cover the brisket

1. Wash and dry the brisket and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Pierce holes in the brisket and insert the garlic cloves. Sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Heat the oil and sear on both sides.

3. Put the onions on the bottom of a heavy casserole, just large enough to hold the brisket. Put the brisket on top and then add the liquid smoke, chili sauce, tomatoes, and tomato sauce and pour over the brisket. Cover with the red wine.

4. Cover with tin foil or a top and bake in the oven for 4 hours.

5. Chill overnight, remove fat that has accumulated, slice, reheat and serve.

Yield: about 10 servings

Fain family noodle kugel, as prepared by Joan Nathan.
Gabriela Herman

FAIN FAMILY NOODLE KUGEL
Adapted from Colleen Fain, Sally Ann Epstein, and Bobbi Mayer Joslin

8 ounces broad, flat, egg noodles
½ cup sugar
12 ounces whole milk cottage cheese
1/2 cup milk or a little more
1/2 cup salted butter, melted, but not hot
1/2 cup golden raisins
2 large eggs, slightly beaten 1 cup sour cream
½ teaspoon cinnamon or to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 350-degrees and grease an 8-cup casserole.

2. Cook the noodles in a large pot of salted water and drain, then rinse to cool down a little.

3. Mix the sugar, cottage cheese, milk, melted butter, raisins, eggs, and sour cream in a large bowl. Stir in the noodles, transfer to casserole dish and liberally sprinkle the cinnamon on top.

4. Bake for 40 minutes until browned on top. If you use a flat casserole you will need slightly less time for cooking.

Yield: about 8 servings

Joan Nathan’s forthcoming book, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, is due out this fall.

Ritual and Observance:

Rosh Hashanah: A Guide for the Perplexed: Everything you ever wanted to know about the holiday, by the Editors

Holiday in the Hinterland: Once home to Jewish immigrants, a South African city today hosts a very different sort of Jewish practice, by Eve Fairbanks

On One Foot: A new Nextbook Press biography of Hillel makes clear that the rabbi’s words and thoughts—though millennia old—resonate today, by Joseph Telushkin

United State: A recent contretemps in Israel served to underscore the surprising and recent cohesion among the branches of U.S. Judaism, by Jonathan D. Sarna

Parts of the Whole: In the reflective period of the High Holidays, Tablet Magazine—together with rabbis and writers—considers the debate over Jewish identity and makes an argument for inclusiveness, by Alana Newhouse

Into the Jewish People: The rabbi who co-officiated at the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding on his journey to accepting intermarriage, by James Ponet

The Jews’ Jews: Anti-Semites paint Jews as different and strange; many Jews do the same to the so-called ‘ultra-Orthodox’, by Avi Shafran

Visiting the Dead: A visit to New York’s Mount Carmel Cemetery highlights how far American Jews have drifted from their immigrant anecestors, geographically and ritually, by Vox Tablet

My Education: What I learned about myself and my family by leading High Holiday services at UCLA, by Mayim Bialik

Blow, Gabriel, Blow: Learning about the shofar, then trying to play one, by Vox Tablet

Books:

Pilgrimage: Each year before Rosh Hashanah, thousands of Jews visit the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Rodger Kamenetz joined them and brought along a friend: Franz Kafka.

On the Bookshelf: High Holiday prayerbooks of every stripe, by Josh Lambert

Food:

Kitchen Conversions: Intermarried couples must learn new holiday recipes and traditions, by Joan Nathan

L’Chaim!: Six kosher wines to spruce up your holiday meals, by Mark Oldman

Market Value: With Rosh Hashanah falling earlier than usual, a chef offers holiday dishes built around late-summer produce, by Melissa Petitto

Happy New Year: A Manhattan bartender devises some Rosh Hashanah cocktails, by Marissa Brostoff

Taste Test: The Tablet staff discovers the perfect apple-honey combo, by the Editors

Ritual and Observance:

Yom Kippur: A Guide for the Perplexed: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Day of Atonement, by The Editors

Seeing Things: When fast-food-induced hallucinations of Chelsea Clinton precede Yom Kippur, extreme measures must be taken

First Draft: Envisioning a rabbi’s struggle to write an original Yom Kippur sermon, by Shalom Auslander

Print War: How the relationship between a reporter and his editor shook the Yiddish press, by Eddy Portnoy

In the Rearview: Novelist Darin Strauss talks about living with, and atoning for, a terrible car accident, by Vox Tablet

Shoes You Can Use: What to wear on Yom Kippur, when leather is banned, by Allison Hoffman

Pardon Me: My childhood bullying, and an attempt to atone for it, by David Rakoff

Hunger Games: How a current best-seller gets Yom Kippur shockingly right, by Marjorie Ingall

Music:

Sacred Remake: We may talk of its eternal qualities, but the music of Kol Nidre is forever being made anew, by Ari Y. Kelman

Melancholy Melody: Kol Nidre gets me every time, by Alexander Gelfand

Art:

Confessional Notes: An Israeli designer crafts an unorthodox ritual object for Yom Kippur, by Len Small

God and Uman: Joining the Breslovers—and my cousin—for Rosh Hashanah in Ukraine, by Marc Caplan

Shoes You Can Use: What to wear on Yom Kippur, when leather is banned, by Allison Hoffman

The Festive Meal: When Yom Kippur was a time to eat, drink, and be merry, by Eddy Portnoy

Pardon Me: My childhood bullying, and an attempt to atone for it , by David Rakoff

Dark Night: How technology killed the silent, empty Israeli Yom Kippur experience, by Liel Leibovitz

Yom Kippur: A Guide for the Perplexed: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Day of Atonement, by The Editors

Food:

Happy New Year: Advice from rabbis and a nutritionist on what to eat when you won’t be eating, by Marc Tracy

Music:

Melancholy Melody: Kol Nidre gets me every time, by Alexander Gelfand

Family:

How To Atone Like a Child: On Yom Kippur, kids will be kids, by Marjorie Ingall

Daily Sorries:

Apologies to the barrista, and to fellow commuters

That whole economic collapse? My bad.

He knows he shouldn’t make jokes about shul.

Pets and procrastination

She wishes she weren’t so grumpy

An apology to Mom

Swayze, we hardly knew ye

Breaking a promise

‘Fido, I owe you one’

And don’t forget our Rosh Hashanah roundup.

“Sorry-Grateful,” by Stephen Sondheim: When it comes to relationships, Sondheim tells us, we’re always sorry-grateful and regretful-happy. “Why look for answers when none occur?” he asks. “You always are what you always were, which has nothing to do with, all to do with her.”

“Sorry Angel,” by Serge Gainsbourg: “It’s me who suicided you,” apologizes the French poet of the obscene. “Now you’re with the angels.” That’s Gainsbourg’s idea of a love song.

“Famous Blue Raincoat,” Leonard Cohen: “And what can I tell you, my brother, my killer, what can I possible say? I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I’m glad you stood in my way.” Apology accepted was never quite so poetic.

“Carbona Not Glue,” The Ramones: Some Jews just can’t get into the Yom Kippur vibe. Like Joey Ramone. “I’m not sorry for the things I do,” he yelped. In his defense, he did have a pretty good reason for his lack of repentance: “My brain is stuck from shooting glue.”

“Sorry,” Madonna: She’s not really Jewish. And she’s not really sorry. Yom Kippur or not, she asks her lover not to beg for her forgiveness. “I’ve seen it all before,” she states, “and I can’t take it anymore.” Maybe next Yom Kippur.

“Endlessly Jealous,” Lou Reed: Not usually one for heartfelt emotions, Lou Reed tries his best to repent. He’s sorry for what he said, sorry for what he did, sorry for beating up his lover. At least he’s apologetic.

If you’ve fallen out of the fold of synagogue membership, or if the economy’s got you down on high ticket prices for Yom Kippur, you’ve still got time to peruse your atonement options. The website No Membership Requiredoffers a list of last-minute, no-tickets-required services in cities across the country.

So now you’ve got no good excuse not to go to shul.

No Membership Required [Homepage]

But, then, the fast need not be too easy. “Although in Hebrew it is customary to say tzom kal, I don’t think it means, ‘Hope you don’t notice that you’re hungry,’” says Rabbi Daniel Nevins of the Jewish Theological Seminary. “I think we should start saying, ‘Have a meaningful fast,’ which is the point.” To which the caffeine-dependent might retort: “How can I draw meaning from my fast if I can’t think straight?”

Where God commands a fast on the 10th day of the seventh month—which He does at least three times in the Torah—it is always cast as a means toward the end of atonement and purification. “The point of the fast is not the suffering in and of itself,” says Rabbi Howard J. Goldsmith of Temple Emanuel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “The point of the fast is to spur us to action and to help us really reflect.” It’s a mistake, in other words, to fetishize the fast. For one thing, it is not the only prohibition: labor, too, is banned on Yom Kippur, as on Shabbat; and so is sex, despite its being perfectly kosher on a typical Friday night. The fast is best thought of as an instrument to achieve greater things. And so there’s nothing wrong with making your fast as easy as possible, within reason. “You should do whatever you can to go into the fast prepared,” Levin says. “You shouldn’t compel the headache.”

How best to prepare? Nutritionist Faye Berger Mitchell, who has written guidebooks for the American Dietetic Association and who observes the Yom Kippur fast, offers these tips:

• For your pre-fast meal, eat whole grains, like brown rice, and other fiber-rich foods, like steamed broccoli. By taking up more space in your stomach—literally—high-fiber foods make you feel fuller for longer. “These are not your traditional Jewish holiday foods,” Mitchell acknowledges. For dessert, fruit is best.

• Try to reduce the sodium content of this meal, altering recipes if need be: otherwise; you’ll be thirsty, and fasting means no water, too. (A low-sodium meal is also a challenge for those used to downing copious quantities of chicken soup and brisket beforehand.)

• Drink plenty of pre-fast fluids. You need to be hydrated to prepare for 25 hours of no eating or drinking!

• Mitchell suggests that caffeine addicts wean themselves off the stuff a bit during the week before. One trick is to brew mixtures of regular and decaf, increasing the proportion of decaf as you progress.

• On Yom Kippur, take pains to avoid strenuous, calorie-burning exercise. “If you’re walking to synagogue, walk slowly,” Mitchell says.

• When breaking fast, start slowly. Mitchell recommends beginning with a glass of juice. And don’t eat as much as you think you want to, unless you won’t mind the subsequent stomachache.

• Should children fast? “Not a good idea,” Mitchell says. “They need energy, and they just can’t really perform without food, because they’re growing.”

• Pregnant women, diabetics, and others with medical conditions should not fast. “It’s important for people who do have a medical reason not to toughen up and do it anyway,” says Mitchell. “They could actually get sick. It could be dangerous.” (Happily, Jewish law is in agreement on that one.)

The worst hunger pangs hit, for many, once they’re home from services and unable to do much but think of a refrigerator full of smoked fish. How to best handle those tough final hours? “I would encourage people to take a walk and enjoy nature,” Levin says. “There is a sense that you’re supposed to pray in a natural setting, where you can appreciate the world.” Or, as Goldsmith notes, you could just stay longer at shul: “We have a liturgy that has worked for Jews for thousands of years.”

I stopped doing most of the things that Jews are supposed to do—going to synagogue, studying the Torah, not preparing shellfish dishes for Friday night dinner (I’d suggest the moules marinière, The Way to Cook, p. 120)—a long time ago. And God only knows how long it’s been since I entertained the idea that He/She/It might actually exist. But Yom Kippur still rings my chimes, mostly because of Kol Nidre. The melody alone has an almost Pavlovian effect on me: all it takes is a bar or two, and I swing into full-blown contemplation mode, complete with a detailed review of my personal failings over the past year.

This has nothing to do with the Aramaic text, which is all about the nullification of unfulfilled vows between man and God. When it comes to words, it’s the viddui—the confessional prayer that follows the Kol Nidre—that really hits home. Reading through that laundry list of sins, of betrayal and slander, perversion and arrogance, I can’t help but notice how many I’ve committed, how many people I’ve wronged. Ever the eager beaver, I inevitably use the viddui to catalog my own transgressions in an effort to improve upon last year’s performance.

Yet the melody of the viddui makes absolutely no impression on me whatsoever. In fact, I can’t even recall it at the moment; whereas all I have to do is think the words “Kol Nidre,” and, whammo, the melody begins to play inside my head, bringing with it a feeling of sobriety that borders on depression. Somehow, through one of those tricks of memory from which we all suffer, I have managed to link the sound of the Kol Nidre with the deep-seated feelings of guilt inspired by the viddui. Hear one, feel the other. (Explain that, Oliver Sacks.)

This probably has something to do with the nature of the Kol Nidre melody itself. No one really knows where it originated. The text has been traced to eighth-century Babylonia—it may be related to the magical incantations that both Jews and non-Jews used at the time to ward off evil spirits—and the chant contains traces of everything from medieval German love songs to Haftarah tropes. But the earliest notated melody dates only to 18th-century Germany. We like to think of the Kol Nidre and many of the other High Holiday melodies as being misinai—so old they date back to the covenant at Mount Sinai—but we really haven’t a clue.

Yet no one doubts the power of those strangely affecting phrases, with their curious up-and-down, sighing-and-sobbing contours. The German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig changed his mind about converting to Christianity after hearing the Kol Nidre in Berlin in 1913. Upon leaving Buchenwald, Reb Leizer of Czenstochow is said to have trawled the Polish countryside for orphaned Jewish children by playing the Kol Nidre on a hand organ in public places; whenever he saw signs of recognition—of longing, or sadness—on the faces of passing kids, he knew that he had struck pay dirt. And the Hungarian poet Nikolaus Lenau, who was not himself Jewish, found the melody so moving (“a song draped with the veil of grief”) that it caused him to weep uncontrollably, leaving his spirit “torn and purified.”

But to be honest, I don’t know why the Kol Nidre melody has such an effect on anyone, let alone me. Yes, it announces the onset of the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar. But so what? That day surely never meant anything to Lenau, and it long ago lost most of its sacred character for me. Yet hearing that chant invariably pulls me back into something that, for the remaining 364 days of the year, I am reasonably certain I’ve rejected. And it’s more than likely that this Yom Kippur Eve, I’ll find myself wandering by my local synagogue, hoping to catch a few strains of something I could hear in full if only I were willing to shell out the $150 for High Holiday tickets. If a contemporary tunesmith could recreate that musical magnetism, he’d make a fortune—though maybe only off the backs of those twisted enough to pay for a song that makes them feel bad about themselves.

Never mind the vows. If I could just free myself of this kosher earworm, I’d be one happy sinner.

Is there something you’re truly sorry for? There’s still time to atone! Call Tablet Magazine’s Sorry Hotline at 718-360-4836, and get it off your chest.

So A. took a new name, according to my cousin—their boys played together—a foursquare North American moniker that could be shortened to one syllable, suitable for barking on the sports field, at a hockey rink, across a sea of office cubicles. It’s a typical assimilative immigrant trajectory, but I couldn’t help feeling partially responsible.

I learned this in autumn of 2003. The summer was over, and with it the heat-induced coma of the season. The weather had turned clear and cool, with air that “gave steel to one’s thoughts,” as the writer Leonard Michaels put it. As surely as the pomegranates find their way onto the grocery store shelves, my newly steeled thoughts inevitably turn to notions of guilt and forgiveness. That’s not entirely true. A. had been on my mind, on and off, for close to 30 years. I had tried to find him on more than one occasion, but the name change had left the trail cold. I mentioned casually to my cousin that I’d like to contact him, got an address, and sat down to write, my homemade version of slichot.

“The reason I’ve been trying to find is you is an embarrassing one for me, but something that has been tormenting me for many, many years. I was incredibly horrible to you the summer we were together. Defensive rationalizations—that I was a child, that I was filled with self-loathing—have never really washed with me, and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to make things right and apologize to you. No kid deserves to be the object of cruelty, least of all you at that age. I remain deeply ashamed and deeply sorry. I have no doubt that you remember all too well what a complete asshole I was. Certainly, I’d never forget it. I’ve tried to grow up to be an adult who isn’t an asshole and as such, it has seemed vitally important to me for some time that I manage to reach you and apologize. I hope this letter serves as some small measure towards that goal.”

As I recall, he looked like an angel. (Why this misty “as I recall?” Three decades later and the wounds I inflicted still feel fresh. Enough with the coyness.) He looked like an angel; copper-haired, green-eyed, slender, freckled, with startlingly white skin and a long, almond-shaped face. And if being the object of undeserved cruelty and rancor had the counterbalancing effect of conferring virtue, then he would have been, in fact, an angel. His misfortune, like that of all victims, was finding himself lower on the pecking order than an insecure bully. I helped to make a stranger feel unwelcome and unsafe. Forgive the caginess. No one was killed. There were no elaborate hazing rituals, no forced nudity, no knives. It didn’t rise much above the level of summer camp teasing. I don’t want to go into specifics. I’m ashamed, for one, and I’m not trolling for absolution.

A woman I used to know, raised a Southern Baptist, once spoke about Sunday mornings in church, where every week, the same abusive husband would stand before the congregation and, wracked with weeping, confess that week’s lapse towards wickedness, plainly visible on the contused and purple face of his suffering wife. This public apology and self-flagellation were the necessary requirements for forgiveness granted by the congregation in the name of God Almighty. The man would leave church that day with his slate clean, and, presumably, his consciousness raised as to the intrinsic shitheadedness of battery. But there he would be the following Sunday—along with his wife, her bruises having been refreshed during the week—recriminating himself, tearful and begging pardon of his sins once again, which once again would be given. There was never a Sunday, in my acquaintance’s recollection, where he hadn’t beaten his wife and where he was not forgiven.

My friend Sophie tries to be my Baptist congregation, chalking it up to youth and stupidity. “If you didn’t suck at age 12, then you suck now. It’s that simple.” It’s nice of her to say so, especially since I knew Sophie at age 12, and she didn’t suck then and she certainly doesn’t suck now. But what I love and value about the days and customs of slichot is the rigor and required honesty. Neither one’s friends nor God get a vote. Only the injured party makes that decision. I’ve tried to imagine how it would feel to receive that letter. Time would accordion and that summer would no doubt come flooding back with an unpleasant freshness. A. would remember the callous, smart-ass ringleader, and feel mildly shocked to find himself no more inclined to grant clemency than he was as a boy. He might even feel angrier, being made to revisit such unpleasantness, and attendant to this anger, a warming blush of superiority, perhaps. A satisfaction that the writer should still be troubled. Here he was, after all, with a wife and child, having moved on, and here was I, fixated on events three decades prior. I had pointedly made sure to leave out of the letter any preening details that might indicate that, aside from this thorn of guilt, I had an otherwise rewarding life. Him thinking me a loser for still dwelling on something long-past seemed a necessary component of a right and proper apology.

But this is all conjecture. I never heard back from him. Probably he rightly surmised that it had nothing to do with him anymore. There would be little he could say at this point. Better to let me twist. Which I do.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the most awesome of all Jewish holidays. We mean that literally: The very last of the Days of Awe, the 10-day period beginning with Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur marks the sealing of the Book of Life and with it our fates for the coming year. Jews—even some who cheerfully ignore other holidays—fast, repent, confess, and do their best to unload themselves of their sins and get on the Almighty’s merciful side. Yom Kippur occurs on the 10th day of the seventh month. Tradition has it that on this day, Moses received the second set of the Ten Commandments after 40 days of preparation, which is the time it took God to forgive the Israelites for their peccadillo with the Golden Calf. To hear the Book of Ezekiel tell it, the original Yom Kippur was a much different experience than our own food-deprived observance and was meant solely to cleanse the Temple’s sanctuary of any impurity that might have accidentally found its way into the Holy of Holies. This was the only time of the year the High Priest was allowed into God’s sacred dwelling, and an intricate set of rituals was required for him to do so. He had to take five dips in a mikveh, change clothes four times, and sacrifice a variety of animals. Among the latter, the most fascinating was the lottery of goats: one beast was chosen to be sacrificed for the Lord, and the other for Azazel (ancient Hebrew for “strong and steep mountain,” the word has since come to mean “hell”). After a short prayer, the animal was taken to a precipitous cliff outside Jerusalem and pushed off the ledge, serving as the literal scapegoat for the sins of the nation of Israel. All of this ancient tradition is recounted in the prayers that constitute the avodah, or worship portion of the liturgy recited during the musaf service. In some synagogues, congregants emulate the High Priest’s actions, gesturing in a way that mimics the sprinkling of bull’s blood on the Holy of Holies. Other congregations, however, ignore this part of the prayer altogether, finding it archaic and irrelevant to modern Jewish life. But while the ancient rituals may be largely forgotten, their deeper meanings stay with us. Like the two goats, for example—one offered to please God and the other to repent for the people’s sins—we still mark each Yom Kippur by observing the difference between wrongdoing committed “bein adam la’makom,” or between Man and God, and that perpetrated “bein adam le’chavero,” between Man and Man. Which is why vidui, or confession of guilt, is both practiced in public prayer and encouraged in private conduct. Another echo of the old ritual is evident in the custom of kapparot, which involves swinging a rooster or a hen over one’s head, for males and females respectively, reciting a prayer, and sacrificing the animal in the hope that it would take on all of the misery that might befall the person.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

The Mishnah, in tractate Yoma 8:1, is very clear on the don’ts: no eating or drinking. No wearing leather shoes. No bathing. No anointing oneself with perfumes or lotions. And no sex. The Bible itself, interestingly, mentions nothing about these prohibitions. Leviticus 23 only forbids us from doing work and tells us to afflict our souls, not our bodies. After the destruction of the Temple, the exile from Zion, and the writing of the Talmud, the holiday’s focus shifted from the High Priest and his purification rituals to the responsibility of each and every Jew to atone for his or her own sins. And while the connection between a gurgling stomach and a reflective mind may be lost on some, it is worth noticing that Yom Kippur is the only fast day on the Jewish calendar that is not observed in commemoration of some historical tragedy, but rather designed purely to allow us to take leave of earthly distractions and focus on our sinful souls. On the do side, it’s customary to wear white to symbolize one’s purity. To the same end, many Orthodox men dip in the mikveh the day before Yom Kippur for extra cleansing, which is probably not a bad idea given the prohibition on baths.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

The holiday’s liturgical highlight is perhaps the most fascinating, controversial, and thrilling of all Jewish prayers, the Kol Nidre, which is recited to usher in Yom Kippur. Aramaic for “all vows,” Kol Nidre releases those who recite it from all of the vows they will make from the current Yom Kippur service until the same service in the next year. (This, by the way, wasn’t always the case: It was Rashi’s son-in-law, Rabbi Meir Ben Samuel, who changed the prayer from the past to the future tense, wishing to stress that its potency was not in retroactively releasing us from our past vows, but rather from future ones, a much more powerful proposition.) It, too, has its beginnings in ancient Israel, where the making of vows was so much the trend that the Torah made a point of warning people against making God a promise they couldn’t keep: “When thou shalt vow a vow unto the Lord thy God,” says Deuteronomy 23, “thou shalt not be slack to pay it; for the Lord thy God will surely require it of thee.” What, however, of those who made a vow and couldn’t keep it? They required a special rite of absolution freeing them from their word. Such a vow—called hattarat nedarim, or the undoing of vows—finally came into being. For the Karaites—the Jewish sect believing that only the scripture, and not oral law, should guide Jewish life—this was proof of the rabbis’ flimsiness, and they engaged in a centuries-long historical campaign to charge their rabbinic opponents with sanctioning a practice that allowed anyone to annul their most solemn promises. Somewhat distressed, the rabbis reacted ingeniously, transforming the yearlong rite of the undoing of vows into a single annual prayer, Kol Nidre. But the Karaite complaint never went away. Instead, its essence was reincarnated in many anti-Semitic accusations, claiming that the prayer was proof that Jews could not be trusted, as all they had to do was recite the Kol Nidre and their promise was reversed. This canard was so popular and prevalent that many localities took to requiring Jews to recite a special oath to guarantee they wouldn’t renege on their word. Mindful of those accusations, some Jewish congregations and denominations throughout history worked to alter the prayer, or remove it from the service altogether. The other major prayer is the Ne’ilah. Hebrew for locking, it is recited at the end of Yom Kippur and concludes with a long blowing of the shofar. With this, tradition has it, the Gates of Heaven are locked, our opportunity to atone over, and our fate determined.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:
• Watch Neil Diamond sing Kol Nidre in The Jazz Singer.
• Begin confessing early by calling our Sorry Line.
• Listen to Leonard Cohen wonder how we’re meant to repent.
• Break the fast sweetly with blueberry blintzes.
• Get into the solemn mood with different Kol Nidre compositions.

Gently kick the back of the pew in front of you. Kick rhythmically to the cantor’s chanting, until your mother suddenly clamps her hand on your knee.

Stare into the Eternal Light until your eyes begin to water. Imagine it is a gateway to another dimension.

Flip ahead in the mahzor and read the Martyrology, the description of how 10 rabbis were tortured by the Romans on Yom Kippur after the destruction of the Second Temple. Read it again. Ponder which would suck the worst: being beheaded like Shimon Ben Gamliel, having your face flayed like Rabbi Yishmael, or having your skin raked with iron combs like Rabbi Akiva? Marvel that you are allowed to read this but were not allowed to go see “Final Destination 4.”

Attempt to count the shul’s ceiling tiles. Attempt to count the number of light bulbs in the chandeliers. Attempt to count the number of triangles in all the Jewish stars in the sanctuary. Attempt to count the number of Fannys and Isadores on the memorial plaques on the sanctuary walls. Try to find the funniest name.

Whisper to your mom, “Are you hungry?” Wait two minutes. Whisper “What about now?” Wait two minutes. Whisper “You know what I’d like? A big plate of fettuccini Alfredo. Oh wait, that’s your favorite, not mine.”

Rub the velvet on the pew so all the nap goes one way. Then rub it so that the nap goes the other way. Then write DOODY in the nap with your finger and erase it.

Braid the fringes of your father’s prayer shawl. Unbraid them. Wrap the fringes as tightly as you can around the tip of your finger and watch as your finger turns purple.

Wonder if it is too late to apologize to the cat for coloring her nose with a purple marker.

As the rabbi tells the story of Jonah and the Whale, ponder. Did the big fish start to digest Jonah before it barfed him up? Did it look like that guy’s acid-melted face in “Seed of Chucky”?

Imagine blowing the shofar. Imagine making the longest tekiyah gedolah anyone has ever heard, ever. Imagine the entire congregation just dumbfounded that you are only a kid and such an amazing talent. Imagine all the popular kids nodding at you with newfound respect in school on Monday and going, “Hey.”

Debate slipping the comic book inside your sweater into the mahzor. Maybe your mom will be too hungry to kill you.

Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, is frank about the situation, saying that we’ve “been embarrassed” by Bernie and the July arrest of several rabbis for money laundering. He’s also blunt about the opportunity afforded by the High Holidays to drum it into congregants heads that this is not how Jews are expected to behave: “[T]he rabbis of America have a lot of Jews trapped in synagogues this weekend, and it’s a wonderful time to focus on who we are and how we are.” Joel, along with Rabbi Moshe Kletenik, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, and two others have signed a letter urging rabbis to talk to their congregations about ethics during Rosh Hashanah services.

Their letter raises the question of whether ideas of Judaism should be proscriptive or descriptive: are we what we think we should be, or are we, well, who we are? Of course, in this case it may be a simpler matter, of the annual need for especially poignant material for the one time of year many Jews actually attend synagogue, and a year that has handed rabbis an obvious choice.

Jewish Leaders Calling for Ethical Renewal [AP]

Happy New Year: A Manhattan bartender devises some Rosh Hashanah cocktails, by Marissa Brostoff

Brisket Business: Star chef Bill Telepan reinvents the holiday staple, by Liel Leibovitz

Sophisticated Palate: The cookbooks that reinvented kosher food, by Tova Mirvis

Oh, Honey! A look at Rosh Hashanah’s best sweetener, by Mimi Sheraton

Taste Test: The Tablet staff discovers the perfect apple-honey combo, by the Editors

Ritual and Observance:

Resolved: Rosh Hashanah resolutions from Matisyahu, Michael Showalter, Ayelet Waldman, and others, by Marc Tracy

Reflection 2.0: A High Holidays online service that asks probing questions and remembers your answers, by Allison Hoffman

Bound for Glory: The Israel Museum unveils a restored mahzor from 1331, by Jeannie Rosenfeld

Wheel of Fortune: A year into the financial meltdown, the calendar keeps turning, and so does the economic cycle, by Daniel Gross

My Education: What I learned about myself and my family by leading High Holiday services at UCLA, by Mayim Bialik

Rosh Hashanah: A Guide for the Perplexed: Everything you ever wanted to know about the holiday, by the Editors

Blow, Gabriel, Blow: Learning about the shofar, then trying to play one, by Vox Tablet

Art:

Holy Rollin’: An illustrated remembrance of High Holidays past, by Vanessa Davis

Community:

Service Charges: How synagogues and their congregants are handling the economic downturn, by Marissa Brostoff

Family:

Onward, Jewish Soldiers: Like generations of Jewish service members, my husband, a Navy pilot, will spend the High Holidays overseas, by Alison Buckholtz

Sorry, Again: There’s no sure way to raise kids who apologize and accept apologies, by Marjorie Ingall

The internet, thankfully, has spawned a solution: 10Q, at www.DoYou10Q.com, the brainchild of New Yorker editor Ben Greenman and filmmaker Nicola Behrman. The 10Q program is what the Days of Atonement might look like if they’d been invented today: an automated online system that coughs up a new, open-ended question and sends it out daily by email on each of the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. They’re like little missives of conscience from an all-knowing and unknowable source. Responses go into a form on the site, and at the end of Yom Kippur—when, according to the rabbinic texts, the gates of repentance have closed for another year—they vanish into a secure server, only to reappear in their owners’ email inboxes in a year’s time. In other words, it’s a psychological time capsule, in written form. “We’re a low-expectation enterprise,” Greenman explained.

Last year, about 1,000 people participated in the pilot version of the project. This year, 10Q organizers, hoping thousands more sign up, are advertising the project on an electronic billboard in Times Square. (A Facebook app and Twitter stream are also in the works.) Visitors to the site will find questions and prompts that touch on universal human themes—family, career, love, hopes, dreams, regrets—and make no explicit reference to Judaism or the holidays. “We’re trying to attract as broad an audience as possible—it’s bridging the fine line between capturing a Jewish audience, and making Jewish principles relevant to everyone,” said Amelia Klein, program director at Reboot, the nonprofit organization aimed at raising Jewish consciousness among young or unaffiliated Jews that’s funding the 10Q project. Participants will also have the option of sharing their responses publicly, albeit anonymously. Here’s a sample of questions and answers from last year’s batch:

Describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year. How did it affect you?

“A little over a year-and-a-half ago I ended a relationship with someone whom I loved dearly, but was not in love with.”

“My youngest child got married and since she was pregnant and she and her fiance were living thousands of miles away from everyone, the only family member to be at the marriage was me.”

“My cat of 13 years died suddenly. I grew up with him. He was my constant companion. He really took care of me as much as I took care of him.”

Think about a major milestone that happened with your family in the past year. How has this affected you?

“My older brother and his wife had a second baby. He’s 34, I’m 30. He’s heterosexual and married, I’m gay and single. ”

“My parents were close to getting a divorce because of my dad’s alleged infidelity. It killed me to see my mom so hurt and broken. I promised myself I would never do that to someone I love, yet I find it hard not to stray.”

“My mom realized her marriage is not worth it. My dad doesn’t know it yet. It will affect us soon.”

Have you had any particularly spiritual experiences this past year?

“In roughly the last year, I discovered meditation. I don’t do it enough (if at all), but I recognize when it happens, whether when I’m taking a moment to myself, or exercising on the spin bike.”

“Yes, saying Kaddish for my father. The year was both short and long. I was lonely in missing him; I was together in mourning with my family. I could feel his presence in my life, and in my prayers.”

“I lost God, and I couldn’t be happier.”

Is there something (a person, a cause, an idea) that you want to investigate more fully in the coming year?

“I want to pursue my own financial well-being. I want to investigate ways to save and invest money that will benefit me the best in the long run of life. I want to investigate what I can do with just $1,000 at age 23.”

“I would choose me as I’m still busy working on my serenity.”

“I want to look into why exactly the Cubs forget how to play baseball in the postseason.”

What is a fear that you have and how has it limited you?

“I have a fear that I will struggle with anxiety and depression my entire life.”

“I fear that I may never feel like any synagogue is ‘home’ ever again.”

“I fear being a burden to my sons in my old age.”

Is there a part of yourself that you want to work on in the coming year?

“My need for mind-numbing distraction. I would like my indulgences to be reading, sleeping, and seeing friends, rather than eating, television, and intoxication.”

“I’ve always had a need for other people very close to me, and I think that’s why I’ve had so little time between relationships. It’s OK to want someone to be there, but I need to be able to take care of myself.”

“I would like to take a deep breath before getting worked up or angry about things—things seem to affect me so deeply these days. I’d like to see them roll off my back a little bit more.”

Matisyahu, hip-hop artist

All are related to consciousness and health:

1. I would like to only put healthy things in my body. This includes eating more consciously, cooking my own food, and buying locally grown veggies, organic products, etc.

2. Exercise. I would like to have one consistent exercise. Not go crazy or anything, just simple stuff: ride a bike, take a hike, etc.

3. I would like to visit the Hasidic rebbes’ gravesites in Europe and spend time at each one, learning the teachings of that rebbe.

4. I would like to continue working on being present in whatever I am doing. To do things with truth, whole-heartedly.

Daphne Merkin, writer

To try in my personal habits to be more like Benjamin Franklin and less like Courtney Love. Early to bed and early to rise, that sort of thing. (Right now I stay up late, watching Iron Chef and Lock Up, when I should be reading Chekhov at the very least; and I get up near noon, by which time Christopher Hitchens has already produced 1,500 words on the issue of the day.)

To try and enjoy the little things; to stop looking for a blaze of light followed by a loud bang, or the transformative phone call, or the email that arrives out of the blue and will change everything. To be happy with my share instead of envying everyone who has a larger apartment. To appreciate that I am alive even though I’m not as thin or young or productive or, well, anything, as I had hoped to be.

To love where I am loved instead of pining after the unreachable or ungettable person (meaning man) without whom my life is incomplete. To accept that most couples are compromised arrangements at best and “the lion’s share of happiness,” to quote my beloved, never-married Philip Larkin, doesn’t necessarily belong to them. To remember that a woman without a man is like a woman without a man—pathetic in a noble sort of way.

To find some route back to the Jewishness I have cast off—not lightly, I might add—and for which I harbor great nostalgia. Not enough to make me actually seek out a shul that might suit me or to return to keeping separate kitchens in my apartment, but enough to hanker after Friday night invitations. To find some way of inserting it in my life in a meaningful fashion—whether it be taking a class or learning how to make gefilte fish from scratch.

Michael Showalter, comedian, star of Comedy Central’s Michael and Michael Have Issues

1. Improve backhand.

2. Learn to speak cat language.

3. Understand meaning of life.

4. No more ice cream every single night.

Naomi Alderman, author of Disobedience

I’m not generally big on New Year’s resolutions; I feel that being in therapy ought to cover my self-improvement needs for the year. Why improve yourself when you can outsource and have someone else do it for you?

However, as the festive season approaches I have been thinking that next year I really want to try to be more forgiving. It’s a very Christian-sounding resolution, I know. It’s not about “turning the other cheek,” though, but a more pragmatic approach: I’ve noticed that individuals who are unforgiving end up coming across as bitter and annoying. So for the sake of my soul or maybe just for the sake of appearances: more forgiveness this year.

Otherwise, there are just the constant ongoing resolutions of the battles one can never win. Answer email more promptly. Do not allow the washing up to sit around for several days. Go to the gym more often. Set a writing schedule and stick to it this time, goddammit—think of Trollope in his study, writing for three hours every morning from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., and then going off to run the post office, be more like that. Get a post office, perhaps.

I once made a list of all the things I thought I should be doing on a daily basis and estimated how long each one would take. The total came to 28 hours a day, and didn’t include any time for sleep. Maybe I really need to learn to be more forgiving of myself.

Douglas Century, writer and author of Nextbook Press’s Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter

I’d love to be able to explain basic biblical stories to my six-year-old daughter without having to look them up on Google. The other day, when I mentioned the story of Abraham (almost) sacrificing Isaac, she looked deeply troubled, and said, “I don’t understand—why would God tell Abraham to kill his own son?” I stammered something about how God was just testing Abraham, then found myself getting online and scrolling through website after website to read the various explanations for the Binding of Isaac. I realized I couldn’t remember the exact motives for Cain killing Abel, either. Or list more than a handful of Joseph’s brothers. Since my daughter is starting her religious education this year, it would be nice to relearn the stories that the 12-year-old me knew by heart.

I also use way too much profanity, especially driving. Since cursing under my breath at other aggressive drivers seems hardwired into my reptilian brain, and since I’m often driving with my daughter in her car seat behind me, I’m also constantly half-turning and apologizing for using bad language. “Daddy shouldn’t have said that, honey, you’re right.” It happens, too, when I’m on the phone. I’ve tried spelling out curse words, but Lena caught me at the first “S-H-I–.” So, I resolve to make every effort to clean up my act. Perhaps it’ll make me calmer and happier too.

Finally, I’m sure most people resolve to be more productive and focused each day. I need to go through a kind of social networking detox, or at least stop rationalizing hours wasted in the sinkholes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube by telling myself it’s time spent doing “research.”

Ayelet Waldman, writer and author of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace

1. Pay more attention to my husband.

2. Not worry as much about my children’s futures.

3. Turn off my damn appliances to save energy.

Mimi Sheraton, former New York Times food critic and Tablet Magazine food columnist

1. I resolve never again to serve my Italian husband matzo balls marinara or noodle kugel—which he abhors as “sweet pasta.”

2. I resolve not to tell guests that my chopped chicken livers contain gribenes. Let them enjoy!

3. I resolve never again to grate potatoes for latkes in my Cuisinart. From now on, it’s a hand-held, four-sided grater or nothing.

4. I resolve to lose the last 10 pounds. Doesn’t everyone?

“You make accommodations for the economy,” said Fox, who added that several of her friends have dropped their synagogue memberships in the past year for financial reasons. “I think they’re being more strict but trying to be accommodating at the same time.”

It’s a double bind: many synagogue-goers—both the weekly and the annual variety—can’t afford the traditionally expensive tickets to services this year, while synagogues, which depend on the contributions of their members, are struggling to accommodate them.

In New York City, Rabbi Judith Hauptman, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary who leads a free service geared toward young adults every year, said she’s never gotten so many reservations so fast—but also that contributions from the donors who fund her service are lower than usual this year.

“The economic downturn is of course the kind of factor that’s going to increase turnout” because people seek solace in religion and community, Hauptman said. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to pay for it. “I think that the number of people looking for either inexpensive or free services this year is going to shoot way up.”

In Miami, Rabbi Hector Epelbaum of Temple Beth David, a Conservative shul, said he expects that the major fundraising that usually takes place around the High Holidays will be low this year—which is a problem because the synagogue is also offering more than the usual number of reduced rates and day school scholarships. “I feel that this year is going to be more difficult than the last one,” he said. According to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, synagogues generally strive to cover between 60 and 70 percent of their costs with dues, but wind up with only 45 or 50 percent covered that way—an annual shortfall typically covered by donations. But with both dues and donations down, some synagogues are cutting programs, laying off staff, or asking rabbis to take paycuts.

Though many synagogues routinely offer free or reduced-rate High Holiday tickets to members in need, just as they offer negotiable membership fees, those provisions are often only accessible to people who ask for them. “I’ve had a lot of people who’ve had to come to me for the first time, and there’s a lot of pain in doing that,” said Rabbi Anthony Fratello, who leads Temple Shaarei Shalom, a Reform temple in Boynton Beach, Florida. “They feel terrible about it.”

But Alan Sherman, executive vice president of the Palm Beach County Board of Rabbis, says the perceived stigma of asking for help may be lifting this year. For the past 30 years Sherman has placed newspaper announcements before the High Holidays offering to match Jews in the community with free or discounted services. “This year things have been totally upside down due to the recession, people’s job losses, and the fact that people—and this is a good thing—aren’t embarrassed or ashamed to ask for help,” Sherman said. “I’ve been inundated with a lot of requests.”

For Sherman, this suggests that the traditional High Holiday ticket model isn’t working.

“Maybe we have to reexamine the issue of charging money for this,” he said. But Fratello read the situation differently: as an argument for the utility of the synagogue membership system. “Part of the reason synagogue membership is so important is that in hard times, there’s somebody you can turn to. There’s so many havurot,” he said, referring to Jewish fellowships that meet routinely for prayer, “that have sprung up and people say, ‘The synagogues aren’t necessary.’ That’s all well and good, until somebody needs something. If you don’t support the synagogue or the congregation when things are good, they’re not going to be able to support you when things are bad.”

After repackaging the new undershirts, old New Yorkers, phone cards, Speed Sticks, DVDs, and extra flight suits, I spotted the siddur. It’s small enough to fit into the palm of my hand. The black leatherette cover is stamped in gold and reads, in Hebrew and English:

PRAYER BOOK

FOR JEWISH PERSONNEL

IN THE ARMED FORCES

OF THE UNITED STATES

I’ve seen the siddur before; it was shipped to Scott during his last tour by the Jewish Welfare Board’s Jewish Chaplains Council, which certifies Jewish chaplains and lay leaders and looks after Jewish servicemembers. The irony of shipping a Hebrew prayerbook to Iraq right before the High Holidays did not escape me. I’ve read several features about Jewish personnel celebrating religious festivals at bases throughout the Middle East since this war began, and there is sometimes a whiff of triumphalism in these tales. It’s almost as if, these accounts suggest, by wrapping tefillin in Kabul, or reading the Torah in Basra, American Jews are reclaiming something that was taken from us. I understand the excitement, and am grateful that Jews in Muslim countries can gather as Jews—this after a long history of treatment as second-class citizens before being stripped of their possessions in 1948 and abruptly expelled from many of these countries.

But for me, sending my husband a siddur was simply sad. It wasn’t a triumph but a tragedy that he was going to be away from me, our six-year-old son, and our four-year-old daughter for more than a year. And yet I was glad he thought to include the siddur, if it brought him solace. It also comforted me to know that several Jewish organizations already had his new mailing address. We’ve marked many Rosh Hashanahs and Yom Kippurs apart (along with countless other holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries), but the Jewish Chaplains Council has sent him everything from dried apples and honey sticks to Hanukkah gelt to chocolate-covered matzoh; the Aleph Institute, a Lubavitch organization that serves Jewish military personnel and prisoners (no kidding), also shipped generous Sabbath and holiday packages.

After my memoir about being a military wife was published last spring, I received dozens of emails from individuals asking how they can send even more holiday cards and packages to Jewish troops. Our story was warmly received, especially by those whose relatives served the nation in earlier wars. We seemed to confirm their hope that a younger generation of Jews continues to contribute to the country that made our success (and successful assimilation) possible.

Exact numbers on Jews in the military are hard to come by, because the military does not routinely report statistics on service members’ religious practices, and discrepancies exist among the organizations that do keep track. According to rough Defense Department estimates, there are currently 4,000 Jews in all of the services combined. A recent Military Times poll found that Jews comprise about one percent of active-duty military members, and just over two percent of the National Guard and Reserves. The director of the JWB Jewish Chaplains Council, Rabbi Harold L. Robinson, a retired Navy Admiral, points out that these figures don’t add up. (He believes it is likely that Jews under-report to DoD authorities and that many see Judaism as an ethnic identity rather than a religious identity.)

By contrast, during World War II, when the draft was in place, self-identified Jewish military members served at rates consistent with their ratio to the total population—around 3.5 percent of the total Armed Forces during that conflict, with numbers reaching 550,000. Institutional support was also much higher: 311 Jewish chaplains served on active duty during World War II. (“I enlisted immediately after Pearl Harbor,” wrote Rabbi Judah Nadich, the first Jewish chaplain to serve in the European theater. “At that time, I was a rabbi in Chicago, and I thought, if a rabbi should not be in the war, then who should?” ) Today, only 20 Jewish chaplains have answered the call to active duty, and almost 40 more serve through the Reserves or National Guard. This is of grave concern to the Jewish chaplains corps, and only partly because fewer chaplains means that the spiritual needs of fewer Jews can be served. Just as worrisome is the idea that in the future there may not be high-enough ranking Jewish chaplains who can suggest military policies that take into account the sensitivities of Jewish personnel.

Thinking about Jews in the American military reminded me of another siddur, which I unpacked earlier this summer following our cross-country move. It is bound in brown leather, and states, in black block letters (no Hebrew):

ABRIDGED PRAYER BOOK

FOR

JEWS IN THE ARMY AND NAVY

OF THE

UNITED STATES

Its copyright—Jewish Publication Society, 1917—tells only part of the story of its origin. We’re not sure how it came into our family, though Scott and I both suspect it may have belonged to a great uncle who served in World War II. It omits much that the newer edition of the siddur incorporates, but what it includes is far more telling. The current edition, for example, has the standard personal prayers, some of which are relevant to the military. There’s the the “Prayer for Moral Strength,” “Prayer on Starting a Journey,” “Memorial Prayer for Servicemen,” and “Prayer for Our Country,” along with extensive services, blessings, psalms, and hymns. The older siddur, however, includes “Confession on a Death Bed,” “Memorial Prayer for Those Fallen in Battle,” and the entire burial service, as well as the songs “America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “Hail! Columbia.” It’s no less Jewish, but far more overtly American. Perhaps Jewish servicemembers in those days felt they had to prove their patriotism, or perhaps these texts simply helped an immigrant population learn unfamiliar but important national anthems, which more seasoned Americans memorized in school. In any case, looking at the newer siddur after perusing the old one suggests a lessening in intensity of the expression of Jews’ Americanness. It also points to a greater comfort level in a hyphenated identity.

I decided to make a nest for both siddurs in the package I was preparing for Scott. I smoothed out a section of his flight suit, lay the books on top, and prepared to tape the box shut. Then I noticed a tiny booklet underneath a pile of his papers. The Aleph Institute’s contribution to the canon of Jewish-military literature is the smallest of all, physically—a 2-inch-by-3-inch stapled, camouflage pamphlet called “Courage & Safety Through Faith and Trust in G-d: A Message to the Jewish Serviceman.” According to the introduction, it’s based on a talk with Rabbi Joseph I. Shneerson, who was the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe and died in 1950. (The pamphlet was originally published during World War II, and reissued after September 11.) I placed it next to the siddurim, and covered all three with the sleeves of Scott’s flight suit, as if in an embrace. But something nagged at me. I picked up the camouflage booklet again, and reread the section entitled “Faith—The Basis of Confidence.” It begins:

The degree of hope and confidence possessed by a Jew depends on the strength of his faith. The very faithful Jew is always full of hope, and consequently he is calm and courageous under the most trying circumstances.

Recently a reporter interviewing me about Standing By, my memoir, asked, toward the end of our conversation, if my faith helped me overcome the formidable challenges of my husband’s last deployment.

“You mean faith in God?” I asked, surprised. I write about and reflect upon religion quite a bit, especially the idea of faith in a time of war. These ideas are even more relevant now that I’m preparing to read the ominous words of the U’Netaneh Tokef, the High Holiday prayer asserting that God will decree who will live and who will die. Strangely, her question had never crossed my mind.

“Of course,” she answered.

“I believe in God,” I said, carefully, not wanting to lie or sound arrogant. “But I have faith in the training the military has given my husband and his squadron, and it gives me the confidence to know that they can handle any challenge.”

She was quiet. I was quiet. It was, obviously, the wrong answer. Then again, I’m neither calm nor courageous under these trying circumstances and maybe that explains why.

Alison Buckholtz is the author of Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War.

The High Holidays—and these High Holidays in particular—have been pushing me to think more about cyclicality. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we dust off the melodies, prayers, and tropes used only at this time of year. Simchat Torah represents the end of a cycle of Torah reading, and the beginning of a new one. Growing up in a large college town in the Midwest, it struck me that the High Holidays coincided with other vital cycles: the return of students to the college campus a few blocks away after a quiet summer, the turning of the leaves and onset of crispness in the air, displacing humidity. As an adult, the holidays inspire another type of cyclical activity—an annual visit to Sable’s, the hole-in-the-wall smoked fish mecca on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

At work (I’m the business columnist at Newsweek and Slate), the fall—and again, this fall in particular—is always a period for reflecting on cycles. September and October are the periods when those in the financial world remind themselves that bad things can happen in the markets—because bad things did happen in the falls of 1929, 1987, and 2008. This year, the High Holidays nearly coincide with the one-year anniversary of the market meltdowns and ensuing bailouts. The High Holidays are the Yomim Nora’im—Days of Awe. But in Hebrew, nora means both awesome and terrible. And last fall, as Lehman Brothers failed, as the world’s financial markets seized up, as governments scrambled to stop a total meltdown, they were truly terrible days for the global economy.

The downturns in markets are cycles we’d just as soon forget. And yet, I can’t help thinking this year that we’ve been too forgetful of cyclicality—in our personal and professional lives. Had our leaders—and we as individual investors and consumers—been more mindful of the power of cycles, we might have avoided some portion of our current woes.

Until recently, an appreciation of cyclicality was deeply embedded in the way we thought about how the global economy worked—periods of growth followed by occasional contractions, which set the stage for more growth. But in the past two decades, the thinking changed. Technology, globalization, interconnectedness, improved management, and understanding borne of experience and the study of history gave us the impression that we could escape the tyranny of economic cycles. Alan Greenspan, elevated to chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987, came to believe—and convinced us—that the business cycle could be tamed. And to a large degree, he was right. Recessions, which had plagued the economy every three or four years, became rare. Between March 1991 and December 2007, the economy contracted for a single eight-month period, in 2001. And even that recession was brief and shallow by historical standards.

A certain arrogance sets in among those who believe they live outside history. But that’s precisely what the financial world came to believe. As prosperity rose and spread, the prospect of a recession, of a cyclical downturn in the economy, or in markets like housing and stocks, was increasingly dismissed as an impossibility. Housing prices would always rise. Loans would always be paid back. The unemployment rate would always remain low. And with every passing day, more money was wagered on this belief that the business cycle was a thing of the past. When you believe prices move in only one direction, it makes sense to borrow (and lend) as much money as you can. The intensity of this belief made the reckoning all the more difficult when it inevitably came last year. The recession—the sudden reassertion of the economic cycle that began in December 2007 and probably ended this summer—was so devastating to the fortunes of so many individuals and institutions because their financial models didn’t account for the possibility of a downturn. It’s as if they had built houses astride an active fault that would shatter at the merest tremor. And so we should approach this High Holiday season with a deeper appreciation of the importance of cyclicality in worldly affairs.

Finally, for me, at least, the High Holidays—and Yom Kippur in particular—represent an antidote to another type of cycle: the news cycle. Journalists have always been captive to the relentless rhythms of world affairs. But in the past several years, it’s gotten much worse. Time was, a reporter could unplug in the evening, or for the weekend, without missing a beat. Now? Not so much. It’s irresponsible to turn off the BlackBerry and avoid email. Editors kick copy back in the evening, and sources in Asia may only be available at five in the morning Eastern time. Amidst the raging storm of Twitter, magazine deadlines, the mandates of filing for the internet, phoning in to radio shows, and rushing to television studios, there are only a few places you can seek respite from the datasmog: airplanes and synagogue. Yom Kippur is probably the one day of the year I don’t check my email or consume any media—regardless of which company might be failing or which television network is calling. It’s a time for reflection and humility. For at least 24 hours, the economic and news cycles can spin without my presence.

Daniel Gross writes about business for Newsweek and Slate.

Have an apology of your own waiting to get out? It’s not too late to repent. Call Tablet Magazine’s Sorry Hotline at 718-360-4836, and tell us all about it.

When I went away to college, I tried going to Hillel High Holiday services, but I really hated it…>>

Since the holiday is commonly called the “Jewish New Year,” one would think Rosh Hashanah would mark the first day of the first month of the Hebrew calendar. It doesn’t: Tishrei, on the first day of which we celebrate this major holiday, is the calendar’s seventh month. Why, then, is it given the distinction of marking the new year?

This question is especially vexing considering that—like the old adage about two Jews and twice as many opinions—the Hebrew calendar marks several different occasions as New Year’s Day: For example, the first day of Nissan, the first month, is the yardstick according to which we measure the years of the reign of kings, while if we were concerned with the tithing of animals, the date to keep in mind would have been the first of Elul, the sixth month.

Seven, however, had always had special meaning in Judaism; although Rosh Hashanah itself isn’t mentioned by name in the Bible, God, speaking to Moses in Leviticus 23:24, imagines the holiday as a sort of Sabbath for the soul: “On the first day of the seventh month,” says the Almighty, “you are to have a day of rest, a sacred assembly commemorated with trumpet blasts.”

These blasts come courtesy of the shofar, or ram’s horn, which is blown to awaken the congregation from its spiritual slumber and drive worshippers to repent. In the Mishna, the holiday is also referred to as “the day of judgment.” The world, the rabbis tell us, is assessed four times a year: on Passover, God passes judgment on the earth’s fertility for the coming year; on Shavuot, he judges the fruit of the trees, and on Sukkot, the rain. But on Rosh Hashanah, it’s man’s turn to stand trial.

Judaism being a legalistic religion, the procedure is described in detail. The Talmud, in the tractate on Rosh Hashanah, tells us that on that day God opens three celestial accounting books: in one He writes the names of the righteous, who will go on to live another year; and in the second, the names of the wicked, who shall perish from this earth before the year is over. The third, and most heavily populated, contains the names of those indeterminate souls whose fate hangs in the balance. They are then put on the heavenly waiting list, and have until Yom Kippur—the 10-day period known as Yamim Noraim (Days of Awe) or Asseret Yamei Teshuva (Ten Days of Repentance)—to repent for their past sins. And as we can never know for sure just which book has our name in it, goes the logic, best to join the atoners. The books, tradition has it, are sealed on Yom Kippur, which is why a common greeting in the period between the two holidays is le’shana tova tikatevu ve’tikhatemu—may your name be written and sealed for a good year.

Casting away sin, however, is serious business, so the custom of tashlikh was created, most likely in 13th-century Germany. The practice derives from the Book of Micah, which commands us in the penultimate verse of its last chapter, to cast all our sins “into the depths of the sea.” On the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Jews congregate by bodies of flowing water—usually rivers, seas, or, when necessary, faucets—toss in bits of bread and recite portions of Micah, and thereafter emerge cleansed and ready to repent.

WHAT DO WE EAT AND WHY?

You know all about the apples dipped in honey, which we eat to symbolize our wishes for a sweet new year. But did you know about the Rosh Hashanah seder? Though not celebrated as universally as the meal on Passover, it is nonetheless customary in many Jewish communities to hold a culinary ceremony on Rosh Hashanah’s first evening, chomping on myriad foods—from the head of a fish to leeks and gourds and black-eyed beans to pomegranates—and expounding on the symbolism of each one. The fish’s head, for example, represents our desire to be in the lead, and the pomegranate our wish to see our rights and good deeds become as plentiful as that fruit’s seeds. Some foods, however, are eaten because their names make for convenient puns in Hebrew or Aramaic: the carrot, for example, or gezer in Hebrew, is eaten to ward off gzerot, evil decrees, against the Jews. Then too, there is the challah. On Rosh Hashanah, the bread that appears year-round in its braided form is made on this holiday into a round, swirled shape, often enhanced with raisins. There are different reasons to explain the variation, among them that the circular shape has, like the world, no beginning and no end, or that the swirl looks like a crown, alluding to the head—or Rosh—of the year.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

This being a holiday, all the standard issurim, or forbidden things, prohibited on Shabbat apply.

During services, we recite two special prayers. The first is the U’Netaneh Tokef, a beautiful medieval poem about the solemnity of the day. “On Rosh Hashanah,” it reads, “will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die…. But repentance, prayer, and charity can remove the evil of the decree.”

The other prayer, the El Maleh Rachamim, is read frequently in the Days of Awe, and is a prayer for the souls of the departed, believed to be watching over those of the living in these crucial times.

And then there’s the shofar. Although it is traditionally blasted (that’s the technical term for what one does with a shofar, and the one who does it is called the blaster) every day during the month of Elul, the month preceding Tishrei, it is on Rosh Hashanah that awakening is expected to begin in earnest. The horn makes three sounds: tekiah, one long blast; teruah, a series of nine staccato blasts; and shevarim, a series of three broken sounds. Saadia Gaon, the great 10th-century rabbi, wrote extensively about the spiritual importance of the shofar, seeing in the instrument everything from an allusion to the ram Abraham sacrificed instead of Isaac to a reference to Sinai, where a shofar was blasted as God delivered his divine covenant to the Israelites. Whatever the meaning, it is considered a great mitzvah to hear the shofar on Rosh Hashanah.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

Alas, no. With the exception of the prayers mentioned above, this is a day of reflection on personal deeds, past behaviors, and future resolutions.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Groove with Birthright’s delightfully bizarre holiday video, featuring a shofar-blasted rabbi and crunk rapper Lil’ John.

• Drool at Rosh Hashanah treats, Sephardi style.

• Curl up with S.Y. Agnon’s stunning anthology Days of Awe. Alternatively, take a gander at a history of the mahzor, the prayer book used on the High Holidays.

• Download your own iPhone Shofar app.

• Mix up a pomegranate cocktail and make the Days of Awe slightly less terrible.

According to Steven Bayme at the American Jewish Committee, U.S. Jewish organizations have lost 25 percent of their wealth since the market went south (though Bernie Madoff’s graft surely helped fritter away institutional funds and private wealth that would have gone toward donations, too). As a result, writes Rachel Zoll at the AP, many synagogues are doing what they can to offer free admission to Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana services, including putting off repairs, cutting jobs, and canceling programs.

Dilemma for High Holidays [Chicago Sun-Times]
Synagogues Under Stress as High Holy Days Approach [AP]

One wants to see the hand of Adonai Himself in the uncanny timing whereby the High Holidays always fall smack in the middle of the pennant race and postseason, tempting the talented faithful. Anyway, given that the Sox are currently a mere 6.5 games behind the Yankees, we’d guess most New Yorkers are hoping Youkilis has so many sins that he has no choice but to Kol Nidre the night away.

An Unholy Move by ESPN [New York Post]
Green, Koufax, and Greenberg—Same Dilemma, Different Decisions [ESPN Classic]
Previously: Look, Jews in Baseball!
Yankees Trade For a Jew

I especially enjoyed the tunes with darkly appealing minor melodies, like “Ma Lecha Hayam,” or guttural Aramaic lyrics, like “Chad Gadya.” Of them all, “Ha Lachma Anya” (“This Is the Bread of Affliction”) was my favorite. So it might be nothing more than nostalgia that made me such a sucker for the jazzified version of the tune on saxophonist Idit Shner’s debut album, Tuesday’s Blues, flooding me with Passover memories at a time better suited to thoughts of the upcoming High Holidays. But I don’t think so.

Tuesday’s Blues is loaded with jazzed-up versions of Jewish and Israeli melodies, from “Lamidbar” to “Adon Haselichot.” But Shner, who played in the Israeli Air Force jazz band and earned a doctorate in saxophone and jazz studies at the University of North Texas (she’s now an assistant professor of jazz and classical saxophone at the University of Oregon), outdid herself with “Ha Lachma.”

For one thing, she recast it as a sprightly major melody, transforming the dirge-like original into something sunny and bright. She also installed a groovy descending bass line and punctuated the bridge with a couple of stop-time punches during which her backing trio drops out and she declaims the melody alone. It’s an old trick, and an effective one—the herky-jerky character of the bridge creates a sense of tension that is relieved by, and contrasts nicely with, the rest of the tune.

And then there’s the performance itself. Shner starts slow but by the end of her solo, she’s hammering away at the tune’s reinvented harmonies like a blacksmith beating hot iron, inventing little themes and throwing off showers of variations on them. Yet her rhythm section is so good—perfect, in fact—that you could tune her out entirely and still be left with one of the best trio performances in recent memory. Not that you’d want to, of course.

There’s yet more Passover material on tsuker-zis, the latest in a series of discs by trumpeter Frank London and singer Lorin Sklamberg that offer fresh interpretations of sacred Jewish music. Having already tackled nigunim and zemirot, the two long-time Klezmatics colleagues now turn their attention to Hasidic holiday songs, aided and abetted by electric guitarist Knox Chandler, Armenian-American oud player Ara Dinkjian, and North Indian percussionist Deep Singh.

Despite a few high-energy tracks—including a Chandler-driven version of an alphabetical acrostic Passover song (whose 25-word-long title lies beyond the scope of this document) that sounds pretty much the way a whirling dervish looks—the album as a whole exudes a mellow, meditative vibe: music to think about, or at least by. This might have something to do with Sklamberg’s light, reedy voice, with its intimations of emotional depth and fragility. Or it could be the result of the relaxed tempos and open, quasi-ambient textures favored on many of the tracks. But I suspect it is mostly the fault of Dinkjian, whose every pause and flourish threatens to take you out of this world and into another, far more interesting one.

The kind of musicianship displayed on both discs is wondrous to hear, and I have to admit that I tend not to expect it from singers, who, for all their talents, are often much less musically sophisticated than the instrumentalists who back them. That is most definitely not the case, however, with Ayelet Rose Gottlieb.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb

CREDIT: Jason Wu

Whereas her previous recording, Mayim Rabim, was based exclusively on the Song of Songs, her latest, Upto Hear from Here, draws on a much more varied and uneven collection of texts. Some of Gottlieb’s self-penned lyrics, like the ones to “Life Is a Structure That Is (Accept It!)” and “Pomegranate Man,” the opening track whose fruity subject does provide a tenuous link to the upcoming holiday season, recall the bullshit that Mike Myers used to spew when doing his caricature of a chain-smoking beat poet. Then again, Gottlieb’s “Venezia,” a Middle Eastern-flavored composition dedicated to her grandmother and delivered in a mixture of English and Hebrew, with what sound like home audio recordings woven into the mix, is absolutely heartbreaking. Elsewhere, Gottlieb borrows some intriguing lines from the likes of Rumi, John Cage, and Agi Mishol.

In the end, however, the quality of the lyrics is almost irrelevant. Words play second fiddle to sound here, and sound is where Gottlieb shines. She’s a singer who thinks like an instrumentalist, and you can hear that in the very first bars of “Pomegranate Man,” when she sings wordlessly along with trumpeter Avishai Cohen and saxophonist Loren Stillman, blending in like just another horn player. Whether dipping into straight-ahead jazz, rummaging through her bag of gospel, soul, and Middle Eastern licks, or tossing off an avant-garde gesture, Gottlieb is always an integral part of the ensemble. That she’s able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her bandmates in so challenging an idiom—one marked by constantly shifting rhythms, ambiguous harmonies, and constant allusions to disparate genres—makes it even easier to forgive her lyrical lapses. I don’t know if Upto Here From Here contains quite as many delights as a pomegranate has seeds, but it has enough to make up for the lousy poetry.

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Last July, journalist Eric Umansky and his fiancée Sara headed to Damascus for a six-month fellowship to study Arabic. After their daily lessons, they roamed the city, discovering loquacious taxi drivers, a lively café culture, and, come the High Holidays, one of the few—if not only—operating synagogues in a city once populated by tens of thousands of Jews.

Eric is back now, full of stories from his trip. He shares a few of them, the most dramatic of which involves a rather disturbing run-in with the synagogue’s purported “Shabbos goy.”

Left: Sara and Eric in the foyer at the Orient Club, one of Damascus’s finest banquet halls. Above their heads, portraits of President Hafez al-Assad and “Junior.” Right: Congregants at the synagogue.

Photos courtesy of Eric Umansky

Beth Simchat Torah bills itself as “New York City’s Synagogue for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Jews, Our Families, and Our Friends”—so perhaps it’s only fitting that its largest functions are so fabulous, with views of the sun setting over the Hudson River as Kol Nidre commences. I attended once, half expecting Liza Minnelli to lead the Amidah, but the spectacle of so many gay Jews turning the sow’s ear of rejection into the silk purse of self-acceptance made me uncomfortable. At Yom Kippur, it seemed to me then, pride and humility are not ideal pew-mates, especially squeezed in so tight.

Space is not a problem at our synagogue: at Union Temple, there aren’t enough congregants. Like all bar mitzvah candidates, our son Erez is therefore required to attend High Holiday services and most Sabbath services, too—which he does, more or less gladly, along with Andy and our younger son, Lucas. Andy actually enjoys being a part of the synagogue community, in part because it’s the one he grew up in; he has even joined the board, whose meetings he tries to hide from me as other spouses might hide assignations. He comes home with the telltale taste of Sanka on his lips.

I, on the other hand, go to services only under duress. When asked why, I usually offer the glib explanation that I had enough religion in my childhood to last the rest of my life. That excuse worked well enough when I was single and childless, but a 12-year-old son creates a different level of expectation. How will he learn to take his religion seriously, or at least regularly, if I don’t? A fair question, but one that makes the bar mitzvah process into a hurdle that the whole family must jump in tandem, even as (for similar reasons) we are hectored to attend the school play, root at the basketball game, bake for the PTA, volunteer in the classroom, and spend weekends inculcating good values by attending family hunger-awareness seminars.

The crushing weight of these expectations reduces them all to more-or-less equivalent chores. I now explain my absence from services by saying that in the division of household duties according to talent and taste, Andy got synagogue and I got laundry. To me the two activities offer roughly the same annoyances: the rhythmic droning, the endless cycle of rising and sitting, the lack of God. But with laundry there is the compensation of clean clothes when it’s over, whereas services leave me feeling vaguely dirty. Is it not, after all, hypocritical for an atheist to pray, or pretend to?

If the problem were merely atheism, though, I should feel comfortable at Union Temple; like most Reform and Reconstructionist congregations, it does not seek to challenge one’s unbelief. (Andy’s an atheist, too.) But in fact I have usually felt less comfortable in such congregations. My family came, as it were, from the other direction. I grew up attending a suburban Conservative synagogue that had been founded—by my parents, among others—in order to escape the stuffy formalities and high church pretensions of the urban congregations their parents had favored. The hoped-for distinction was evident in the name they chose. My grandfather belonged to Beth El, “house of God”; my parents and their friends dubbed their new shul “Beth Hillel,” after the scholar rather than the deity. Later, the two synagogues merged and awkwardly hyphenated their names.

Beth Hillel was meant to offer a more personal though still rigorous Judaism, and for a few years did so. But reform movements, especially perhaps “conservative” ones, evolve their own orthodoxies. As more families were drawn to the spirit of the young temple, more space was needed; a new sanctuary required donors to finance it. Donors expect to be listened to in matters of practice and policy, and do not always want moral instruction. They may get it anyway. After 30 years of blowing the shofar during the High Holidays, my father was summarily replaced one fall by a man who had made a very large gift to the congregation. When that man was unable to coax even a single good tekiah out of his dinky ram’s horn, a voice from the pews called out, “There is a God.”

That was my mother.

My father was partly reinstated in his duties and forgave the insult. But my mother had little patience for the mealy-mouthed. She didn’t mind disagreements but despised obfuscation. She mistrusted most rabbis (and included the rabbinate on a list of professions she deemed too dangerous for her sons to consider) not because of what they might preach but because she thought they were professionally insincere. From the moment a new young rabbi began his tenure at Beth Hillel in 1991 with a Rosh Hashana sermon urging toleration but not acceptance of homosexuals, she sought to reeducate him, never more so than when I was disinvited from speaking there—on the subject of life as a gay Jewish parent—because he felt that my remarks might be too controversial.

Eight years later, at Rosh Hashana this fall, this controversy rose again. The High Holidays are, for rabbis and other professional Jews, a chance to roll out their best rhetoric and grapple with hot-potato issues like “the Palestinian question.” In the weeks before the High Holidays, Arnold M. Eisen, the Chancellor Designate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, sent out a fundraising letter and gave speeches that set the tone for this year’s sermon at Beth Hillel (and, presumably, at other Conservative synagogues around the country, since JTS is the leading training institution for American Conservatism). Without specifically naming his bogeyman, Professor Eisen darkly alluded to the “crucial distinction between pluralism and relativism,” and urged Conservative Jews to stand firm for diversity without “overreaching.”

The rabbi at Beth Hillel was less artfully vague about his subject. Unlike Eisen, he noted in his Rosh Hashana sermon that the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly is expected to release in December its responsa—official guidelines on religious practice—regarding the role of gays and lesbians in Conservative Judaism. Can they be married? Can they be ordained? Then he asked a pair of questions meant to model fairness and balance:

Given the explicit prohibitions in the Torah against homosexuality, how can we endorse the gay lifestyle and open the ranks of Jewish religious leadership to those who are homosexual? On the other hand, given what we know about homosexuality, given our best medical information which confirms that homosexuality is much more about nature than it is about nurture or choice, how can we in good conscience not accept as equal partners in the Jewish community those who are gay or lesbian? There are no simple answers to these questions.

Actually, there are simple answers to these questions, but apparently the rabbi was not aware of them. Instead, he agonized for several more pages (the sermon was published online in the synagogue newsletter) about the difficult mechanics of change, as if the issue were not one of values but of procedure. To his credit, he pointed out that some of the controversial responsa the movement had issued in the past had worked out tolerably, including those permitting the ordination of women and the use of automobiles on Sabbath.

But there was a limit, he said. The possibility of gay rabbis and gay weddings in the Conservative movement, he said, was similar to the evolutionary “overshooting” that had produced the peacock, with its “ostentatious” tail, awkward flight, and other “abnormal” and self-defeating characteristics. He suggested that by evolving too fast toward acceptance of gays and lesbians, Judaism might “become the peacock, an extraordinarily attractive bird, but a bird which has changed too much, even for its own good.”

I’m not making this up.

Perhaps because my mother was not there to shout from the pews—she died five years ago—it did not occur to the rabbi that there were gay people, or their parents, siblings and friends, in the packed sanctuary that day. There were, of course. I have spoken to many of them now. One sent letters to members of the congregation, asking them to protest the rabbi’s comments. Another, a founding member, told me that she and a friend, whose son had died of AIDS, held hands and cried. She thought of resigning from the synagogue, as did my brother, though both reevaluated their decisions when their anger subsided.

But my father’s anger did not subside. It was not primarily directed at the rabbi; at 80, my father is not looking to burn bridges and, anyway, he slept through part of the sermon. Instead, he wrote to Professor Eisen at the Seminary:

I am a founder of my synagogue some 45 years ago. I was the third president and a board member for about 20 years. I still am a shofar blower and have been since the synagogue’s inception. My father was honored by the JTS over 60 years ago and was a member of our merged synagogue at the time of his death. My son is gay. He and his partner have adopted two newborn boys. Erez, the eldest, will become a Bar Mitzvah next year in a Reform temple in Brooklyn. How dare you have the chutzpa to still debate the standing in the Jewish community of this boy’s parents and then preach the all-inclusive message in your letter. I see this as sheer hypocrisy.

My family and I have been supporters of the Seminary for now three generations. No more. I cannot support their policies, their lack of empathy, and their debates over overt discrimination. I am not happy over my decision, but my feelings about the dignity of my children and respect for my father make this decision necessary.

Though he thought he had dealt with the matter sufficiently, a few weeks later, when asked to make his annual congregational pledge, my father found that he wasn’t able to write the check. In a letter to the president of the board, he said he would resign from the synagogue he had helped to build, with his own hands, if it could not find a way to stand up for the full enfranchisement of its gay members. In an email to me, he added, “I am sure your mother would have handled it in a more creative way, and I consulted her about it. I did not get an answer.”

I had not meant to deal with gayness in this bar mitzvah blog. It seemed, at first, irrelevant to the anxieties of faith and finance that most Jewish parents feel as their sons and daughters strike 13. But the Rosh Hashana sermon at Beth Hillel, now emailed all over the country, and especially my father’s response, brought me up short. Suddenly this issue seemed crucial to decoding my anxiety about confirming my son as a Jew. It wasn’t so much the Conservative movement’s impending policy decision that disturbed me as the way that policy was being discussed. It is one thing to disagree on gay marriage, but turning gay people into a problematic “other” just to score points seems unkind and ominous. I would have thought that Jewish leaders, of all people, would be wary of discussing groups of human beings in the third person as a difficulty to be resolved. Haven’t we heard this kind of language before? Something about rootless cosmopolitans and the Jewish problem?

Well, this was the gayish problem, and I couldn’t avoid it any longer, if only because its final solution will determine what kind of faith I am asking my son to take part in. Of course, on the face of it, it’s absurd to state that the desire of gay people to participate in Jewish life, marry, or become rabbis is a threat to Judaism, especially in comparison to the actual threats posed by (gay and nongay) people who want to leave Jewish life, divorce, or escape from rabbis. Judaism is not being forced evolutionarily beyond its natural state into useless shapes by those who would like to join it. Gay people have been playing a part in Judaism for centuries, as congregants, rabbis, parents, dissenters. The only issue now is whether they may do so honestly.

A more accurate metaphor would be one that notes how evolution is a two-way street, encouraging any adaptation that leads to survival. While some living things have therefore grown more complex through the ages, becoming stronger and more resilient, others have grown simpler and dumber. In that regard, the argument about “overshooting” is not appreciably different from the arguments made by anti-integration forces during the Jim Crow era, or Christian literalists who defy evolution not only as a school subject but as a part of nature, a part of God. I do not recognize a vision of Jewish life—especially from the pulpit—that seeks to narrow instead of expand its meaning. I would rather Judaism be a peacock than a paramecium.

But one of the problems with Judaism, and one of its strengths, is that what it “must be” is not prescribed. This allows for a good deal of hypocrisy. The Torah, a gay Orthodox friend informs me, is said to have 70 faces; it matters less which one we look upon than that we’re looking. Well, 70 faces is fine for a book. In a religious leader, even two is too many.

At its best, Judaism is an urgent moral confrontation with the world, not a series of abstract discussions on parliamentary matters. Growing up as an atheist Conservative Jew fulfilling obligations without faith, I used to look down on the Reform movement as too lax: a faith without obligations. Main Line Reform was the brazenly secular name of the local Reform temple—though some of us snootily called it “Main Line Reform Church.” Was anything so easy worth doing? And so part of my anxiety about Erez’s becoming a bar mitzvah was that it would be happening in the kind of congregation whose outlook once looked like Judaism Lite to me.

I don’t feel that way anymore. While Beth Hillel was fending off fantastical peacocks this Rosh Hashana, the rabbi at Union Temple was talking about global warming and the Jewish responsibility to save the earth. The gayish question never came up; we should be so lucky as to have the sanctuary flooded with homosexuals and bisexuals and who-knows-what-all wanting to marry as Jews, or serve on the pulpit. Reform Judaism cannot address my specifically religious dilemmas, but it’s hard to ignore what it offers instead: a tradition that would welcome me—and not just my son—as a man.

At the time, David had begun to draft a Rosh Hashanah sermon about the ways in which people walk around with invisible, private pain, and how we can support them even if we are unaware of its precise dimensions. In that sermon, he would have described our experience with infertility as one example of such pain. And in that sermon, our experience would have had a happy ending—or at least a happier new beginning. I started picking outfits in my mind. I couldn’t wait.

Then just before yontif, we learned that not only was the prenatal testing indeed behind us, but so, too, was our pregnancy. The baby, we were later informed, had been perfectly healthy. And the procedure we had chosen carried less than one percent chance of loss. But we, as it turned out, were the rare family who bore the heavy weight of that slim chance.

Our wounds too raw to expose, David revised the sermon. Last Rosh Hashanah, I held a friend’s hand as I listened to my husband’s words knowing exactly what was missing, feeling as if the “hidden pain” he was describing hung visibly between us like a thin, sharp wire that would cut me if I moved. And on Yom Kippur I listened more closely to the Unetaneh tokef than ever before. Who shall live and who shall die, indeed. Our creation, our creature, our tiny living soul: its life’s limit had been fixed, its destiny ordained. Like the angels, I shuddered.

This year, 5767, I got my Rosh Hashanah sermon. I am far along enough with baby Kinehora that my pregnancy is public knowledge, my belly practically public space, though it doesn’t always get me a seat on the subway, but that’s for another day. It was easy to select an outfit for the occasion; I have only so many maternity items (and people will just have to understand why I traded my trademark thrilling heels for arch-supporting clogs). David spoke, this year, about diverse approaches to prayer— including his own, last year, at our darkest time.

But my swelling belly was not the only reason I could listen and be okay. It was also because between last year’s Unetaneh tokef and this year’s, recited last weekend on Rosh Hashanah and to be recited again in a few days on Yom Kippur, I learned a little bit more about how to live. How to live all year long, that is, with the very uncertainty that we feel at the end of Yom Kippur, during Ne’ilah, when, we imagine, the gates begin to close.

There’s another reason David and I hid our pain last year. Just after our own loss, one of the synagogue’s families suffered an exponentially greater one. Their older daughter, a bright 28-year-old, was killed in a car accident on the Friday before Rosh Hashanah. The community convulsed with grief. And David and I were reminded that no matter how hard one works for, clings to, or focuses one’s life on a particular vision—get pregnant get pregnant get pregnant—other things happen. And not just to your own vision. Terrible things that you weren’t terribly worried about happen. All beyond your control.

Happy things you had nothing to do with happen, too, all the time. I’m not saying the lesson is that “tragedy lurks around every corner!” (Hard as my mom worked to teach me.) When I got pregnant this time, baruch hashem, I found myself a bit calmer. I certainly didn’t shrug off the possibility of miscarriage or other disaster; far from it. Believe me, I still haven’t. But I worked hard to separate the fact that we chose the procedure that ended our first pregnancy from the notion that we had any control whatsoever over the outcome. And this time, unless I hurl myself down the stairs like in old movies—which, I hear, is actually unlikely to do harm—I have found myself somewhat sturdier in the belief that my pregnancy is going to do what my pregnancy is going to do. And meanwhile, David could get hit by a bus. God forbid, but you see what I’m saying. Of course we have agency; I don’t believe in “fate.” But there is great freedom in accepting, living with, embracing, or—when appropriate—willfully ignoring uncertainty. The alternative, really, can make you crazy.

That’s also why I’ve been somewhat mellow, especially this time around, about superstition. It’s traditional for Jews not to have showers, to leave the baby-to-be’s room empty until his or her advent, and not to disclose names until after the birth. Just this summer, my cousins—who made me a beaded red bindel to ward off the evil eye—practically disinvited me from their father’s unveiling: too superstitious about bellies in graveyards.

I declined several kind offers to host baby showers—due more to a “Jews don’t do such things” gut feeling than to a belief that accepting a new pair of booties would cause us to give birth to an alien. It was also a karmic gesture to my infertile sistren: Should they suffer like I have? Instead, we planned two separate non-shower events to celebrate with friends and receive their non-Playskool blessings. While many mothers find a certain pregnancy book, the one that rhymes with “Mutts to Inspect When You’re Collecting,” the embodiment of evil, I do not believe that my hasty rite-of-passage purchase thereof last year was in any way related to our loss. It killed me to throw out the “pregnancy journal” I’d started, along with various other mementos of the first time—in fact, I made David do it—but it’s not as if our loss would have been easier without them.

For me, it’s come down to addressing this question: Which will make me more insane, having baby items in the house before she’s born, or not having them in the house before she’s born? In response, I have made utterly irrational and inconsistent decisions. The hand-me-down onesies stay in the hall, but the hand-me-down Boppies (current total: three. Please, no more.) make it into the nursery—I mean, den closet. The crib we ordered is ready for delivery, but we told Schneider’s we’d rather wait. In other words, I improvise. I ask myself what I can live with; the answers don’t always make sense. It feels good to wear the bindel, but mainly as a reminder that if God forbid something goes wrong, my family will be there.

Sometimes I wonder if writing about baby Kinehora in the first place will come back to haunt me. Sometimes I look around my expecting moms group and think, “One of us might not make it.” And when I hear Unetaneh tokef again, I may shudder anew. What will happen to me, our baby, our friends, our families this year? I cannot know, I cannot control it. All I can know is how it feels, at this instant, to be 34 weeks pregnant (currently, since you asked, it feels like someone’s doing Tae Bo in my belly), how it feels to watch my husband lead us in prayer, how it feels to mark the passage of another year, how it feels to be sitting, right where I am, in my sensible clogs, right now. To me—as I have learned, in a harder way than I might have liked—that is how it feels to live.