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

Congressman Ron Klein: War remembrance conflicts with Rosh Hashanah [South Florida Sun Sentinel]
Lawmakers seek date change for remembrance weekend [JTA]

Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, commenced on a Saturday, and would be followed on the very next Saturday by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. These particular Saturdays happened to be pay days for the miners, and the coincidence made it particularly hard for the Jewish merchants of Silver Bow. Those who were sincere in their beliefs did not worry unduly about this coincidence. They were willing, even eager to sacrifice profits for the sake of their religion. Moses was such a one. Much as he loved his store and greatly as he looked forward to these golden pay days, he did not for a moment tolerate the thought of keeping his store open for business.

On the holy days it was his custom to rise at six so that he might be in the synagogue an hour later. Rebecca, too, was up at that early hour and roused the children. Since the holidays occurred in the latter part of September, it was already cold in Montana. In Roumania, it had been pleasant to wake in the autumnal morning and walk through the rich red and gold countryside to the Shule. Moses and Rebecca remembered the voices of the Roumanian congregation, a steady humming sound pierced by the rising supplications of the rabbi, a golden overtone in a full-bodied symphony. The contrast of Silver Bow was overwhelming and depressing, particularly on Rosh Hashana. It did not matter so much on Yom Kippur, for that was the day of mourning, of deep grief for the sins committed during the past twelve months. The dark skies of Silver Bow and the penetrating winds that swept through the town were in keeping with the doleful nature of the day.

Cold as it was, no fire was started in any of the stoves; and whatever servant there happened to be in the house at the time was given the day off. It was not proper that servants should work on the holy days, no matter what their beliefs might be. Rebecca and Moses dressed in their cold bedchamber, and the children shivered in their own icy rooms. There was no hot coffee for breakfast, but Rebecca served cake and wine. Since Yom Kippur was a day of fasting, there was nothing to warm up congealed bodies, and the Singermanns formed a frozen, despondent group when they left their house to attend the services in the synagogue. They left a gloomy, cold house to emerge into a dim street harsh with smoke and sulphur. But it was comforting to reach the modest Shule, dark and musty, warmed by the presence of many worshipers. The men with their hats worn low over their eyes, their shoulders draped by the inevitable tallith, or shawl, stood in many attitudes; some were bent low over the benches peering with a desperate concentration into the Hebrew prayer books; others stood with their eyes to the wall as though ashamed to show their faces agonized by grief and supplication; and still others, as if pursued by their daily temptations, strode up and down the narrow aisles, praying in their stride, beating their breasts rhythmically, on the heart, on the heart, on the heart. For it is from the heart that one must worship sincerely to Jehovah; it is as though the heart is a door to the soul, and one is beating upon that door, crying, “Open! Open! Open! I am without and lonely, and I would be in Thy presence, O Lord! Adenoi Elehenu, Adenoi Echod!”

On this Yom Kippur, Moses occupied a bench near the altar, and it was to this corner of the Shule that he shepherded his flock, his wife and five children. Michael was still too young to appear in the synagogue, and Mary O’Brien had taken him to her home in Walkerville for die day. Last year Joseph had been here, praying by the side of his father; but now he was married and his wife was a Christian Scientist. There was a yawning gap where he should have stood, his slim shoulders draped by the tallith. There had been for Moses a kind of security in the knowledge of Joseph’s presence in a Shule, a warmth of kinship that cannot be far from God. But now he was gone—sold to the devil! “O Lord, have mercy upon my son and show him the right way!” Moses prayed, and his voice transformed the ugly wooden shack into an immortal place. He sang and all else seemed fugitive and dying; but his songs were one with the million nights that have passed over the earth since Abraham and David and Solomon. “This was my son, Joseph. Now I am bereft of him. Forgive Thou his many sins, O Lord! Adenoi Elehenu, Adenoi Echod! Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, The Lord is One!”

At noon time, Moses went outside for a breath of air. He walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the synagogue, refreshing his body and lungs and feeling the wind in his eyes. Members of the congregation stood about in small groups holding earnest conversation with one another, seeking diversion and rest in gossip—aye, even on the Day of Atonement! When the afternoon prayers began, they would be able to renew their supplications to Jehovah with a more devout and strengthened ardor. After a minute, Moses became aware that they were casting furtive, uneasy glances in his direction. They would look at him and then resume talking with great heat and animation. He caught detached words. . . . “His son, Joseph . . . Such a shame . . . the son keeps open his store on Yom Kippur. . . . With my own eyes . . . disgrace . . . Only of money he thinks. . . . Should I have such a son, I would hang my head. . . . And we keep our stores closed that such a one . . .”

Moses knew that they were talking of his oldest son. He dared not meet their reproachful eyes, yet every word they spoke was a wound in his body. Usually the most courageous of men, he was moved now by a desire to flee from these critical eyes and hide away. He looked towards the door of the synagogue and saw David emerge, David so tall and strong, with grace in his walk and assurance in his manner. Moses felt suddenly free, and as he moved forward to meet his third son, he thought that Jehovah would not hold Joseph so much against him since there was David, so alive, so vivid in his young beauty.

But as David caught sight of his father, a frown appeared on his forehead, and his eyes blinked with troubled anger. For a moment, Moses was hurt by his son’s expression; but it turned out that it was not with his father that David was angry. On the contrary, this was one of those rare occasions when David was thoroughly sympathetic with his father’s attitude.

“Did you know that Joseph was keeping his store open today?” David whispered, drawing Moses to the edge of the walk. “Everybody’s talking about it and cursing at us behind our backs. It’s a shame!” David kicked at the rocks in the street.

“It was not like this before he married that woman,” said Moses, throwing the blame on Daisy rather than on his favorite son. “She’s to blame.” And he added in Yiddish, “She should roll in the dust!”

“It ain’t so much because I’m religious that I care,” said David truthfully, and Moses looked moody at these words. “But how does it look for other people? Every Jewish store in the block closed for the holidays, and his open with the Goyem!”

“It is the woman,” persisted Moses stubbornly, but he only half believed his own words. “She is to blame. She with her Christian Science! Do you think I don’t know? I have seen her go into the church with the Christians. But why do I talk? He is no more a son of mine. Let her give him flesh of the swine to eat.”

The worshipers returned into the synagogue. The rabbi’s voice that had been droning on and on during the interlude, in a kind of passive monotone, was once more raised to its high pitch of intense supplication. Its sharpness, its vehemence of expression stabbed the quietness of the street and recalled the men and women to their various places within. “It is beneath me to talk from such a son,” said Moses and returned within the Shule, leaving David to stand alone on the sidewalk.

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.