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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was lucky to have been there. Participating, politics took on an emotional poignancy they rarely do, and the spiritual issues we are commanded to think about during Yom Kippur—including those raised in the haftarah, from Isaiah, in which we are exhorted to think of what kind of fast God truly desires—were made as real and personal as my learning has told me they should be. Besides all of which, it was immensely moving to be a part of a group of Jews practicing our religion publicly and peaceably; I schepped naches from the organizers, who were very clearly putting hard-earned Jewish summer camp experience to good use; I felt like I was part of a community, in the way that the concept of the minyan is supposed to encourage.

Halal vendors dotted the outskirts, prompting one smart aleck to remark that we were their worst nightmare: several hundred Jews who weren’t eating. A couple onlookers claimed that the firm Brown Brothers Harriman, whose very tall building we all faced when looking east, had helped finance the Nazis, and that Bush’s grandfather had been a part of it. This cynic chalked the rambling up to dorm-room investigative journalism, until a quick Google revealed it to be totally true. Though I tend not to be one for crunchier variants of Judaism, the few moments of schmaltz were outweighed by the moral seriousness of the larger mission. And the politics should have been welcome to, let’s say, the open-minded. “I will be more accountable for Palestine. Aleinu,” was followed by, “I will be more accountable for Israel. Aleinu.” Afterward, a few folks pulled out instruments—a violin, a guitar—and there was dancing. “Early rabbinic texts call Yom Kippur one of the two happiest days of the year,” George Davis, our rabbi for the evening, told us. “What makes this day happy? It is the day of forgiveness.”

What seems undeniable is that the service, less than trying to advance a cause, was trying to be a cause. The organizers did not intend primarily to argue for a certain vision of society; they endeavored to be that society, in this instance an observant Jewish slice of it, in which members of all different denominations (Sieradski told me that from the chazzan to the machzorim, official Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox organs had all chipped in), political beliefs, and—emphasis here—classes and sexual orientations can come together to share in ancient ritual.

In this, the service was a perfect match for Occupy Wall Street itself, which to this point has been most successful in simply (to crib from Gandhi) being the change it wishes to see in the world rather than enacting it on a systemic level. A trip back to Lower Manhattan yesterday confirmed this. There is a fascinating, functioning mini-society in Zuccotti Park. There is a food line. There is a medical station, with a doctor on call. There is a newspaper (including a Spanish edition, a copy of which I proudly own). There are exhibits, almost as in a museum, showing new and better ways to live.

The politics yesterday remained focused on “occupying Wall Street”—calling to account a system that rewards the richest one percent with 40 percent of the country’s wealth and that allows financial tycoons who pay low tax rates and exploited the ignorance of the less-well-off to have prime membership in that top one percent. (Wall Street is responding: reportedly, JPMorgan Chase’s weekly email on the global economy was titled, “Tikkun Olam.”) Around 4, there was a rally led by clergy, and a rabbi got up and recited Isaiah on fasting. I saw a sign that read, “End the Occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.” I saw anti-Obama signs; I saw pro-Obama signs. What was almost totally lacking were any of the things you worry about. I saw a sign that read, “Finally, an occupation a radical Jew can get behind,” and if you don’t see that as harmless, I fear how much must trouble your sleep. I saw a solitary guy spouting Che. Will he be joined by more? That would be very, very sad.

If only there were another Jewish celebration that could continue with the theme of benevolent occupation. Say, a holiday in which you build a makeshift house and eat and sleep in it.

What’s that you say? It starts Wednesday night?

Yes, folks, it’s true: I can confirm that Sieradski and friends will be building an Occupy Wall Street sukkah.

Yom Kippur Prayers for Corporate Atonement at Occupy Wall Street [Religion Dispatches]
Related: The Left Declares Its Independence [NYT]
Earlier: Panic in Zuccotti Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague,
Who by strangulation and who by stoning,
Who shall have rest and who shall wander,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,
Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented,
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low,
Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.

—“U’Netaneh Tokef,” by Amnon of Mainz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God.

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

It’s God’s turn:

O Mankind, son of your fathers and your fathers’ fathers, let My prayers come before you, and do not hide yourself from My supplication. O Mankind, I am not so arrogant nor so hardened to say, “I am righteous and have not sinned.” For truly I have sinned. I have turned away from you, and I have done evil in your sight.

(God should bend forward at the waist here and upon reciting each sin pound his chest with his fist.)

For the sins I committed against you with diseases of the body, and for the sins I committed against you with diseases of the mind.

For the sins committed by murdering your parents, and for the sins I committed by murdering your children.

For cancer and for AIDS and for heart disease and for emphysema and for Alzheimer’s and for Parkinson’s. For regular leukemia, and for childhood leukemia.

For the commandments I gave you that I don’t even adhere to myself.

For hangovers.

For erectile dysfunction.

For premenstrual syndrome.

For aging, for time, for mortality.

For Miley Cyrus.

For all the Cyruses.

For all the Kardashians, and all the Olsens and all the Duffs and all the Hiltons and all the Afflecks and all the Baldwins and all the Palins and all the Palins-in-law.

For YA vampire novels.

For lynchings and gassings and mass graves and medical experiments and being burned alive.

For broken hearts. For loneliness. For divorce and for dysfunction.

For making it so damned hard.

For judging you, damning you, condemning you, without ever having been for even a brief moment in your soiled, mortal shoes.

For the whole circumcision thing.

For turning my head.

For calling homosexuality an abomination. (I’d just been dumped by my boyfriend.)

For the enduring lies and the broken promises.

For the unanswered prayers and the unanswered questions.

For all those notes in the wall I never read.

For Facebook and for MySpace.

And for Ashton fucking Kutcher.

For all these things, Mankind,

pardon me,

forgive me,

atone me.

(Perfect. Now go swing a cock around your head.)

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

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

Keeping faith with the consolations of cycles, of recurrence (Mahzor’s root is chzr, meaning “return”), is the last ritual practice of a Judaism that has abandoned the Sabbath and dietary strictures, God and afterlife, etc. Such a belief, solely in the regulating merit of belief, is embodied not only in the Jewish books—read septennially, annually, monthly, weekly, daily—but also in books in general, if they are read not as commodities, rather as enduring resources (that timeless calendar, the canon).

Only last week, avoiding shul for Rosh Hashanah, I reread Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Buber’s letters, read the Internet. What did I find? The Death of Books! The End of Books! Today—if you read what is written today—all books seem to be “memory books” (“yizkor buch,” which is Yiddish, indicates a volume memorializing the dead of a particular shtetl or region ravaged by the Holocaust, e.g., the Sefer Marmarosh, which catalogs the names of my cousins in an area including Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, or the Sárospatak Book, which lists the names of closer relatives from Hungary).

Remembrance, at every instance, threatens an ultimate recursion: We remember so regularly until we’re only remembering we’re remembering. It’s not just the Internet. Recent print media seem to consist entirely of pieties about the death of print media and the inevitable ascension of the digital. Just as our prayerbooks seem to consist entirely of prayers that—though they’re said to be, should be, dedicated to saving our and our relations’ souls—spend the preponderance of their sentences and stanzas mortifying man and praising God. Unwilling to praise or mortify, incapable of salvation, following Rosh Hashanah I wrote the following Yizkor for bookery. Epigraphs as epitaphs, they comprise a page to print and slip between the relevant pages of your Mahzor—for when memory becomes too painful because too rote, or too remote from Yizkor’s words (just as all contemporary words have become too remote from their inscribing).

***

May there never come a future in which a secret can be hidden in a book.

May there never come a future when a child will have to search for what a book is on the computer. For what a book was.

Once books go and with them, covers, may we still find meaning in the words binding and bound.

May we still find comfort in the margin.

Consider the archaic English: boke. As in Chaucer, at the conclusion of Canterbury Tales, disavowing “the boke of Troilus, the boke also of Fame, the boke of the five and twenty Ladies, the boke of the Duchesse, the boke of Seint Valentines day of the Parlement of briddes.” It’s like book, only in past tense.

Blessed is the page, for it is more fraught than the screen. Reading a page, you always know there’s a page you’re not reading just on the other side.

Blessed are the bookmarks: (personal) envelopes, pencils and pens, an ermine’s baculum, my father’s/mother’s expired driver’s license, a scrap of a dead neighbor’s ex libris on which I scribbled the word bibliothanatos, (historical) Mao had bookmarks produced featuring his sayings, “Be serious, be active,” bamboo bookmarks from Nepal, cornhusks from Czechoslovakia, American bookmarks manufactured as advertisements for Heinz in the warty shapes of pickles. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) first popularized bookmarks. The term now characterizes a computer function that holds a webpage detailing the life of Elizabeth.

Consider Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. Leave it to the goyim to end with Apocalypse. Moses and YHVH—our earliest professional writers of fiction—and even the deity’s amateur “son,” who only wrote once, one illegible word dug into sand (John 8)—would never have allowed it.

Reward with a girlfriend my friend H., a junior librarian from a fine family of Los Angeles. His recent email mentions his databasing nearly 30 books called “The Last Book,” or a variation on that title.

Grant the justice/splendor of the smell of books, which is merely the smell of dust. This, like all sameness, instructs in mortality. After the book is composed, it decomposes. That (and other reasons) is why there are multiple copies.

Grant the meek/radiant feel of books (haptics is the current term): the texture, the heft in hand. Note for posterity that if you closed your eyes and ran your fingers over a page you could tell which parts of that page were blank and which held ink. Words were palpable, words felt palpable, until the advent of recycling and digital printing (blot forever the 1990s).

Find repose among the taste of books. Find peace from, in a singularly impractical coinage, their “mannaism.” It’s said that monks poisoned the pagetips of forbidden books to punish their readers. It’s said that rabbis placed honey there at the tips to encourage students to lick and go forward. To lick and proceed. Consider however that when the lesson was finished and the book was shut, the honeyed pages would stick together. Consider however that such slavish adherence to factuality would be our own destruction. Woe to the generation that cannot tell stories. Woe to the generation that cannot be told stories.

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

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

Soon after Dan’s departure, as if on cue, I noticed that Luke and Justine were dancing awfully close together. No, I thought, I must be mistaken. But there they were, on the dance floor next to me, all over each other—at my 21st birthday! I remember wondering why neither of them noticed that I was standing right there, followed by the sad and obvious answer that they were not noticing me because they were consumed by one another.

I also remember thinking, She’s a really good dancer.

I’d first met Justine in Wyoming two years earlier, on a summer geology program. Both of us were trying to complete all of our math and science credits against the backdrop of the Grand Tetons. We roomed together in a tin hut, the cement floor of which hosted various rodents; it had cracked open during an earthquake and had never been repaired. We lived without electricity or a bathroom; we studied (much harder than either of us had bargained for) by flashlight and slept very little. We were both arty, earnest, East Coast Jewish girls who were terrible at math. I loved everything about her and took for granted that this was a friend for life.

One by one, as Luke and Justine’s hips pressed together and did not come apart, each of my friends stopped dancing and came over to me, weighing in on the increasingly awkward situation. Still, Luke didn’t break away; nor did Justine. His lips were at her neck. Her hands were on his ass. I don’t remember what followed, exactly, but she did come home with us to Long Island, and that was one long and silent train ride. She left the house a few hours later before anyone was awake.

Luke left several groveling messages that day, and I ignored them all.

Justine called the following night. She didn’t mention what happened. “What about sisterhood?” I finally yelled. “Is that only when the guy in question isn’t charming and your friend’s boyfriend?”

“But—I just—”

The worst part, I explained, was how this was all such a cliché—obviously. So humiliating.

She apologized, but it was hollow. I couldn’t figure out why she sounded so meek. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said. I’m sure both of us knew she would do no such thing. I still have no idea if she saw Luke again. Justine and I only shared one close mutual friend, and that friend had no news for me. She only said that Justine was more insecure than I’d realized. Oh please, was what I probably said. Oh. Please.

That fall I lived on a tree-lined street with the best front porches in Ann Arbor. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Justine since that awful phone conversation. I knew she was living not far from my house and often wondered when I’d see her, walking by. On Yom Kippur, I was getting ready to go to synagogue when there was a knock at the door. Jehovah’s Witnesses often came around, and I was set to explain to the proselytizer that it was the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, that even for a Jew like me, who went to synagogue once a year, this was the worst day to come knocking. But when I opened the door, there was no one spreading the word.

Justine stood there. The sky was oyster-colored, her dress dark green. The wind kicked up fallen leaves. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Listen, I’ve thought a lot about that night.”

“It’s OK,” I said, not because I meant it, exactly, but because at this point, what did it matter?

“No, really,” she said, and I could see that she was struggling.

“OK,” I relented. “I’m listening.”

“It’s Yom Kippur,” she said. “We’re supposed to look at ourselves and atone for our sins.”

“I know,” I smiled, wryly. Though I had observed the holiday my entire life and knew plenty of Jews who did, too, I had never heard of anyone repenting in this way.

“I’m atoning,” she said. “There are a million ways to fend off a tipsy guy. Especially if that guy is your friend’s boyfriend.”

“He was a tenuous boyfriend,” I acknowledged.

“I know he was,” she said. “But that’s what I should have done.” She looked up at the sky, as if she wanted it to rain. “I think I liked the attention,” she finally said.

I nodded along with her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

We might have hugged, but that’s not part of my recollection. I only remember the pre-stormy weather, her serious, beautiful face. “Good yontif,” she said, and I watched her walk off, down the middle of my quiet street.

When we saw each other after that, we always talked warmly but briefly—she was considering law school, dating a writer—and when we said goodbye, each and every time, I was always struck with how she’d actually atoned. I was also struck by how I really and truly had forgiven her. I thought of her fondly, respectfully. And yet we were no longer friends.

As for Luke, the day after my 21st birthday party, he started an apology campaign complete with lavish flowers and self-flagellating letters. He was the one person who had begun as temporary and was the person whom I thought I was least likely to stay in contact with. And he’s been my friend for nearly 20 years.

Somewhere along the way, I did manage to become an adult. And though adulthood didn’t happen at 21, it very well might have started then, when I began to see how, though even the most heartfelt atonement can’t always bind what’s broken, it’s certainly worth a shot.

I recently Googled Justine. She’s a lawyer specializing in women’s rights. I found an article about an event honoring her work. She was wearing a suit in the accompanying photograph, with the same beautiful face, the same serious expression. And maybe because she was my friend for a time—my friend who made a late-night mistake, my friend who’d struggled and finally apologized, my friend who, according to the World Wide Web, followed through on those nascent feminist ideas she’d begun to explore the summer our friendship ended—when I viewed the evidence of her successful life, I was filled with warmth and recognition. And some kind of foolish pride.

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

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

When I first arrived in New York, someone found me a job at the Jewish Agency for Palestine. It was 1951. I had a degree in English Literature from the University of London, but I had no typing and was hired as a file clerk. I spent my mornings hand-copying lists of manufacturers and the dates, locations from and to, and means by which they were scheduled to transfer quantities of items with abstract and curious names of what might, so far as I knew, have been spare parts for plowshares, or armored tanks.

Midday, I would take the elevator to the ground floor where the clever and delightful Miriam H.—sad that we lost contact—operated the switchboard. We’d carry our presumably kosher brown-bags across Fifth Avenue and eat our lunches in the Central Park Zoo.

Why does the mise-en-scene of an elegant interior converted into office space keep turning up in my stories? During London’s postwar years, bomb-damaged Bedford College for Women had to rent a Regent’s Park mansion for additional space. Our Shakespeare lectures were held in a ballroom with pale, scalloped walls, an Adams fireplace, and fitted with industrial overhead lighting. The Jewish Agency in New York was located near the corner of the avenue in a lovely townhouse. From outside its size seemed modest; one was surprised at the several floors of rooms that were grand on a human scale, with handsome doors and windows. Its old bird-cage elevator with the open ironwork is the locus of my nano story:

The elevator’s doors open and outside, in the foyer, stands one of the agency’s rabbis. I may, or may not, as I’ve said, have known his name. If he and I had exchanged words socially or in the course of agency business, I don’t remember it, nor could I pick out his face from a police line-up; it was markedly unremarkable except for the narrow nose not unlike my own.
I had noted, passing him in the hall or on the stairways, that the era’s exaggerated shoulder pads looked silly on a man of little stature; his suits, I thought, were too light. And so this rabbi and I stand face to face, he waiting to get on the elevator, I wanting to get off to find Miriam and go and eat our lunch in the park. For me to step out of the elevator would be to walk over or through the rabbi who is not moving out of my way. By preventing me from getting off, he is necessarily preventing himself from getting on to go wherever he is going.

So, what happened? Nothing happened. From my early 20s to my 80s, the rabbi in the too-light suit and shoulder pads has recurred in my memory—is it once or twice a year, or only once, maybe, in five years? He irritates me. I think ill of a person—a rabbi!—whose sense of self leaves zero awareness of another person and of that person’s probable wants and needs. Max Frisch, the Swiss novelist and playwright, speaks of the phenomenon of people entering a bus and remaining congregated at the entrance, preventing those coming behind them from getting aboard. On our irritable days, says Frisch (he means the days he hasn’t written one good paragraph), we despair of mankind.

But why, for more than half a century, does this slightest of events continue to come into consciousness? Is it that my conscience suspects there is something wrong with this picture? Look again: Why am I not carrying the brown-paper lunch bag? Because I’m not on my way down to find Miriam to go to—I am returning from the park! The picture has flipped: It’s me waiting in the foyer to get on the elevator. I have been so preoccupied with despairing of mankind and being irritated with the innocent rabbi and his shoulder pads that I have not moved out of his way to let him get off the elevator so I can get on and return up to the floor on which I work.

Well, that took 60-plus years to put right. And don’t we know that the next and every future Yom Kippur we’ll need to knock on our breasts with our clenched fists and name the regular, the ancient list of our misjudgments and our misbehaviors?

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

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

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

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

Mahler felt a strong connection to the Jewish faith of his childhood, yet converted to Catholicism to qualify for a job at the Vienna Court Opera. (He told a friend that the decision had “cost me a great deal.”) My father, too, felt powerfully drawn to Judaism but not to dogma; he had little interest in rules of any kind. He could chant Torah and daven like nobody’s business, but he delighted in what he called “glatt trayf.”

More than anything else, what I think drew my father to Mahler was the composer’s obsession with death. My dad had nearly died of polio at 9. At 15, he watched his own father have a heart attack in a living room chair and die in front of him. My father had his own heart attack at 39, and he barely recovered from experimental heart surgery at 56, in 1996. Mahler had a weak heart too. Both men were both convinced they would die young. Both were right. Mahler died in 1911, at 51; my dad in 2004, at 64.

The subject of the shadow of death brings me to the Rosh Hashanah connection. My father was famous in our shul for his Torah reading on the second day of the holiday—the binding of Isaac. When I was a teenager, dad’s rendition was a symphony of mortification for me. He’d do dramatically different voices for Abraham (tentative, confused), Isaac (weak, small) and God (really freaking loud). When he got to the moment of truth in the text, he’d slowly raise the Torah pointer in the air as if to plunge it into the scroll, or into Isaac’s bound body. I wanted to die. Today I find this awesome and Mahlerian. I would give anything to be able to hear it again.

The High Holidays are a good time to ponder not just how we’d choose to be different in the coming year, but also the impact of loss and the need to reach out to people on earth while we still can. As a teenager and a twentysomething, I was frequently embarrassed by my dad’s flamboyance and sappiness. The man had no filter. Because he was aware that he could die at any time, he was quick to tell my brother and me how proud he was of us and how much he loved us. (Every time he turned sentimental and beatific, I called him “The Moonie.” He just laughed.) My dad was also inappropriate a lot—he once gave a non-Jewish guest at our Passover Seder a “Crucifixion Barbie” he’d made, complete with stigmata (red nail polish) and a Popsicle-stick cross. He was no angel.

At this time of year, when we ponder the kind of person we want to be in the future, I admire my dad’s authenticity, precisely the quality that embarrassed me about him when I was young. Now I want to emulate it. I spend a lot of time being anxious about what people will think of me. I worry about the embarrassment of failing. But my dad didn’t care.

I also think about conveying my passions to my kids. I remember my dad’s delight when I emailed him from California in 1997, telling him I was thinking about going to a San Francisco Symphony performance of Mahler’s Second. I still have his emailed response:

This is the piece I joined the Boston Pro Musica to sing last year. This is the piece that has haunted me since I was 10. This is the ‘Resurrection.’ When I sang this piece in May, 1996, The Malachamovess was floating on his scrawny horse in front of the second balcony, and I looked him in his eye socket and said, ‘Listen to me, you motherfucker, listen to what I can sing!’ And he rode off in defeat. When you hear this piece, it will change your view of classical music.

My father especially loved the Second’s finale:

Aufersteh’n, ja aufershteh’n
Mein herz, Mein herz in einem nu,
Sterben werd ich um zu leben!
Sterben werd ich um zu leben!

In English, that’s:

Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you, my heart, in an instant!
Die shall I in order to live.

Is it too much to think of the parallels between this piece and the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah? Isaac and Abraham didn’t experience a literal resurrection, but they did leave that hillside with new lives. They’d faced death and loss. They’d seen the power and terror and confusing mercy of God. And it’s only with the awareness of loss that we’re able to rise above our own petty anxieties and take risks, express our true feelings, and live our lives the way they should be lived.

“The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler once told the composer Sibelius. “It must embrace everything!” And so must we—the spiritual, the hilarious, the embarrassing—if we’re to lead our best, richest lives.

For my dad’s unveiling in 2005, we brought a boom-box to the cemetery and blasted the Second Symphony. On the grave, we placed rocks that my cousin Daniella had taken from the garden next to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. My husband wore my dad’s old Siegfried and Roy T-shirt. The CD’s chorus sang, “That for which you suffered, to God will it lead you.” My dad (who’d left instructions when he was in the Navy in the 1970s that if he were killed in action he wanted a full military funeral—but including Mahler) would have adored it all.

I miss him every day. When he died, my daughter Josie was not quite 3; I was eight months pregnant with her sister, Maxie. I do see him every day, in a way, in Josie’s musicality and Maxie’s goofy humor. Which isn’t enough, of course. But to be human is to experience loss; Yom Kippur’s Yizkor service makes that abundantly clear. It’s some small consolation, though, that the High Holidays are an opportunity for us all to ponder how to turn our suffering into music. Shanah Tova.

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.

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

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

Related: Fast Food [Tablet Magazine]

• In addition to the usual Shabbat restrictions on work, there is “no eating, drinking, washing, perfuming, sex, or fancy shoes.”

• On Friday night, Psalms 92 (the Shabbat Psalm) and 93 are added to the Yom Kippur service.

• During all of the standing prayers (the Amidot), there are Shabbat-specific additions.

• “Avenu Malkenu,” which you would normally sing throughout Yom Kippur, is not sung until the final service, Neilah, “since by then Shabbat is pretty much over.”

Adds Rabbi Nevins, “Obviously we’ll miss the joy of Shabbat, but most people feel the purifying power of this day as its own reward. Also, since most of our festivals are falling out adjacent to Shabbat this year, yielding three-day holidays (which can feel like too much of a good thing), it is nice to have one festival overlap with Shabbat.”

I don’t know about the too-much-of-a-good-thing part, but it does feel appropriate to have Yom Kippur on Shabbat.

Finally, if you need any advice on how to have the proverbial “easy fast,” here are my suggestions (caffeine suppositories optional). For further questions, do consult Tablet Magazine’s Yom Kippur FAQ.

Related: Fast Food [Tablet Magazine]

I have to admit that the jetlag this time was way beyond physical and made the return to Israel especially difficult. After three weeks in Urbana, Illinois, with my wife and son, the American Midwest had penetrated deep into our bones through the grease in the food, the bagel-shaped billboards, and the ubiquitous supermarket specials (otherwise it’s hard to explain why Lev, my five-year-old, insists on presenting himself as “only $4.99”).

My wife’s jetlag manifests itself in the new daily routine she developed in consultation with the unusually sticky menu of the Urbana IHOP. Back in Tel Aviv, she continues to begin her morning with pancakes and strawberries, goes on to a lunch of French toast slathered in butter, and rolls up to a dinner of Nutella crepes topped with whipped cream and a side of onion rings. If she lumbers in at this rate, very soon Lev and I will be able to leave our apartment and go to live inside her.

My son’s tough return to Tel Aviv has mostly taken the form of heartbreaking monologues about “our home in Urbana.” He’s constantly telling anyone who will listen how much he misses the safe we had in our hotel room and how much he wants to go back to the LL floor, “my favorite floor in the whole world,” as he loves to say in a pathos-filled voice. LL was where he was free any hour of the day to bowl and to choose from an array of alluring snacks and neon-colored energy drinks on display in the glittering, greedy vending machines.

And I, like the rest of my battered family, also got hit square in the stomach. My addiction was to doughnuts. Surprisingly, I discovered that the combination of the sugar high, the doughy softness, and the unsaturated-fat poisoning my body caused psychedelic hallucinations. After three doughnuts, the sky turned purple, and after five, I believed that the shanah tova card I got from the American Embassy was actually a three-dimensional hologram of a huge doughnut out of which Chelsea Clinton leapt, topless.

And burdened by all that baggage, we’re supposed to deal with Yom Kippur. I don’t want to complain, but you have to admit that diving into that fast while a 3-D hallucination of Chelsea Clinton jumping out of a huge sugar-coated confection rolls around my brain is a bit Job-like. Except that your faithful servant, unlike that cursed biblical figure, didn’t just sit on his backside and scratch himself, but decided while still in Urbana to prepare for resisting culinary temptation on the coming Day of Atonement. At night, when my sweet family was sound asleep and dreaming of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I was busy recording 60 straight minutes of fast-food commercials in our hotel room. The kind of ads where the announcer, with the jaded tone of someone who’s already seen and swallowed everything, promises you a 4-foot-long sandwich and a gallon bottle of Coke for under five dollars (maybe that’s where my son got it) or a free vat of fries with every sizzling 9-pound steak topped with bubbling cheese. And so, for the entire hour of my recording, the screen is filled with horrifying shots: a frenzied dolly zoom of a monster-sized hamburger bleeding ketchup; a giant pizza spinning wildly around your head, threatening to destroy the world with an artillery shelling of extra spicy pepperoni; and a waffle the size of the U.S. national debt sinking slowly into an endless swamp of chocolate chip ice cream in a calorie-rich homage to the Titanic.

Since we’ve been back in Tel Aviv, that disk has been sitting innocently in the inner pocket of my suitcase. And when the right moment comes, exactly one hour before the fast begins this evening, I’ll innocently invite my nuclear family into the living room, shove the doomsday disc into the kishkes of the DVD, and make us all watch it straight through to the end, extra-crunchy, jalapeno-coated Buffalo wings commercial included, no exemptions or bathroom breaks. And if that disgusting commercial diet fails to keep us food free for the next 24 hours, I’ll have no choice but to submissively accept any flood God sends my way. Although if it turns out that we have a say in the matter, my wife would strongly prefer a maple syrup one.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

“Being primarily a conceptual instrument, Vidduy: The Musical is not tuned to a standard key but does play tonal music when struck,” Abramson wrote in an email. “This is aligned with the concept of a ‘free-form’ confession, and holds a vague reference to the famous Hasidic tale of the boy who brings his flute to synagogue (even though it is prohibited to play, or even carry, a musical instrument on the holiday)—and the Rabbi says that this child’s flute sounds reached higher in the heavens than all of the other congregants’ ‘standard’ prayers.”

On a purely visual level, Vidduy appears austere and unadorned when compared with much of what’s offered in today’s Judaica shops. “The vast majority of people still equate Jewish visuals with a very limited spectrum of design, form, color, and type,” Abramson wrote. “That’s why I take so much pleasure in seeing the amazement in a person’s eyes when they see a Torah pointer in the form of a screwdriver, or a Kiddush cup that doesn’t look like ‘what a Kiddush cup is supposed to look like’; and even though I consider myself an old-school kind of guy, and my work stems and feeds off of these ancient traditions, I take much pride in being one of those designers who are exploring the boundaries of Jewish visuals and design.”

Indeed, in exploring Abramson’s broader body of work, it becomes clear that his inspiration comes from boundaries—both respecting and pushing them. Whether describing a mitzvah through instructions printed on a can or spontaneously organizing a minyan, rules are put to the test and presented in the context of everyday life. “Coming from an Orthodox background and studying in yeshiva for many years, I found Jewish knowledge to be expansive and vast—almost to a point where it is incomprehensible. I think that’s why I find comfort in lists, structures, and boundaries. I myself noticed only inadvertently that my work seeks a given structure (i.e., the 613 mitzvot, the 22 letters of the alphabet in the Vidduy piece, the 10 people for a minyan etc.). I also find the tension between abstract theological ideas and limited, non-flexible boundaries to be fascinating and thought-provoking.”

Vidduy: The Musical can be viewed this October as part of an exhibition in the Judaica wing of the Ein Harod Museum in Israel.

CREDIT: Jonathon Rosen

— I don’t know, this just isn’t working.
— You’re being too hard on yourself, Dear.
— It feels obvious.
— What’s obvious about it?
— I feel like I’ve heard it all before. I want to surprise people, I want to make them think, you know? It’s the Yom Kippur sermon, Hon, it’s the biggest sermon of the year. Packed house. I really want to knock it out of the park.
— Remember what Hemingway said, Dear: The first draft of anything is shit.
— I thought Rashi said that. What am I going to do?
— Did you mention the Holocaust?
— Everyone mentions the Holocaust.
— The Inquisition?
— Old news.
— Pogroms?
— You see? You see what I mean? There’s nothing new, nothing fresh.
— What about Iran? It’s very timely. You could do your whole “Iran/ I ran” thing, about running from God, running from punishment. I really liked that one the last time you did it.
— That wasn’t me.
— It wasn’t?
— No.
— Who was that?
— Silverberg.
— Oh.
— You always like Silverberg’s sermons.
— That’s not true.
— It is true.
— Don’t make this about me, Dear.
— “I ran from Hashem, so Hashem is using Iran to punish me.” Jesus Christ. Do you remember his Yom Kippur sermon last year? “If we learn from it, we can turn it from a Hollow-caust to a fuller-caust.”
— I liked that.
— I need a drink.
— Don’t start that again.
— Just get me a goddamn drink.

Later.

— “… and by looking at ourselves and admitting our sins, we can find inner joy, and find true happiness, and then we can turn Yom Kippur into Yom Chipper.” What do you think?
— Chipper?
— Chipper. You know—happy, upbeat.
— Oh.
— It’s crap.
— It’s not.
— Of course it is. “Yom Chipper.”
— You remember what Maimonides said: Writer’s block is just high expectations.
— I thought that was William Stafford.
— I like Yom Stripper.
— Yom Stripper?
— Isn’t that what you said?
— I said Yom Chipper. What the hell is Yom Stripper?
— Yom Chipper, then.
— What the hell is Yom Stripper? Do you even listen to me anymore? Maybe if I was Rabbi Silverberg you would listen.
— Don’t make this about me, Dear.
(awkward silence)
— You really like Yom Stripper?
— It’s cute.
— … “And so this Yom Kippur, if we bare our souls, and remove our …” Oh, for God’s sake.

Later.

— So?
— I think it’s good, Dear.
— Do you really?
— It’s different.
— I wanted it to be different. I wanted to do something totally new and unexpected, you know?
— I think it’s really good.
— Who’s the shul president these days? I’m going to call him. Is it still Dr. Hammer?
— No, it’s Dr. Pleeter.
— Hand me the phone. (dials) Dr. Pleeter? Rabbi Rosen here. Ha ha, yes, it certainly is. Listen, I want to run this past you. It’s my sermon for Yom Kippur. I’m going with “Don’t repent.” Hear me out. Everyone does “you’re sinners, you’re at fault, feel bad,” well, I’m going the other way. I’m saying no more fear, no more living in terror. If anyone’s been punished enough, it’s us Jews, am I right? So, to hell with this—go home! Have a big meal and a glass of wine. No more fasting, no more chest-beating—if anyone should ask for forgiveness, it’s God. This should be God’s Day of Atonement, not ours. Stop feeling so bad, stop beating yourself up. I have this whole thing about fasting—about how the only thing you shouldn’t eat today is your heart out. (pause) Uh huh. (pause) Right. (pause) Well, I think that … (pause). I think you’re making a bit much of the whole … no, no, I was really, I mean what I meant was that, sort of a feel—good kind of a … (pause) of course, yes, I … well, I had this whole “Yom Chipper” thing … no, I mean, if you feel that strongly … yes, of course … yes, I like that … sure, yes, yes, of course … no, I think you have a point … sure, OK … right … yes … see you then. Bye.
— What’d he say?
— He wants something about the Holocaust.
— What about it?
— He liked Silverberg’s whole Hollow-caust thing.
— I liked that, too.
— Thought I could throw in a line or two about Iran.
— It’s very timely.
— How about: If we’re not in a God mood, we’ll get Mach—mood.
— Mach—mood?
— Ahmadinejad.
— I like that.
— Yeah?
— Yeah, that’s good.
— Yeah, it is. I think it can work.
— Of course it can.
— You think?
— I really like it.
— Me, too.
— Phew.
— Right?
— That was a close one.
— I knew you’d get it.

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But in contrast, we tend to know less about average Jews, whose lives didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. That began to change in the late 19th century, when the Yiddish press hit the streets, for the first time recounting the lives of the unwashed masses of Jews in the public record. Tablet Magazine offers some of their stories, reconstructed from century-old newspaper accounts.

Newspaper readers don’t often consider what kind of behind-the-scenes insanity goes into the articles they peruse. I’m not referring here to either the intrepid news-gathering or the hysterical keyboard pounding of writers on deadline. The insanity I’m curious about has to do with the tension-filled relationship between writers and editors.

Is it true, as some writers contend for example, that editors wantonly destroy perfect copy? Or do they artfully reshape a writer’s prose into a more cogent text? The editor-journalist relationship is as fraught as that between a mohel and baby. The mohel has no choice but to snip; the baby has no choice but to cry, but he drinks a little wine and he gets over it.

Renowned for its minor and major disputes, the Yiddish press was a place where editors ruled inky fiefdoms, cracking the whip over writers who served as bitter and often disloyal subjects. Editors controlled the fates and livelihoods of writers and journalists, many of whom felt the press functioned as a kind of commercial department of Yiddish literature—something over which they felt they should have more control.

Most of the battles within the Yiddish journalistic world never left the perimeter of the editor’s desks. But on occasion, these spats leapt out of the editorial offices and onto the pages of the papers, making for some of the juiciest Yiddish snark this side of Pinsk.

When, for instance, famed columnist Hillel Zeitlin jumped ship in late 1910 from Warsaw’s daily Haynt to a new competitor, Moment, his editor, Shmuel Yatskan, was furious but temporarily held his tongue.

Zeitlin had been one of Haynt’s most popular columnists. Born into a family of Lubavitcher Hasidim, he strayed from his yeshiva studies after discovering Spinoza, Nietszche, and a slew of other Western thinkers. Like any shtetl kid in the process of ridding himself of tradition, he moved to the city—Warsaw, in this case—and involved himself in Jewish political matters and journalism. But Zeitlin never completely gave up his traditional ways, and an interest in Kabbalah eventually brought him back, not only to full religious observance, but to a promotion of Jewish tradition in his newspaper columns.

Zeitlin’s former editor, Yatskan, was also a Litvak plying journalism in Warsaw. An ordained rabbi from the highly regarded Ponevezh Yeshiva, Yatskan was a major figure in the Yiddish press, having founded some of Warsaw’s early Jewish dailies, including Haynt, which became the best-selling Yiddish paper in Poland.

With an understanding that a popular newspaper should have a broad mandate, Yatskan printed a lot of sensationalistic trash along with high-quality literature, as well as excellent cultural and political criticism. His papers always appealed to the widest possible audience.

That’s where Zeitlin fit in. Able to synthesize abstract philosophical ideas about Jewish culture, religion, and modern society into a readable article, Zeitlin was one of the paper’s major assets. In particular, his columns appealed to religious readers. So, when he decided to abandon Yatskan’s Haynt it was a devastating blow.

Yatskan and Zeitlin sniped at each other for a while, printing what in Yiddish is called “secrets from kheyder.” Words like hypocrite, trash, liar, and provocateur were bandied about briefly, but then things seemed to settle down. The appearance of tranquility was deceptive, however, and by September in 1913, Yatskan could no longer control his anger at Zeitlin’s departure and rekindled the fight by printing a blurb in Haynt by an unnamed “correspondent” from Pinsk:

Seeing how Hillel Zeitlin is still around and unashamedly screams before the public in regard to his holiness and complains about the “lies” that are being spread about him, that he, tragically, is a “holy man” who is being hounded for his religiosity, and also has the audacity to compare the accusation against the victim of the Kiev blood-libel with himself, it is my duty to remind him of the fact that when he was here, in Pinsk giving a lecture, I, along with numerous others who can verify it, saw with my own eyes, as the others saw with theirs, how in the train station buffet he ate a pork chop, with a roll, followed by a cutlet.

Although this rambling sentence (21 lines of one newspaper column) was a grammatical mess, it was also a finely crafted accusation, attacking Zeitlin for his hypocrisy, arrogance, and trangression: the eating of trayf.

The accusation was the last straw. Zeitlin and the Moment staff responded in the paper by saying that Yatskan and Haynt were rank liars attacking a former colleague who had left for good reason. In printed testimonials supporting their besmirched colleague, dozens of journalists sided with Zeitlin.

Haynt, as well the daily Der fraynd, pounded away at Zeitlin, attacking him for all manner of sin, ranging from writing on Shabbos to violating Yom Kippur. Moment shot back, asserting that Yatskan wrote a fake Torah, printed pornography, and promoted conversion among Jews, claims Yatskan said were “a product of unscrupulous swindlers and a gang of Sodomites who created a horror story comparable to some of the worst crimes ever committed.” No one ever accused Yatskan of subtlety.

To Zeitlin’s readers the attacks were devastating. How could their beloved writer, a frumer yid, stand accused of such heinous transgressions? Thousands signed petitions of support and wrote letters, dozens of which Moment published. Haynt claimed that it was all a ploy: The letters and the names were fakes.

Yiddish cartoonists had a field day: Zeitlin’s bushy beard and shock of long hair made for great caricatures. With the battle coming to a head just before Yom Kippur, Yosef Tunkel, the brightest satirical light of 20th century Yiddish, found the perfect analogy for this tempest—the kapores slaughter ritual, a custom in which Jews on the eve of Yom Kippur wave a chicken over their heads three times and then kill it in order to expiate their sins (the Jew’s, not the chicken’s).

Tunkel drew Zeitlin’s bushy head onto the chicken with which Yatskan performs kapores, while chicken Zeitlin defecates. The image perfectly captured their unhappy relationship. By the time this cartoon appeared on the cover of Tunkel’s special Yom Kippur humor magazine, the organized Jewish community had begun to freak out over the fact that the mudslinging had gotten so out of hand, that the Polish press had begun to report on it in a series of “look at these crazy Jews” articles.

At that point a number of communal leaders decided to create an arbitration panel to put an end to the ugly public dispute. There was probably no need; by early October, 1913, the Mendel Beilis blood libel trial was underway, a huge story that dominated the Yiddish press through the fall as the Zeitlin-Yatskan episode fizzled into another forgotten incident in Jewish journalism, though it remains an exemplar of the way editors and journalists, Yiddish or otherwise, feel about each other.

The basement-dwelling 2010 Washington Nationals are no 1965 Dodgers, and Nats pitcher Jason Marquis, who is Jewish, is certainly no Koufax. But Marquis is slated to start Friday night—Kol Nidre—at the Philadelphia Phillies, and (via Kaplan’s Korner) he plans on doing so (in fact, he has in past years, too). “Your team expects you to do your job and not let your teammates down, and that’s the approach I take,” he said.

Now, look. That is not an invalid response. And for every Koufax, there is also slugger Hank Greenberg, who in 1934 played on Rosh Hashanah while his Detroit Tigers were in a tight pennant race, only to sit out Yom Kippur once a World Series spot was all but secured. Moreover, I don’t think the importance (or lack of importance) of a big game should make a difference: If you feel you shouldn’t play on Yom Kippur, then that should include the World Series; if you feel you should, that should include a meaningless September regular season outing. And Marquis didn’t ask to be made a role model (which, given his 6.60 ERA this season, is maybe a good thing!).

But: Dude. Ask your manager to move your start. C’mon. How are Jewish 8-year-old Nats fans—poor schmucks—going to learn to observe the Highest of the Holidays?

Meanwhile, check Kaplan’s Korner for updates on Kevin Youkilis, Ryan Braun, and the rest.

Marquis Plans To Make Start on Kol Nidre [Miami Herald]
Earlier: Huge Yankees-Sox Game Set for Kol Nidre

Mockingjay is the final book in a trilogy. The first two books, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, introduced readers to a dystopian society in which children are selected as contestants in a terrible reality show, thrown into a giant arena, and forced to battle to the death before zillions of hidden and not-so-hidden cameras. Those cameras are controlled by the Capitol, a dictatorship that rules what once was North America. The series’ heroine, Katniss, volunteers for the Hunger Games to save her little sister, whose name has been drawn as one of the two “tributes” from their district. Katniss is groomed, costumed, given a backstory for the audience to follow, and then set loose to kill or be killed. It’s 1984-meets-Survivor-meets-Project Runway-meets-Spartacus.

While Eat Pray Love was the story of one person’s entirely inward-looking quest for happiness, The Hunger Games trilogy is about how one person, under the grimmest circumstances imaginable, can help others. Throughout the trilogy, but especially in Mockingjay, Katniss has to face the fact that people have died because of her, both directly—killed in the arena—and indirectly—killed because she slowly becomes a symbol of rebellion against the Capitol’s tyranny. Her knowledge of her own culpability and responsibility weighs heavily on her. You don’t have to be a revolutionary teen symbol in a flame-covered suit holding a bow and arrow to understand those feelings, especially at this time of year. This time of year is here to remind us that we’re all connected (kol yisrael areivim zeh la-zeh—all of us are responsible for one another) and that we’re all guilty of something.

And we couldn’t have asked for a better heroine than Katniss to help us realize that. She is a flawed heroine, clearly damaged after her experiences in the Games. To the dismay of some readers, in Mockingjay she isn’t a butt-kicking superhero. She’s a person—sometimes passive, sometimes fearful, sometimes full of self-doubt—like all of us. She opts to face the most unsavory aspects of herself. She accepts the introspection, responsibility, and regret we ourselves try to face on Yom Kippur. She takes off her costume, as we, too, must strip away the layers of defensiveness and guardedness that keep us from being the people we should be.

Another constant theme in all three books is how hard it is to retain our humanity in challenging situations. What sins are permissible for the greater good? In Katniss’ world, as in our own, there’s no bright line between good and evil. People do good things for bad reasons and bad things for good reasons. We’ve all sinned; the question is what we do thereafter.

The answer both Judaism and Mockingjay offer is introspection. No one is as hard on Katniss as she is on herself. Unlike Liz in Eat Pray Love, who’s all too eager to forgive herself, Katniss doesn’t let herself off easily. But being too self-flagellating can also be paralyzing. We need to be people of action, not just reflection. Self-loathing can keep us from the important work of tikkun olam. Katniss needs to come to terms with her own sins and take responsibility for them without letting them consume her. (As I pointed out last week, the Hebrew word for sin is literally “a missing of the mark”—how ironic that Katniss is an archer.)

But being forgiving, of oneself and of others, doesn’t mean having no standards. Like Katniss, we need to listen for a still, small voice amid the din. That tiny voice could be our own courage, or it could be the awareness of someone else’s humanity. We need to have the presence of mind to forgive and the strength of character to trust again.

And, like Katniss, we need to learn how to be at peace with the past. As parents, we fall down a lot, we miss the mark, we lose our tempers, we lie to our children, we aren’t fully present when they tell us their stories. None of us is perfect. But we try to do better, and to do better we must first overcome the burdens of our past failings.

Thank God we have a heroine like Katniss, then, who, like parents everywhere, walks a path that is often lonely, a path that acknowledges nuance and realizes that what’s right doesn’t always bring applause and congratulations. But that’s what true heroism is: doing something just because it’s right. Let us keep that in mind as we sit in services this year.

Gmar chatima tova—may you be sealed in the book of life.

In a new memoir, Half a Life, Strauss writes about the crash and its aftermath. He joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about how this tragedy has shaped his life, about guilt and doubt, and about his fears for his children.

Twenty years ago, he was in a terrible car accident in which a high school classmate died. In his forthcoming memoir, Half a Life, he forces himself to look back at what happened in greater detail, and with greater honesty, than he’d ever done before. The act of writing the book was, for him, a kind of ritualized repentance—not unlike Yom Kippur, as he explains here:

But that’s not the real story. The real story is who’s playing these gigs. One of the rumored bands is the Dave Matthews Band. And the other? Well, Dr. Watson, let’s figure this out:

• Dave Matthews Band is managed by Red Light.

• The jam band Phish is also managed by Red Light.

• Last time Dave Matthews Band played a ballpark, it was last spring, it was Fenway Park in Boston, and the following night, Phish played it.

• There have long been rumors on obscure message boards that only crazy people like me read that Phish is playing Wrigley this summer.

So, it’s probably Phish (better book my plane tickets). And therein lies the problem! Two of Phish’s four members—its rhythm section, ironically enough—are Jews: drummer Jon Fishman (hence the band name) and bassist Mike Gordon.

Fellas! Do I need to remind you about Sandy Koufax sitting out the World Series?

UPDATE: I didn’t read closely enough! The September 18 concert will reportedly being after sundown! As if further proof were needed that the folks playing the concert have other things to do during Yom Kippur … .

Below: Phish performs “Avenu Malkenu.” Yes, I’m serious.

Cubs Can Have Yom Kippur Concerts at Wrigley [JTA]

Could Vioxx Cousin Prevent Yom Kippur Headache? [Reuters/Vos Iz Neias?]

The absurd report received a no less absurd response from the Israeli government, which demanded that the Swedish prime minister apologize for the story. The Swedes, of course, refused, claiming freedom of the press, even if in this specific case, the press was not of particularly high quality. And Israel responded immediately with the unconventional weapon it keeps hidden away for conflicts of just such magnitude: a consumer boycott of Ikea. In the midst of this hyperventilated political storm, yours truly found himself spending Rosh Hashanah with an audience of polite Swedish readers who thanked him generously for his stories and were even more grateful that he didn’t take advantage of the moment he autographed their books to snatch a kidney or two.

But my real Swedish drama began when I realized there was a danger that I might not get back to Israel before Yom Kippur. Over the past few years, I’ve spent quite a few holidays outside of Israel, and despite the self-pitying, whiny face I always present to the people around me, I have to admit that I’ve often felt somewhat relieved to spend an Independence Day without an aerial demonstration of Air Force planes flying right over my head, or a Shavuot eve minus aunts and uncles who are insulted because I’ve refused their invitations to a holiday dinner. But I always did everything I could to be in Israel on Yom Kippur. All these years, all my life.

The night after the problem of my flight back was solved—with the help of my host’s savvy travel agent—I invited everyone to celebrate our success at a local Swedish restaurant called, for some reason, Cracow, which is famous, of course, for its huge selection of Czech beers. “Now that it all worked out, maybe you can explain to us what the hell is so special about that holiday,” my young Swedish publisher asked. And so I found myself, with a stomach full of cold potato salad and Czech beer, trying to explain to a few half-drunk, literary Swedes what Yom Kippur is.

The Swedes listened and were fascinated. The thought of a day on which no motorized vehicles drive through the cities, people walk around without their wallets and all the stores are closed, a day on which there are no TV broadcasts or even updates on websites—all sounded to them like an innovative Naomi Klein concept and not like an ancient Jewish holiday. The fact that it was also a day on which you’re supposed to ask others for forgiveness and do moral stocktaking upgraded the anti-consumerist angle with a welcome touch of ’60s hippiedom. And the fasting bit sounded like an extreme version of the fashionable low-carb diet they’d talked to me about in such glowing terms just that morning. And so I began the evening trying to explain the ancient Hebrew ritual in my broken English, and found myself doing PR for the coolest, most sought after holiday in the universe, the iPhone of all festivals.

At that point, the amazed Swedes were consumed by envy of me for having been born into such a wonderful religion. Their eyes darted around the restaurant, looking at the patrons as if they were searching for a mohel who would cut them a deal to join up.

Twenty-six hours later, I was strolling with my wife down the center lane of one of Tel Aviv’s busiest thoroughfares, our little son riding his bike with the training wheels behind us. Above us, birds were chirping their morning birdsong. I’ve spent my whole life on that street, but I only get to hear the birds on Yom Kippur.

“Daddy,” my son asked as he pedaled and panted, “tomorrow’s Yom Kippur too, right?”

“No, son,” I said, “tomorrow’s a regular day.”

He burst into tears.

“Don’t cry, honey,” my wife tried to comfort him, “in less than a week it’ll be Sukkot.”

That didn’t help at all. The kid was right. There’s nothing like Yom Kippur. Everyone knows it. Even the Swedes.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

For decades, canvas sneakers have been the favored solution, though rubber Crocs are gaining in popularity. But now, Jews have a whole new set of options: shoes made for vegans. Earlier this week, the Conservative movement launched a campaign to get Jews to buy hemp and recycled-rubber slip-ons from Toms, a California company founded by Blake Mycoskie, a Southern Methodist University dropout (and former Amazing Race contestant) who gives away a pair of shoes in the Third World for every pair he sells. “People can make not wearing leather shoes into a mitzvah,” explained Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly. (She said she wasn’t sure how many congregants follow the custom, but acknowledged that the Toms initiative, dubbed “Heart and Sole,” is a nice way to remind people of it, too.)

But who needs slippers when Stella McCartney—the queen of vegan runway couture—is selling $1,200 faux-suede platform boots? Plus, last year, Natalie Portman launched her own line of fashionable vegan shoes at Te Casan, a high-end shoe boutique in New York’s SoHo, and pledged to donate five percent of her profits to charity—not quite as generous as the Toms offer, but tzedakah nonetheless.

Moo Shoes, an all-vegan shoe store on New York’s Lower East Side, sells an array of faux-leather high heels and flats from makers like Olsen Haus—whose designer, Elizabeth Olsen, has worked for Calvin Klein and Nine West—and NoVacas, which guarantees that even the glue holding its synthetic shoes together is vegan. The trouble, store owner Sara Kubersky explained, is that observant Jews tend to want their leather-free Yom Kippur shoes to look, well, leather-free. “We’ve had people browse in the store and say they could wear the shoes on the High Holidays,” said Kuberski, who said she remembered a regular parade of slip-ons at her childhood shul. “But I’ve always felt that people who aren’t going to wear leather will wear canvas—you don’t want people thinking you’re wearing leather.”

Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of the Modern Orthodox Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (which counts the newly converted, and fashion-conscious, Ivanka Trump among its members) agrees. The problem, he explained, was that it violates a principle known as mar’it ayin—the imperative not to mislead others into thinking it’s acceptable to break Jewish law. “It’s not a good idea to wear shoes that look like leather on Yom Kippur,” he said.

“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.

These Yom Kippur Balls, organized initially by anarchists in the mid-1880s, started in London and migrated to New York and Montreal. Smaller nosh fests and public demonstrations were also celebrated by Jewish antinomians in other locales. Unorthodox Jews in interwar Poland could pull hundreds of locals into small venues on Yom Kippur in shtetls like Kalish and Chelm; in larger cities like Warsaw and Lodz, they could sell out 5,000-seat circuses. Heresy was big business; tickets for early 1890s Yom Kippur events cost 15 cents for anarchists: capitalists who deigned to attend paid double.

Advertised in the Yiddish press, Yom Kippur balls, lectures, and nosh-fests were decidedly communal events created by and for an alternative community. You had to be a Jew to avail yourself of a blintz given out by a Jewish organization in Warsaw on Yom Kippur. Otherwise, it just wasn’t heresy. Yet it was not just provocation that motivated people to engage in what critics would consider a supremely obnoxious activity. Some people partook to spite a god they don’t believe in. Others to antagonize their parents. Still others to harass the religious establishment. In fact harassment may have been the biggest draw.

Plus, it was often a way to get free publicity. New York’s Herrick Brothers Restaurant caused a riot on Yom Kippur in 1898 when it became apparent they were staying open for the holiday. As the sun went down on the Lower East Side and a good portion of its denizens made their way to shul, hundreds of them fell upon diners at the packed Division Street restaurant with fist and nail.

And some revelers were motivated to attend Yom Kippur balls for political reasons, as an excerpt from Haynt, one of Warsaw’s daily Yiddish papers, made clear the day after Yom Kippur, 1927:

In the non-religious sector everything went according to tradition. The Independent Socialists organized a Kol nidre evening in which various “cantors” and “cantorettes” performed in a Jewish fashion. And there was rejoicing in the house.

This year, the Free-thinkers also fulfilled their “holy mission” and held a meeting during Kol nidre at the Worker’s House on 23 Karmelitska Street in which religion, Yom Kippur and atheism was discussed.

And if the meeting itself went without incident, they went out onto the Jewish streets the morning of Yom Kippur and hawked old issues of the magazine “The Freethinker” while people were on their way to shul. On account of this, a number of fights occurred between religious Jews and the “holy rollers” that sold the magazines.

A few incidents also occurred during the day, when a group of Free-thinkers came out onto Karmelitska, Dzika and Nalevkes, some with lit cigarettes, and others with apples in their mouths.

On account of this provocation, a serious battle occurred between the “demonstrators” and the religious passers-by. Water was dumped from a window on Karmelitska Street onto the heads of the Freethinkers.

Also, a free lunch was organized at the Worker’s Home at 23 Karmelitska Street for those who weren’t able to eat at home because of their parents or wives.

The number of takers for this free lunch was so large that the line for tickets stretched all the way to the front gate of the building, where a large crowd gathered. Some protested against those eating, others in defense of them. Occasionally, the arguments became so heated that the police had to intervene.

Similar scenes also occurred at the Bundist “Worker’’s Corner,” on 9 Pshiazd Street, where the struggle for lunch was so great that the screams and yells could be heard all the way in the street. In addition, some of those eating showed off their big appetites in front of the windows, bringing forth much anguish among the religious Jews who were passing by.

The “struggle for lunch” was indeed intense. Yom Kippur battles broke out between religious and anti-religious Jews worldwide as a result of these annual provocations. Released from communal religious obligation, contemporary American Jews might find these events to be quaint little political-religious convulsions of yesteryear. In Israel, where religious influence in political and daily life is more of an issue, such provocations might seem more understandable. But perhaps Israelis don’t need another dispute on their plate. Packed beaches in Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur are an indication that the “struggle for lunch” has been transformed, in the Jewish state, into the “struggle for rest and relaxation.”

Click for translation

Although largely secular, my family took the Day of Atonement seriously. We would spend the last moments before the holiday’s descent tearing apart squares of toilet paper, as even this most mundane of acts was deemed disrespectful of Judaism’s most awesome day. Riding a bicycle, a Yom Kippur tradition among young and unobservant Israelis, was similarly judged in my family as excessively profane, and so, as soon as we would return home from synagogue after reciting Kol Nidre, I would run up the stairs and onto the balcony and look around.

The neighborhood, a small and modest enclave in the heart of a small and modest town bordering on Tel Aviv, was shrouded by the thick, ink-blue sky. The glow of television sets, the flickering of refrigerator lights, and all the other ghosts of electricity that haunt our daily lives were nowhere to be seen. The neighborhood was dark, dark and quiet, with mumbles and prayers drowned by the shattering silence. And I, a kid who spent most of his days with his Atari and VCR and various battery-operated trinkets, would just sit there and stare and listen and give myself over to this immense stillness and feel something that wasn’t precisely religious but intensely personal, a feeling I suppose was peace.

It faded fast.

By the early 1990s, as I stumbled into pubescence, Israel was rapidly connecting to cable TV. I still spent Yom Kippur with my grandmother, and I still sat on the same balcony, but it wasn’t the same. Peeking, out of the corner of my eye, at the television, I knew that it now concealed glorious secrets. Even if the Israeli channels darkened their screens for a day on Yom Kippur, MTV in Hong Kong, or the soccer channel out of Milan, or any of the other stations included in our subscription plan went about their business as usual. And they were just there, within reach, hiding behind the reflective screen. All I had to do was turn on the set.

Finally, one year, I did. I was 16, and angry at the world as only a 16-year-old can be. God, it seemed to me back in those days, days soaked in rage and alcohol and self-pity, should ask for my forgiveness, not the other way around. Instead of observing his holiest day, I decided to entertain myself. I abandoned the balcony for the basement. I spent the day watching stale British comedies from the 1970s. It was the most miserable Yom Kippur I’ve ever had.

As I grew older, youth’s rebellious streak mercifully fatigued, I resolved to return to the tranquility I’d known in my childhood. But it was gone, slain, in part, by technology. On Yom Kippur of 1995, for example, now 19 and a soldier, I returned to my perch on the balcony. I surveyed the neighborhood. It was no longer dark. Some neighbors were watching television, however discreetly, and others, I could tell by their open windows, were engaging with a new presence: the Internet.

Despite all my promises to remain disconnected, I was burning with curiosity. It was the day of O.J. Simpson’s verdict. I just had to know how it ended. I slipped into the study and logged on.

And so, with each new year, a new technology joined the parade marching on my peace of mind. Video games got better, phones smarter, the Web more intricate. I finished the army and moved to New York, where the temptation to engage with gadgets became even stronger, especially as the internet now connected me to social networks populated by my friends. As one of Twitter’s earliest users, I felt compelled to spend parts of Yom Kippur 2007, sharing my reflections, in 140 characters or less, with a few dozens of my closest friends. The notion of taking a day off from what media critic Todd Gitlin elegantly dubbed the Torrent seemed ludicrous to me. The whole point of a torrent is that there are no days off, not even for atonement, not even to God.

Or, at least, not for me. Some people, I know, have no problem stepping out not only yearly but weekly, observing Shabbat away from media and machines. I’m incapable of such mastery, partially because I know that no matter how unplugged I manage to become, or for how long, I will never again have that serenity of Yom Kippur on the balcony in Ramat Gan, with the whole world sheltered in soft shadows and everyone sitting wordlessly in the dark. I can be as still as I want, but television, the Internet, the cellular phone, they’ll always be there, emissaries from a bright world of circuitry and screens, a world I’ve come to inhabit and love, a world that Ramat Gan, circa 1985, knew nothing about.

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.

Luckily, National Jewish Democratic Council spokesman Aaron Keyak spent some time considering Beck’s proposal in his Huffington Post column, and offers three possibilities: that Beck was trying to co-opt the Jews, that Beck was trying to co-opt all of Yom Kippur, or, more plausibly, that Beck just didn’t really notice. “Maybe Beck will be surprised when his Jewish staff doesn’t show up on Monday,” Keyak wrote. “I bet he will be surprised when they take the Fast and Prayer Day for the Republic that seriously.”

But here’s a question Keyak didn’t consider: when Beck invoked “the founders,” was he talking about George Washington and his friends or Abraham and his sons? Because as far as we know, George Washington and Ben Franklin were neither Jews nor given to observing Yom Kippur, and, you know, there wasn’t any Republic to fast for way back 5770 years ago. Mysteries upon mysteries! Anyway, we’ll keep you posted on how the fast parties shape up.

Glenn Beck: The Grinch Who Stole Yom Kippur [HuffPost]

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.

When I first attended High Holiday services at UCLA, as a 19-year-old college freshman in 1995, two sisters shared cantorial duties. I had never before been so moved by chanting; their singing wasn’t flowery or operatic, as it had been at my Reform synagogue growing up. It was simple, soulful, and understated. After several years, these sisters moved on, and the UCLA rabbi, aware that I was the director of the school’s Jewish a cappella group and that my career in show business had included singing, asked me to take over. Having seen me in services, he knew I was already familiar with the way our community davened. On a dozen cassettes, the sisters recorded the trope for the hundreds of High Holiday machzor pages so that I could practice nightly in the year leading up to my first yontif as cantor, or chazzanit.

I felt I was living out a personal destiny: my mother’s father was a lay chazzan for his community of Holocaust survivors in the Bronx and San Diego. As a nine-year-old child in Poland, he left yeshiva to earn money for his family, but I had been told that he could have been one of the greats. My grandfather Ephraim (he went by “Frank”) was a feisty, primarily Yiddish-speaking Orthodox man who barely grasped the concept of a girl having a bat mitzvah. How would I explain to him, then almost 90, that I was going to lead services? That I’d wear a lacey kippah and the white kittel, or robe, typically worn by pious men on the High Holidays?

He was incredulous that a 26-year-old woman would perform a role traditionally reserved for men. He smiled gently, opened his mouth to debate the halachic implications, then thought better of it and sighed deeply. The world was changing faster than he could grasp.

My debut as a chazzanit marked many firsts: the first time I attended all services of all of the holidays, the first time I ever attended a Musaf or Yizkor service, and the first time I fasted a full 25 hours, even though I was nursing my firstborn son every two hours. All of this was so different from my experience growing up—in my family on Yom Kippur, we fasted until we got hungry, usually around lunch.

As my grandfather got older and more frail (and less confrontational about the unconventionality of a female chazzan), the months before the High Holidays became a special time for us. Our interactions were becoming more difficult as his mind faded, but I would rehearse the traditional melodies and ancient words with him at his retirement home, helping him recall his youth. He was not very communicative or psychologically aware, so I’m uncertain exactly which parts of this time together touched him most. I know that he was thrilled that I could “kvetch it out” like he did, nursing the mournful notes and having them catch in my throat, and he would grow teary-eyed as I practiced. He would listen with his head turned once his eyesight had failed him, to eliminate even the possibility that his attempts to look at me might take away from the spiritual and melodic experience. My voice was therapy for us both; it gave us something to connect with and brought us close together. He wished he could come to shul both to hear me and to take the lead in chanting the Maftir service (his favorite duty from his youth), but, being Orthodox, he would not drive on a holiday and was, by then, too frail to walk the far distance to our shul.

When I studied for my role as chazzanit, I did so in an academic way, setting out to learn dutifully all of the prayers which I had previously skimmed as a congregant. There was a tremendous amount of Hebrew I had never recited before and had to learn to pronounce. What surprised me in this process was that it became more than a rote study of text. It became a passion. I intuitively felt the rhythms of the prayers in my body as if they were written inside me. The trope made sense as if it was a physics equation that the universe had encoded for my voice millions of years ago. I was a conduit for the community. This was true when I chanted Kol Nidre, asking for a kind of pre-anullment of all the oaths and promises that our community will make that we may fail to fulfill. This was true as I held back tears recounting the massacre of the rabbis, and as I chanted El Maleh Rachamim for those who perished in the Holocaust. I felt a sense of mystical energy surrounding the congregation when I covered my head as the kohanim made their priestly blessing. I did not feel arrogant about the responsibility entrusted to me; I felt blessed and valued beyond measure.

As I grew more observant in those years, I started feeling a bit anxious about leading services. Doing so violated the rules of kol isha, the restrictions on the voice of a woman singing before men, forbidden in Orthodoxy. Though any man sufficiently concerned with this issue would probably not have been attending the service I led, where men and women sit together, I nevertheless chafed at the idea that my leadership role was a violation of codes of modesty, to which I was increasingly faithful. Moreover, there is a traditional prohibition about women reciting collective blessings on behalf of men. I felt uneasy about challenging that.

By the time I was expecting my second child, my pregnancy made some of these issues moot—after all, I couldn’t well stand on the bimah nine months pregnant, and so I took a “maternity leave.” Taking a break felt right—my life was now about parenting and exploring observance. A year later, I held baby number two and distracted my toddler with his train set as I sat listening to the daughters of the original chazzanit sisters chanting what I used to chant. These young women, one finishing high school, one in college, were beautiful, single, and they pronounced the Hebrew I often struggled with as if it was their first language. Although they sang so well, my heart broke for the lost opportunity to serve my community even while I was certain that tending to my boys was the best job I could ever have. In retrospect, I see that the tension I felt had to do not with wanting to take on a role that men traditionally fill, but with adjusting to being satisfied with my new role as a fully present mother to young children. Finding spiritual fulfillment within the confines of Jewish law is a hefty challenge for me, but I’m up to and am enjoying the journey. This year, those two gifted daughters will be on the bimah again and I’ll sit and follow along with my boys, now one and four, still with a bit of longing for the experience they’re having. But this time I will contribute in a way that feels right to me for now—I’ll attend all services, fast the full 25 hours on Yom Kippur while, yet again, nursing. And this time, I will be on the bimah, not chanting, but proudly blowing shofar.

Wait, I sound like I’m making excuses for my kid acting like a weenus, right? I’m not. Her actions were inexcusable. I am mortified. And like many parents, I personalize what my kid does and sometimes get confused that she and I are not the same person. (And this confusion is what leads to idiocy such as boasting about your newborn’s Apgar scores—uh, dude, your kid is not a genius for breathing successfully—as well as more insidious parenting mishegas such as the dismissal of all entitled, bratty conduct as the fault of someone else: an unsympathetic teacher, a kid who deserved to get picked on, a situation that all but forced your child to misbehave.) Like many parents, I worry that my child’s conduct reflects poorly on me. And my reaction is to push the bad stuff under the rug rather than confronting it head-on.

But that won’t fly during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In our tradition, now’s the time to take a hard look at ourselves, including our parenting. Is mine crappy? Am I raising a unrepentant, hair-trigger-temper-owning pill? (Don’t answer that.) How can I do better?

Unfortunately, research indicates that there’s no surefire way to raise a good apologizer. A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times wrote about research in which toddlers were encouraged to believe they’d broken a toy that was very special to the researcher. (Researchers: big meanies.) University of Iowa psychologists found that the kids who expressed the most guilt had the fewest behavioral problems over the next five years. This was true even for kids with poor impulse control.

But it’s important not to confuse guilt with shame. Guilt is when you feel terrible about something you’ve done; shame is when you feel you’re a terrible person. As parents, we can encourage our kids to feel guilty for their misdeeds (and indeed, as Jews, it’s our moral obligation to guilt our children as much as humanly possible) without shaming them by belittling them as human beings. There’s a big difference between “Smacking your friend was completely unacceptable—how do you think she felt? How could you have solved the problem without getting physical? How do you think you can pull yourself back from the brink next time?” and “What the hell is wrong with you?! You make me sick!” And though I wish I knew the magic words and skills to craft a morally well-developed child, there isn’t a single parenting style that correlates with raising kids who feel appropriate guilt without crippling shame.

So what’s a parent to do? Psychologist June Tangney at George Mason University recommends that when your kid misses the mark (which is, after all, the definition of the Hebrew word “chet,” frequently translated as “sin”), you should focus not just on the bad deed but on helping the kid make amends. (The High Holidays are not only about saying you’re sorry, but also about working not to repeat the same mistake again.) Josie tends to curl inward after an outburst, so embarrassed about her conduct that she has trouble talking about it. Which means she has trouble getting out the words, “I’m sorry.” (Maxine has no such trouble. At four, she blithely views “I’m sorry!” as a get-out-of-jail-free card. As long as she says it, she thinks she’s in the clear. Wrong-o, kid.) As for Josie: I made her apologize to Bubbe; I often talk about my own values; I apologize myself when I lose my temper. Basically, I do what the parenting experts say. And I still don’t know how everything’s going to turn out. Parenting often feels like you’re flying blind.

At this time of year we’re not only supposed to apologize; we’re supposed to accept the apologies of others. And for some kids, including Josie, neither is easy. (Hey, she’s descended from a long line of seethers.) But as Rabbi David Wolpe once wrote, “The grudge perches on the heart like a gargoyle on a parapet.” Echoing the same sentiment, Buddha supposedly said, “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.” Buddha and David Wolpe should totally have dinner.

But children love feeling persecuted. They love wailing “That’s not faaaaaaair!” Our job is to teach them that life isn’t fair, and though sometimes people wrong us, we have to forgive. “There’s a wealth of literature saying that harboring resentments and grudges takes a toll on your psychological and physical health,” Christopher Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies character strengths and happiness, told me in an interview. “Yes, you may be pissed off. But if you can let go, you are doing yourself a favor, not the other person. You don’t have to forget; you just have to choose to let the emotional burden go.” In Judaism, we’re supposed to accept all genuine apologies, which isn’t always easy for the young. Or, for that matter, the not-so-young.

So how to keep kids from ruminating about being wronged? How to encourage them to forgive? One strategy is to tell them about a time when we ourselves did wrong and were forgiven. Josie loves to hear the story about the time when I was in college and missed a flight to meet my parents at a family wedding. I called my dad expecting him to scream at me, but he could tell I felt terrible, and simply suggested ways to fix the problem.

It’s hard not to get worked up when we or our kids screw up. It’s tempting to lash out or look for blame. But doing that would really be missing the mark.

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

According to Judaic scholar Edna Nahshon, though, the symbolic value of shoes is a year-round affair. Her new book, a collection of essays aptly titled Jews and Shoes, aims to trace the role of footwear in the evolution of Jewish identity. Nahshon follows shoes across the sartorial map. Examining the Bible’s treatment of Moses’ sandals, Ora Horn Prouser, a scholar at the Academy for Jewish Religion, discovers a window into her relationship with God. Fashion historian Ayala Raz finds Zionist ideology inscribed upon popular Israeli footwear. The Jewish Museum’s Andrew Ingall puts a Jewish spin on Primo Levi’s fetishistic preference for women in heels, and artist Mayer Kirshenblatt offers a glimpse into life in pre-war Poland as he recalls his years as a shoemaker. If the essays in Nahshon’s collection figure the shoe as an extension of the Jewish body, Jews and Shoes offers a “cultural anatomy” of footwear.

Roll your mouse over the illustration to learn more about Jews and shoes . . .

Illustration by Vanessa Davis.

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.