(Tablet Magazine, based on cover art from Scholastic)

A couple of weeks ago, I griped about Eat Pray Love, a book I felt offered a facile (and goyish) portrait of spiritual awakening. Thankfully, a current bestseller, Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay, is giving readers a more nuanced, challenging, and thought-provoking view of what it means to live a moral life. What’s more, the issues explored in this book resonate deeply at Yom Kippur. And guess what! It’s a young adult novel.

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. (more…)

(Flickr/Robert Martens)

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is for many American Jews the one day each year they dedicate to thinking about their lives, their transgressions, and their futures. But some people think about their actions much more frequently, and writer Darin Strauss is among them. Much of what he’s thought about over the past 20 years is a fatal car accident during his last days in high school; Strauss was driving, and a classmate was killed.

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. 

(Eric Molinsky)

This time of year is heavy on reflection and repentance. For Darin Strauss, the guest on this week’s Vox Tablet podcast (which will run tomorrow), these are familiar emotions.

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:

Gravestones at Mount Carmel Cemetery.(Molly Surno)

In the period before the High Holidays, it’s traditional for Jews to visit the graves of departed family members and recite kaddish, the mourner’s prayer. In the New York area, many of the sprawling Jewish cemeteries date back at least a century and were chosen by immigrant communities seeking a burial place for their landsmen for generations to come. Rabbi Andy Bachman, of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, knows these graveyards well—he often officiates at funerals in Queens and Brooklyn. He took Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry (and photographer Molly Surno—see gallery below) on a tour of Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, the final resting place of some 85,000 Jewish New Yorkers including Bella Abzug, Abraham Cahan, and Benny Leonard, and he talked about how changes in burial customs over the past several decade reflect broader shifts in Jewish American life.

Phish. From our left: McConnell, Anastasio, Gordon, and Fishman.(Glide)

Wrigley Field, legendary ballpark of the Chicago Cubs, got the go-ahead to host two rock concerts on September 17 and 18 despite the fact that Yom Kippur begins at sundown on the 17th, and nearby synagogues were concerned about the parking situation. Brief aside: Yom Kippur is really early this year!

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:

(more…)

Pharmaceutical company Merck thinks it has solved your Yom Kippur headache—and that its infamous drug Vioxx, which was the subject of a massive recall and class-action settlement, is involved. The anti-headache drug, marketed as Arcoxia, is a Vioxx cousin. In studies, people who took it the night before a night and day of fasting experienced either no headache or a reduced headache (as compared to those who took the placebo), and found it easier to fast. Arcoxia is available in several European countries as well as Israel. Stateside, however, it is hard to come by: the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve it, on the grounds that it is too similar to its black-sheep cousin. Dunno—it certainly beats suppositories!

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

(Children from the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary Library; Ikea photo from the 2010 Ikea catalog.)

My visit last week to the Gothenburg Book Fair in Sweden got off to a stressful start. Several weeks before I arrived in that peaceful city, which boasts Northern Europe’s largest amusement park, a local tabloid published a story accusing Israel of stealing organs from Palestinians killed by the IDF. The story managed to make an impressive quantum leap in logic by linking an unproven accusation against the Israeli army for something it allegedly did in the early 1990s to a New Jersey rabbi accused of trafficking in human organs in 2009, as if the gap of more than a decade and thousands of miles was merely a trivial detail. The only thing missing in the article was a recipe for matzos made with the blood of Christian children.

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. (more…)

Clockwise from top left: Vegan Tahoe Blue slip-on and Vegan Wrap Boot from Toms, Swell Shoe from Olsen Haus, Olivia pump from Novacas, Stella McCartney animal print ankle boots (Clockwise from top left: Toms, Moo Shoes, Moo Shoes, Net-a-Porter)

For some of us, the real deprivation presented by Yom Kippur is not food, or even caffeine. It’s shoes—leather ones, to be precise. Rabbinic tradition, naturally, offers an array of explanations for why—leather shoes are considered a luxury; leather footwear was forbidden in the Temple; the need for shoes is a reminder of the sins of Eden. The real question, in practice, is what to wear instead.

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. (more…)

(Youtube.com)

The Day of Atonement is a few days away, and tradition requires us to ask each other’s forgiveness for sins, slights, and other snafus we may have committed during the past year. If you’re in need for a bit of inspiration with all this sorry business, here are some musical examples of Jews apologizing in a variety of ways, from the morbid to the heartfelt:

“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. (more…)

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]