Prayer = Dance = Prayer

You know when you have a brilliant idea, but you aren’t sure how to make it work, and then you find out someone else has already had the same idea and made it a reality, and you’re kind of excited, because what they’re doing is awesome, but you’re also kind of sad, because you didn’t get to it first?

The Day of the Fast of Atonement

Yom Kippur is the climax of the Jewish liturgical year. After a month and a half in which ideally one has time to reflect on one’s sins and failings in the past year, made amends to the people one has harmed, and resolved to get right with G-d, Jews gather for a day of fasting and penitential (and occasionally celebratory prayers). We’ve already put in weeks struggling to achieve true repentance, depending on our custom, we’ve been saying special prayers beseeching divine mercy and forgiveness each night for either a month or a couple of weeks, but on Yom Kipur we atone.

What the heck is atonement, anyway? I harkens back to a more ancient version of Judaism, when rather than seeing repentance (Teshuvah) as the key to wiping away sin, sins were cleansed by means of sacrificial offerings in the temple. As one of my teachers likes to point out, although for Jews today Teshuvah / Repentance is a central component of our relationship with G-d, the concept does not appear a single time in the Pentateuch (it does eventually show up in later books of the bible). There is this ancient, primitive but intuitively compelling notion that sin demands punishment no matter what, and there’s no way around it. In the days of the temple, we asked G-d to transfer that punishment to an innocent beast that would be sacrificed. Now we have no temple at which to offer sacrifices, but we do have repentance.

While I do believe that repentance/teshuvah provides a real alternative to deserved punishment, sometimes teshuvah doesn’t feel like enough. It’s hard to shake primal sense that there must be some immutable divine karmic calculus, to which we will be held accountable regardless of how sorry we are. That’s where Yom Kipur comes in. Once a year, we fast, we wear uncomfortable shoes, and we stand in synagogue praying for hours- in short we afflict our bodes and our souls, in order to somehow cleanse ourselves of those sins which teshuvah alone was not enough to wipe away.

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This year I spent Yom Kipur with the Leader Minyan, a hippyish, semi-egalitarian, quasi-Orthodox congregation, famous (or infamous) for very very slow, deeply intentional davening, with lots of singing and dancing. Their normal Shabbat morning services take about 6 hours (with a break for a snack), so I full expected their services to take most of the day on Yom Kippur. What I did not realize was that this minyan would start praying at 6:30 in the morning and not stop for a break for the next twelve hours.

I got there before services started in the morning, and stayed through the day as the crowd filled in and thinned out and then filled in again. Although I couldn’t stay fully focused the whole time, and even dozed in my seat during some parts of the service, it was incredible to spend such an extended period of time in a sanctified prayer space. I sang until I thought I would go hoarse; I danced until I was leaning on my neighbor for support. And a couple of times, when I felt myself on the verge of passing out from dehydration, I took a whiff from the one of the communal snuff boxes to wake me up (incredibly, the use of snuff on Yom Kippur is not only permitted but a deeply established tradition). By the end of the day, when the sun had gone down, as we concluded Ne’ilah, the final prayer service of Yom Kippur, there was this light joy in the room. Simple relief that the fast was over, pious gratitude at having had the opportunity to atone for our sins, and the medical fact of low blood-sugar and dehydration combined to make us all a little giddy, as we danced and sang for the last time together in that marathon of prayer.

I tend to think of Yom Kippur as a day for self reflection and repentance, so I was slightly uneasy about the fact that I had been so busy praying the liturgy and singing the melodies with the congregation that I hadn’t had much time for quiet contemplation. But the truth is that the Yom Kipur is not essentially a day for self-reflection; it’s the day we put put the final seal on a season, or ideally perhaps a full year of self-examination and repentance. It is a day to be lived, to be experiencedm to be endured and celebrated in body and spirit, something which I did this year perhaps more fully than I ever have before.

At the end of the day, as I headed for home, I felt empty and light. In the days since the fast, I’ve noticed myself being more serious about being a kinder, better person in my littlest daily interactions. Am I yet as considerate of others as I should be? Do I shun catty gossip completely? No and no, but the front lines in those battles have moved in the right direction, and I find myself more acutely aware when I say something unkind, or I treat someone dismissively, or make immoral consumer choices, without excessive self-recrimination, but simply an awareness that I could be doing better. It feels good. I hope this feeling and this awareness last.

“Aseh l’cha rav”

In an often quoted passage from Masechet Avot, or the Ethics of the Fathers, an 1800 year old collection of aphorisms and moral instruction, and the only book of the Mishnah that does not contain any normative law, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Perachia says “Aseh l’cha rav uk’neh lecha chaver,” which translates as literally as “make a rabbi for yourself and aquire yourself a friend.”

Leaving aside the bit about the friend, “aseh l’cha rav” reflects the importance in Jewish life of having a “rav,” a spiritual, intellectual, moral and legal guide. Ideally a rav is someone you can study with and learn from, someone who can inspire you with his or her (though traditionally just his) interpretation of Biblical text, someone who can provide you with advice and comfort in difficult times, but also someone who can tell you whether it’s okay to eat that chicken soup that you accidentally dropped a dollop of sour cream into.

Though I am privileged to count a number of rabbis whom I deeply admire among my acquaintance, I had not met any whom I felt I could make my Rav. I was looking for someone who was spiritually engaged, possessed of deep intellectual understanding of the tradition, someone I could look to as a moral guide as well as a halakhic decisor, someone who could provide a living example of how to live as an honest, decent person. Perhaps most difficult of all, I felt I needed someone whose worldview roughly jibed with my own: an intellectually open critical thinker with a deep respect for received tradition, a feminist working for equity in a serious way within the framework of Jewish religious law, not by throwing it out or grossly distorting it. Aside from all that, I was looking for someone with whom I felt some kind of personal connection.

I had begun to despair that I would ever find such a person, and yet I felt I could never accept the authority of anyone without all of those qualities.

Then, this summer, I found my rav in the scholar-in-residence at the Jewish summer camp where I was working. Over the course his month-long residency, I had the chance to study with him one-on-one, sit in on classes he gave, to consult him about prosaic questions of Jewish religious law, to share meals with him and his wife and even to work with him on fixing and maintaining the eruv of our camp. When he got ready to leave, the sad feeling in the pit of my stomach at not knowing when I would get to study with him and learn from him again told me I had finally found my rav.

The search for a rav reminds me of my search for Ms. Right. In that search, too, I have a short but very difficult-to-satisfy list of non-negotiable requirements. One key difference, which makes the latter search a lot harder, is that while it doesn’t matter how many students a rav has, I’ve got to get to my Ms. Right before anyone else does.

Special Season

In the United States, Chanukah lives in the shadow of his richer, more popular relative, Christmas. It’s a cruel calendric accident that the central holiday of the country’s majority religion should be juxtaposed with a very nice, but relatively minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, a holiday whose theological significance is probably more comparable to that of Presidents Day than to that of Christmas.

The celebration of Chanukah in the US becomes tainted by a sense of well-meaning condescention from the broader, Christmas-celebrating public and the anxious desire on the part of Jews to somehow turbo-charge their holiday in order compete.

My family, in which both holidays were celebrated, was a bit of a microcosm of this dynamic. The Christmas-celebrators were a lot more invested in their holiday, decorating their houses weeks ahead of time, putting up trees and wreaths and creches, planning meals for the eve and day of the holiday. The Chanukah-celebrators, by contrast, contented themselves with one big dinner party and lighting candles. The most important factor in dertemining my childhood understanding of the holidays’ relative importance was of couse the number of presents I received for each. And in this department, Chanukah could certainly not compete. The Christians in my family gave a lot more presents than the Jews did.

So while I always enjoyed Chanukah growing up, it was not a holiday I looked forward to with longing and excitement the way I looked forward to Christmas. As a teenager and adult, I began to find Christmas more and more alienating for combination of theological, cultural and personal reasons (not necessarily in that order), but my love of Chanukah did not grow proportionally, and I found myself dreading the month of December and all its enforced holiday cheer.

Moving to Israel this year, among the things I was happy to escape, was the annual two-month onslaught of Christmas marketing. I was gratified to find that Chanukah here does not fill Christmas’ niche as the high holiday of Consumerism. To be sure, the Chanukah Sufganiyot (more about that later) go on sale several weeks before the holiday and I found one flyer about a chanukah sale on my door today, but other than that the holiday here retains a dignified, quiet beauty that I’ve never noticed in it in the States, where it is almost entirely defined by its calendric neighbor.

I think my first clue that I was going to feel differently about Chanukah this year was a few days before Chanukah, when I was at my weekly volunteer assignment, where I spend time with three young Ethiopian children, who live with their mother at an absorption center for recent immigrants. Throughout the afternoon, the children would spontaneously burst into one of a very small number of Chanukah songs they knew. Their eager anticipation of the holiday was such that they could not contain it for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone that excited about Chanukah, nor could I remember getting that excited about the holiday myself. Their excitement rubbed off on me, and I found myself looking forward to the holiday in a way I never had before.

The first night of Chanukah came. I lit candles with my roommates. We sang the blessings and traditional songs together, and then I went outside to my balcony to daven mincha (afternoon prayers). I could see our three sets of shabbat candles and chanukah candles while I davened, and my heart swelled. I simultaneously felt gratitude for being able to celebrate this beautiful holiday in Jerusalem, a wistfulness at not being able celebrate with my friends and family back in the states, and strangest and most intense of all, a powerful longing to light candles and celebrate this holiday with my own as yet unborn children.

That poignant mix of emotions was only sharpened as I walked to Friday night services. I passed families walking together. I passed lit oil lights in glass boxes to protect them from the wind, set up in front of garden gates. I passed a group of young chasidic men dancing in a circle on the sidewalk and singing. I passed a haredi yeshiva where the windows were full of menoras being lit by boys who had not gone home for the holiday. I imagined their homesickness, and it brought into relief my own bittersweet feelings at the comencement of the holiday.

That evening, for the first time, I felt the spirit of Chanukah.

Special People in Special Places

There’s a soup kitchen in central Jerusalem where a number of students from my yeshiva volunteer on Friday mornings. The dining room is overwhelming and disorganized, as people jostle for a place line and literally try to yank trays of food out of volunteers’ hands. It’s not a pleasant or particularly heartwarming environment; volunteering in the dining room, one gets yelled as often as one gets thanked by the people eating there.

The first time I volunteered there, my second week in Jerusalem, I was bending down in the middle of the crowded dining room to tie up a bag of garbage, when I felt a kiss on the back of my head. I looked up to see the smiling face of an eight or ten-year-old boy with Downs Syndrome. It was a tender gesture in the midst of a dirty, distressing and fairly un-tender environment, and I felt like the boy had given me a real blessing.

The experience reinforced my believe that people with serious developmental disabilities have something powerful to offer to the rest of us. In metaphysical terms, I believe that retarded people are agents of blessing, and I am always very grateful for chance encounters with those whose minds work differently from my own.

Two days ago, I was davening mincha in the beautiful Abuhav Synagogue in Tsfat, the mountain town in Northern Israel, which has been a center of Jewish mysticism for centuries. I had finished my silent prayer, and was standing, waiting for the shaliach tzibbur (service leader) to begin his repetition when I noticed some movement behind me out of the corner of my eye. I turned and saw a boy with Downs Syndrome sitting next to my seat, waving in the direction of the bima and the ark. I wasn’t sure if he was waving to the shaliach tzibbur or just for the fun of waving, or if perhaps, as I imagined, he was waving to G-d. The boy stopped waving after a few seconds and began turning the pages in the two siddurim (prayerbooks) he had open in front of him. After a minute, he stood up, shuckled for a couple of seconds, sat back down and pulled a third siddur off the shelf and held it in his lap. An adult who seemed to have something to do with him came over and tried to get him to close at some of the open siddurim but the boy held his ground. I felt honored to be able to sit next to this boy and enjoy his kavannah for the brief mincha service.