The weeks leading up to the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are meant to be ones of introspection. There have been many instances in the past month or two when I’ve thought about ways I have been less than perfect. I have even reached out to a few people to apologize for not being for them what I felt they deserved. In their responses, I have learned a great deal about what it means to be present in someone’s life.
I’m not so great at maintaining contact with people. I am often disappointed in people and would prefer to keep my distance in order to preserve their positive status in my thoughts. I hesitate to find out that someone is less educated than I thought, or votes a particular way, or has any negative qualities. (This is a complicated issue and I am working on this too!) Until now, I had not considered that anyone might rely on me for anything or that hearing from me might make a difference to them. I choose to take it as a compliment that I do make a difference to some people. I vow to do much better at being a participatory member of friendships.
I’m often surprised at the depth we as humans can cause another to hurt. The feeling of unintentionally hurting another person weighs so heavily on me as to feel like a chokehold. Being betrayed by someone I thought to be a partner and friend also brings forth stinging tears, even a year and a half later. All part of the human experience I guess. And, of course, each person has a different perspective.
Yesterday, at Temple, many images were coming unbidden to mind. It is the most solemn day of the year. Our prayer text often has us reading aloud and apologizing for sins “we” have committed. I personally may have walked past a stranger instead of welcoming them, but I haven’t participated in most of the sins that crossed my lips, but I imagine we are meant to feel that, being a small drop in the sea of humanity, we are mixed together with others among us who have. Until all human beings have ceased their evil actions and intentions, each one of us is accountable for the other. Am I not “my brother’s keeper?”
I have always felt a great responsibility to counteract the violence and negativity in the world and to be an example to others in the hope that they will also be a voice for goodness and acceptance. Just this morning my walking partner told me of a man who killed his wife and children, which just baffles me. Are some people born into the world with a tendency or susceptibility for that? Or is it a matter of one generation teaching the next by action and example? How do we break the cycle?
As I sat freely in Yom Kippur services, listening to the cello make it’s winding way through the powerful and emotional terrain of Kol Nidre, I felt the history of our people. I often feel such weighted mournfulness for the comprehensive span of abuse and pointless death the Jewish people have endured that I can barely speak. And yet, each year, I humbly ask for pardon and I strive to optimistically move forward with the best of intentions.
Sometimes I wish I were born a man in the time of rabbinic Judaism, when scholarly pursuits of texts and human nature, many of which we read today in our prayer books, took root. How would it feel to be amongst the most learned of society who could ponder such matters and correspond with those who were (and are still today) the most influential thinkers?
I also often imagine myself and my family among those who escaped slavery long, long ago in Egypt, leaving behind all we’d ever known, to journey to the Red Sea, trusting in Moses and in God and hoping for a different life. I wonder how much a person can be expected to endure before breaking. And how to carry on even thus.
Probably every time I am leaving a crowded concert, baseball game, or movie theater, when the person ahead of me is taking microscopic steps forward every so slowly, I picture us all mutely stepping toward our deaths, naked and huddled together in fear, as so many were during the Holocaust. One group overpowering another for no valid reason I can see. No accomplishments or social standing can help us then. We are all equal before each other.
Every single time I recite the Shema prayer, “the watchword of our faith,” I imagine Jews all over the world doing the same and feel a powerful sense of community and belonging. We say “Hear, O Israel,” referring to all Jews the world over, and we proclaim our defiance of many of the societies we once lived among by saying that we believe there is One God. It is a simple recitation of faith and trust, and yet how many years have we as a People been saying these words and living by its message? How many have died with those words on their lips?
I don’t know if I am praying to a God who has already decided “who shall live and who shall die” in the coming year, or if any higher power is listening to our pleas at all. I don’t know if what happens to us has been pre-ordained or has anything to do with us at all. I do know that the supplication and introspection does us all good. Stopping all else and participating in a holy day as a global Jewish community, whether out of obligation or heart-felt purity, is one of many ways that the Jewish faith carries on l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation.
I am fairly positive that not everyone feels the heaviness of the burden as I do. I’ve always felt deeply, and that’s ok because that’s just who I am. I hope it allows me to be a more present friend, a more understanding spouse, and a humbler human being.
For now, I must shake off the solemnity and get back to my regular programming… there’s a school book fair that is not going to plan itself, you know! 🙂
Thank you for reading.
