Despite my epiphany about God and Ben Franklin, I’m not so keen on going to synagogue so late on a weekend night. But I’ve committed to push through my laziness, my excuses (and my comfort zone) to keep up and show up. Judaism has specific office hours.
I’ve picked a program that starts before midnight, because I’m a wimp about staying up late. I walk into the dignified Park Avenue Synagogue on Madison Avenue at 10 P.M. and feel like a party guest who’s arrived too early. It’s not crowded, not empty. This sanctuary always has a formality to it, but tonight there’s extra pomp: the velvet-swathed Torah is adorned in pristine white garb for the impending High Holidays, like a child putting on a new birthday outfit. The music is majestic. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, whom I know and admire, is lacking his usual wry humor. Tonight is serious stuff.
May my heart be open
To every broken soul,
To orphaned life,
To every stumbler Wandering unknown
And groping in the shadow.
I’m the stumbler, the wanderer, the groper in the shadow. That’s why I started this project. I now realize it’s a quintessential Jewish act: seeking, grappling. If you’re reaching, it’s because you believe there’s something to grab hold of.
I can’t stay till the end because I promised my friend Rabbi Elie Kaunfer I’d stop by his service way uptown. Cofounder of Mechon Hadar, an independent seminary, Elie taught my Torah study group and wrote me this email before the holiday: “Abby, You might like a more experiential davening (reciting prayers), even if you aren’t able to understand or even follow every word.”
I arrive late to the crowded room of young regulars on the second floor of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center in Washington Heights. They have run out of handouts and chairs, so I move to a corner of the dimly lit space, grab my iPhone, and quickly download the Selichot text Elie had sent me in advance. I steal a glance at the worshippers around me, making sure I’m not the only one relying on a handheld device. I’m not; this is the Y Generation. I manage to find where they are on the page, but can barely keep up, especially in the bad light.
It’s clear, however, that no one cares what his or her neighbor is doing. When singing the niggunim (melodies without words), the full-throated, harmonizing voices somehow lift me up and carry me along. Elie’s email comes back to me: “Prayer is not about a cognitive experience of the words.”
Whenever we get to the “Thirteen Attributes of God”—which has a melody I somehow absorbed in Central’s services—I can sing with the room, and that changes everything.
Adonai! Adonai! El rachum v’chanun / Erech apayim v’rav chesed ve-emet / Notzer chesed la-alafim / Nosey avon vafesha v’chata’ah v’nakeh!
It’s revealing to watch Elie in this context and realize that a ritual like Selichot, with its raw pleading, can bring out someone’s primal side. Usually a measured, scholarly presence, Elie is bowed in fervid prayer, his head tented with a tallis, his voice—more powerful than I knew it could be—rising and falling, driving the worship as if overtaken by some divine engine. I wish I could be that transported.
Each time we get to the Thirteen Attributes, the song gains in volume. We plead as one. Hear me. Forgive me. Grant me another year. It echoes the twenty-seventh Psalm I’ve been reciting daily. It could feel useless to repeat—day after day—verses that may (or may not) have been penned by King David. But just like the recurrent sound of the shofar each dawn, just like the recurrence of the Thirteen Attributes, I’m beginning to grasp the resonance in repetition. Each reprise offers another chance at meaning.
“Do not hide your face from me. . . . Do not forsake me, do not abandon me”—Psalm 27.
And repeat.
Rabbi Joanna Samuels
ON ROSH HASHANAH
“Today the world is born,” we proclaim on Rosh Hashanah. A provocative Midrash teaches that Rosh Hashanah is not the anniversary of the first day of creation, but instead the sixth day of creation. On one long sixth day, God created Adam and Eve, who, in turn, loved, disobeyed, were banished from paradise, and learned that they would, eventually, die.
It is this sixth day that is the churning expanse of my yoma arichta—the “long day” that the sages called the two days of this holiday. I am intensely present to the miracle of being alive and yet frighteningly awake to the dark reality of mortality. I am optimistic that a new year could bring renewal to my soul and yet I confront my stubborn habits and long-standing failures. I am aware that I can—I must!—marshal my abilities in the service of making our world more just, and yet I am overwhelmed by how much seems unfixable.
Each and every Rosh Hashanah, as I seesaw from gratitude to fear, from possibility to narrowness, I consider the yoma arichta of Jewish history, the continuous narrative of a people, diverse and divergent, balancing on the same axis of optimism and fear. In the merit of all those whose lives make up the long years of our presence on earth, I commit to see possibility, to seek out repair, and to embrace the miracle of creation.
9. 29. 14
I REMEMBER, AS A kid, feeling that the High Holy Day passage, Unetaneh Tokef—“Let us acknowledge the power [of the holiness of the day]”—which says that God is going to decide “Who will live and who will die,” did not apply to me.
“Who by sword” seemed archaic; “Who by water” remote.
But that litany becomes alarmingly vivid as I get older. This year it feels as if every peril leaps off the page when I’m in Rosh Hashanah services.
“Who shall see ripe age and who shall not. . . .” My childhood friend Dan died a few weeks before the holiday while swimming in the ocean.
“Who shall perish by fire. . . .” Six members of a New Jersey family—related to Rhonda, who works the checkout counter where I get breakfast—died in a fire on Father’s Day, three months earlier.
“. . . and who by water.” The New York Times just reported that global temperatures, left unchecked, will ultimately flood coastal cities.
“Who by sword. . . .” Steven Sotloff and James Foley were recently beheaded by ISIS.
“. . . and who by beast. . . .” A twenty-two-year-old hiker was mauled by a bear.
“Who by earthquake. . . .” A main shock of 6.0 in Napa.
“. . . and who by plague.” The Ebola virus made headlines all summer.
The grim catalog rattles me when I read it in preparation for Rosh Hashanah—the day we’ll recite the Unetaneh Tokef in morning services.
For now, the night before, I’m comforted by my congregation, Central Synagogue, packed into Avery Fisher Hall on the eve of the new year (our numbers require renting a larger space on the High Holidays). Looking out from the first-tier balcony, there’s something symbolically powerful about rows and rows of yarmulkes and familiar families. Thousands are still here, not yet smote by water, fire, or sword. So many of