shabbat shalom
Oct. 1st, 2010 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiI wonder which is more common: people raised in religious families who fall away from their beliefs as they grow older, or the opposite. Like Ursula Le Guin, I was raised "as irreligious as a jackrabbit," and have largely remained so. My great-grandparents' immigrant Judaism had been almost totally transformed into secular humanism by the time it reached my parents' generation, leaving only a few traces, like my father's knee-jerk support for Israel in arguments with my mother. I had observant Jewish friends in high school, and it was an occasional joke among us that I, the least religious in practice and (probably) belief, was by far the most typically (Ashkenazy-) "Jewish"-looking.
I spent a few years of college celebrating Shabbat and the High Holidays with the Jewish students' group, something my parents put up with in resigned silence. I made some good friends, learned some prayers and Hebrew songs (and put together a songbook/prayerbook of them to satisfy my own need for sheet music; I wonder if anyone still uses it there), but never quite got to the point of surrendering myself to belief. After college, I always seemed to be living somewhere where there were either too few Jews or too many, and I had other things than prayer on my mind. Time passes.
Sometime this year--I think it must have been around May?--I decided, as I'd done a few times in the past, to try doing Shabbat for myself again. This time, for some reason, it felt right. I don't think I've missed a week since. Many observant Jews would probably find the way I go about it disrespectful at best: a little votive candle in a plain ceramic candleholder a friend gave me (I'm terrified of fire and breathe a sigh of relief every time I manage to light the damn thing without burning myself), a mouthful of wine (a step or two above Manischewitz, sour rather than sweet, which is all the difference I can tell), and a bite of not bread but rice. I sing the prayers from the old prayerbook I made in college, asking myself every week if I'm ever likely to make a space in my life to learn Hebrew. And then I eat whatever I've cooked--often Thai curry on Fridays--and blow the candle out when I'm ready to go to bed.
There's so much I worry about in my job, and so little I can do about it, either through my own failings or because things are simply out of my hands. It helps me to have a few moments to watch the candle start to burn while I pray for my students, one or two or all of them, and sometimes for myself. I still wouldn't call myself a believer or a religious person, but I look forward to this time on Friday evenings.
I should add that, if I do have a true religion, it's probably--like my father before me--music. The only time I speak rather than sing the Friday prayers is when there's music on the radio, like tonight, a Beethoven piano concerto. I'm sure God, if Anyone like that exists, would rather listen to Beethoven than to me singing. And, as with today's BGM, there are pieces by Brahms in particular that I can't listen to without believing in God, or in something like God. The Second Symphony and the last movement of the Fourth, the first string sextet and the clarinet sonatas, the First Piano Concerto--there's just something there wider and deeper and more wonderful and terrible than fits inside any one human being. To put it another way, it doesn't much matter to me if there's God or not, as long as there's a Brahms.
I spent a few years of college celebrating Shabbat and the High Holidays with the Jewish students' group, something my parents put up with in resigned silence. I made some good friends, learned some prayers and Hebrew songs (and put together a songbook/prayerbook of them to satisfy my own need for sheet music; I wonder if anyone still uses it there), but never quite got to the point of surrendering myself to belief. After college, I always seemed to be living somewhere where there were either too few Jews or too many, and I had other things than prayer on my mind. Time passes.
Sometime this year--I think it must have been around May?--I decided, as I'd done a few times in the past, to try doing Shabbat for myself again. This time, for some reason, it felt right. I don't think I've missed a week since. Many observant Jews would probably find the way I go about it disrespectful at best: a little votive candle in a plain ceramic candleholder a friend gave me (I'm terrified of fire and breathe a sigh of relief every time I manage to light the damn thing without burning myself), a mouthful of wine (a step or two above Manischewitz, sour rather than sweet, which is all the difference I can tell), and a bite of not bread but rice. I sing the prayers from the old prayerbook I made in college, asking myself every week if I'm ever likely to make a space in my life to learn Hebrew. And then I eat whatever I've cooked--often Thai curry on Fridays--and blow the candle out when I'm ready to go to bed.
There's so much I worry about in my job, and so little I can do about it, either through my own failings or because things are simply out of my hands. It helps me to have a few moments to watch the candle start to burn while I pray for my students, one or two or all of them, and sometimes for myself. I still wouldn't call myself a believer or a religious person, but I look forward to this time on Friday evenings.
I should add that, if I do have a true religion, it's probably--like my father before me--music. The only time I speak rather than sing the Friday prayers is when there's music on the radio, like tonight, a Beethoven piano concerto. I'm sure God, if Anyone like that exists, would rather listen to Beethoven than to me singing. And, as with today's BGM, there are pieces by Brahms in particular that I can't listen to without believing in God, or in something like God. The Second Symphony and the last movement of the Fourth, the first string sextet and the clarinet sonatas, the First Piano Concerto--there's just something there wider and deeper and more wonderful and terrible than fits inside any one human being. To put it another way, it doesn't much matter to me if there's God or not, as long as there's a Brahms.
