Entry tags:
days of atonement
(When I read about the Middle East, I take anything I’m reading with a grain of salt. Not because I don’t trust the author or because I know better—the opposite, God knows, I don’t know from nothing—but you know the rule: two Jews, three opinions. Add Palestinians and Egyptians and Iranians and Lebanese and Saudi (and Americans, and British, and French, and…) into the mix and you seem to get a wild proliferation of opinions spreading out from every one person you run up against. So I read reminding myself: this is how it looks to this person. One piece of the kaleidoscope.)
I was reading Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem (it turned up in the English section of the public library of all places, so sue me), and paused to be amused by his friend Ze’ev Chafets, who sits on the curbside every Yom Kippur with a beer and some falafel and calls out to passersby, not all of them known to him, “Hey, brother, if I did anything to harm you this year, knowingly or unknowingly, forgive me.” Something occurred to me at that point: Yom Kippur happens every year.
Obvious, right, all holidays happen every year, from Ramadan to Tanabata, that’s how they work (why, I wonder. A question for another day.) It was only in college that I ever went to Yom Kippur services, and what stuck in my mind was the Hebrew-alphabetical catalog of the sins called out with the rhythmic breast-beating (and how unhumbly delighted I was to be given the cantor’s role for that part of one of the services). You admit to the year’s sins, and apologize for them, and try to atone. But there’s nothing in the service, as far as I know, where you add “—and I’ll never do it again.” No painful, unfulfillable promises of reform. Of course you’ll do it again, or else you’ll do something else sinful. People do sins. That’s how it works. That’s why Yom Kippur happens every year. Old people don’t get out of it because they’ve done all their atoning when they were younger and gotten it all out of the way; they have brand-new individual sins, a year’s worth, to atone for.
What a holiday. Jews have guilt; we’re famous for it. (Jewish women especially, I’d say, but that again is a whole ‘nother can of whatever.) There’s only so much guilt you can stand at one time, and only so many ways to get rid of it in everyday life. So once a year you get rid of it wholesale, enough to keep going for another year. Allowing Jewish neuroses (it was my fault, I should have known better, if only I had done something) to flourish? Granting a reasonable portion of psychological health to a community? What do I know?
I was reading Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem (it turned up in the English section of the public library of all places, so sue me), and paused to be amused by his friend Ze’ev Chafets, who sits on the curbside every Yom Kippur with a beer and some falafel and calls out to passersby, not all of them known to him, “Hey, brother, if I did anything to harm you this year, knowingly or unknowingly, forgive me.” Something occurred to me at that point: Yom Kippur happens every year.
Obvious, right, all holidays happen every year, from Ramadan to Tanabata, that’s how they work (why, I wonder. A question for another day.) It was only in college that I ever went to Yom Kippur services, and what stuck in my mind was the Hebrew-alphabetical catalog of the sins called out with the rhythmic breast-beating (and how unhumbly delighted I was to be given the cantor’s role for that part of one of the services). You admit to the year’s sins, and apologize for them, and try to atone. But there’s nothing in the service, as far as I know, where you add “—and I’ll never do it again.” No painful, unfulfillable promises of reform. Of course you’ll do it again, or else you’ll do something else sinful. People do sins. That’s how it works. That’s why Yom Kippur happens every year. Old people don’t get out of it because they’ve done all their atoning when they were younger and gotten it all out of the way; they have brand-new individual sins, a year’s worth, to atone for.
What a holiday. Jews have guilt; we’re famous for it. (Jewish women especially, I’d say, but that again is a whole ‘nother can of whatever.) There’s only so much guilt you can stand at one time, and only so many ways to get rid of it in everyday life. So once a year you get rid of it wholesale, enough to keep going for another year. Allowing Jewish neuroses (it was my fault, I should have known better, if only I had done something) to flourish? Granting a reasonable portion of psychological health to a community? What do I know?
