I was recently invited to speak to students about what Yom Kippur means to me. Not hip to being the Token Jew, I would ordinarily decline. But having something to do with middle age, something to do with the time warp in the internet age, I’ve been thinking seriously about rituals–religious, spiritual, secular, and silly–that mark time. So I will visit this class on Yom Kippur on Monday.
This week I have been thinking about what to say to a group of sixteen-year-olds, most of whom I don’t know, about my relationship to Yom Kippur, and perhaps to Judaism more broadly. Where to begin?
Maybe here: I’m a thoroughly secular dude. I have no religious faith to speak of. I didn’t identify as a Jew until my 30’s. Much to my parents' consternation, I adamantly refused to say I was Jewish, despite two Jewish parents, five years in Hebrew school, my Bar Mitzvah, and my penchant for discussing my gut health.
To this day, I’m not totally comfortable identifying as Jewish. If anything, I am Jew-ish. More He-Bruh than Hebrew.
A confluence of factors have made me feel more Jew-ish over time. Aging has played a role. I hardly know a non-Jewish way to deal with pain or discomfort. You couldn’t possibly see or hear me get off a couch or without presuming it is a Jew getting off a couch.
Also, moving to Berlin has challenged me to reconsider my essential Jew-ishness, though not necessarily in the ways you might imagine.
Parenting, as parenting does, has forced me to reconnect to and reevaluate my childhood. I believed then, as I believe now, that Hebrew school was torture and that organized religion tends to be a scam. That said, I have warm memories of the Jewish community that raised me.
I should add that this book, as much as any Philip Roth book, helped me come to terms with my relationship to Judaism. The authors, father and daughter, argue that Judaism is defined not by a bloodline; but a textline.
The lines of text are teeming with struggle. For struggle is at the heart of Jewish expression. In an NPR interview, Amos Oz said:
"If you promise to take the following with a grain of salt, I would add that you can never get two Jews to agree with each other on anything. It's difficult to find one Jew who agrees with himself or herself on something, because everyone has a divided mind and soul, everyone is ambivalent. So our civilization is a civilization of dispute, of disagreement and of argument."
Grain of salt taken. But it is my divided mind and soul that makes it hard for me to identify as Jewish, and yet harder to feel like a representative of Judaism. I grew up in a Jewish community, but I have few Jewish friends. I do not go to temple. I have few rituals and no religion.
And it’s this problem of lacking rituals that attracts me to reconsidering my relationship with Judaism. For the last 39 weeks I’ve been writing a newsletter every Friday, the Jewish Sabbath. Sabbath begins Friday night, I write on Friday morning. This is my only Sabbath ritual, so don’t ask me if I tear toilet paper.
I write to mark time. This is how I reflect on the week. This is the beginning of my slide into the weekend. This moment, as I type, as I struggle with words, this is my communion with my people. It’s also my communion with you people.
This writing is but one ritual I’m pursuing in my efforts to develop a sense of emotional structure so I can feel less unmoored in our Age of Anxiety.
Like all religions, Judaism is emphatically ritualistic. There's an ancient set of traditions, rules, and practices. It is, in part, because they are ancient that I don’t identify with them. But if one practices some of the ancient traditions of the Jewish people they can’t help but feel connected to time immemorial. As someone who, for a living and for fun, thinks a lot about the past, I find this to be powerful stuff.
But what I really want to tell this class on Yom Kippur is that the nature of youth is to live in the present. I don’t want them to be held back by the dead hand of the past. I want them to hold tight to their ability to be fully in the moment. To be here and now. For this is a beauty of youth.
As we age and gather moss, as we develop our own histories and write our own stories, it becomes harder to be present. This is why we have meditation retreats and mindfulness training and yoga and microdosing.
So I’ve been thinking about practices and traditions that, perhaps paradoxically, are deeply rooted in the past, but bring us into the present.
Yom Kippur is precisely that. It’s a series of ancient practices, the goals of which are to press the brakes, to be perfectly present, and to seek forgiveness.
Having negated the study of Judaism broadly and of Yom Kippur specifically, I’ve been struggling this week with what to say to these kids on Monday. I reached out to Rabbi Rothschild, with whom I recorded a lively podcast conversation. I phoned a Jewish funeral director, also a podcast alum. I chatted with my OG He-Bro, Scott Robbin, with whom I have a standing conversation on Tuesday evenings (my most edifying ritual). I also did what I’m occasionally wise enough to do when I still feel lost: I consulted the poets.
Of course, I will walk the young German goyim through the basics of Yom Kippur. Seeking forgiveness. Making amends. Reconciling with God, family, and friends. Redemption. Fasting. Purification. Social justice. Compassion. Community. Awe. Lots of awe.
Yom Kippur brings a powerful series of rituals that can make Jews feel powerless in the face of God. It's a communal acknowledgement that we are human. We err. We must not hide, indeed we cannot hide from our misdeeds. For no one walks alone. Even the angels stand before God on this day. They submit to an angry God. This is the one day that Jews don’t argue with God. The day where the superego supersedes the id.
But despite the ritual acknowledgement of our powerlessness in the face of the forces greater than us, Yom Kippur is also meant to empower. It’s a Mental Health Day. A timeless reminder that we don't have to be perfect, but we must strive to be better. A reminder that despite our many flaws and transgressions, we can be forgiven. And if you believe–as Tolstoy, Gandhi, William Lloyd Garrison did, and as I do–that the Kingdom of God is Within You, then Yom Kippur whisks you away from everyday life and creates a sacred space for you to sit with your wrongdoings. To apologize to yourself. To forgive yourself. To give yourself Grace.
But that’s just my reading of Yom Kippur and, like I said, I can't speak for the Jews. And the truth is that when I think about Yom Kippur, I mostly reflect on my lived experiences as a kid. The family stress around arriving on time to temple, which, if memory serves, we never did. This was a problem because it was the only day of the year where the temple was crowded. Lots of folks seeking forgiveness, I reckon.
I remember the cornucopia of classic 80’s colognes and perfumes. Jews are not to bathe on Yom Kippur, but apparently showering in Drakkar Noir or Davidoff Cool Water or Dior Poison was part of God’s Divine Plan.
I remember being bored, dreadfully bored. Playing with the tzitzit on my dad’s tallit. Still bored. Playing air tic-tac-toe with my bro. Bored. “All rise for the yada yada.” “Blah blah blah” in ancient Hebrew (likely translation: “God is omnipotent, you’re not.”). “Please be seated.” Waiting for the shofar to be blown. Bored. Asking to go to the bathroom every hour, hopefully to meet a pal so we could hide in the coat room, talk about which Hebrew school girls we crushed on, and bemoan our dismal lot in life. We weren’t hiding from the Russians or the Germans, we were hiding from the Jews.
We were just kids. Regular bored kids, just like all the other bored kids who had to go to school that day, but at least they had recess and lunch.
But these are just my thoughts and memories about Yom Kippur, some of which I might share on Monday. But for now, I have to wake up my shiksa wife and my shiksa kid so the little shiksa and I can get to school on time. But before I run, allow me to share two Yom Kippur poems that I discovered this week.
The first was penned by Leonard Bernstein (not to be confused with Bradley Cooper in a prosthetic schnoz) in the late 1940’s.
Poem for Yom Kippur
From the left and from the right I hear:
“We have sinned, we have dealt treacherously, we have slandered.”
But I hear another song in my heart:
I believe in the truthfulness of art
In being energetic, in being sensitive, in the essentials
Today I believe in prayerfulness
I believe in the man to come
who will give water to the barren areas
But first and foremost I believe in Love
And until we stop shedding blood
I live in a dream
Waiting for the day of love (and), understanding, the day (today).
And this one, by Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Philip Schultz, as published in Slate in 2008.
Yom Kippur
You are asked to stand and bow your head,
consider the harm you’ve caused,
the respect you’ve withheld,
the anger misspent, the fear spread,
the earnestness displayed
in the service of prestige and sensibility,
all the callous, cruel, stubborn, joyless sins
in your alphabet of woe
so that you might be forgiven.
You are asked to believe in the spark
of your divinity, in the purity
of the words of your mouth
and the memories of your heart.
You are asked for this one day and one night
to starve your body so your soul can feast
on faith and adoration.
You are asked to forgive the past
and remember the dead, to gaze
across the desert in your heart
toward Jerusalem. To separate
the sacred from the profane
and be as numerous as the sands
and the stars of heaven.
To believe that no matter what
you have done to yourself and others
morning will come and the mountain
of night will fade. To believe,
for these few precious moments,
in the utter sweetness of your life.
You are asked to bow your head
and remain standing,
and say Amen.
I also read this breathtaking Adrienne Rich poem. You can too.
Have a lovely weekend.
Yours,
DL
I’m learning how rituals that mark time matter to me. So this year, I am carving out an hour or so on Friday to sit quietly before my family wakes to write about what I obsessed about that week. If you enjoy this weekly reflection, please subscribe so I can send it to you every Friday.