Drowning my sins
Oct. 15th, 2005 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taylweaverSo this past Thursday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. It is also a fast day.
The fasting part went fine for me - it was the headache I woke up with in the morning that caused all the problems - it stayed with me all day, though it varied in its intensity.
It was not a particularly meaningful Yom Kippur as Yom Kippur's go for me (yes, I know, it should probably be pluralized as Yemei Kippur, but I am anglicizing the pluralization), partly due to the cantor we had, who did not know our tunes, and partly due to the weather. The liturgy has the potential to be so powerful with its combination of poetry and starkness. There is one prayer in particular that, if done properly, can bring a congregation to tears - or at least get everyone thinking and focused on the power of God and the idea of judgement. But that doesn't work when the tune so jarringly different than what you are used to. For those of you more familiar with the liturgy, you know that I am referring to the Unetane Tokef prayer.
For those of you not familiar with the liturgy, this particular prayer is at the heart of high holiday services. It describes God as a shepherd, counting his flock of sheep one by one as they pass before him and deciding the fate of each one. Then it goes on to list many of those fates: who will be born and who will die, who will die at their time and who will die before their time. Then it lists all sorts of ways people can die: "who by fire and who by water," and so on. I am forgetting the order off the top of my head, but it lists famine and thirst, earthquakes and plagues, and then more human-caused deaths like stoning. Point being, it keeps asking: who will die this way, and who will die that way. When led by the right person, those words can be so powerful. In my head, I can still hear the voice of the rabbi who usually leads high holiday services where my family goes - but alas, he was unavailable this year, so we had that other cantor.
So yeah, not such a meaningful year.
The weather also messed with things a bit. On Wednesday, as I traveled between my two schools in the middle of the morning, carrying not only my two school bags - one on each shoulder until I find the time to finally buy a backpack - but also a bag with my stuff to take home for Yom Kippur, I got rather soaked. Umbrellas don't do much when it's raining so hard that the water is bouncing up from the puddles on the pavement, when some paths are covered with a uniform layer of water that splashes up onto my ankles and into my sneakers with each new step I take. True, the top half of me stayed dry, but as I walked the five blocks or so from the subway to the school, my sneakers went from dry, to just a bit damp, to damp enough inside to wet my socks, to positively swampy. Even worse, my bags got wet - both outside and inside - so that even the extra pair of socks I carry with me - for precisely such occasions - was no longer dry when I pulled it out. Not to mention, dry socks + wet sneakers = wet socks. So my feet had to suffer through that for five hours.
It was a rather impressive rain - the kind that can soak you in the two seconds it takes to get from the covered subway platform onto the subway train itself - because this is all above-ground and outdoors where I work. The kind that is blown in at you by the air that is forced aside as the subway train pulls in. The kind that leaks in the window on the subway train and drips on the seats. The kind that turns streets to rivers - the puddles at the corners of the street were so big that I had to make detours to cross each street - and even then, the flow of water on the sides of the street was as wide as the parked cars on either side. I did a lot of jumping.
And then the weather continued into Thursday. Which meant that I had to bend the rules of Yom Kippur a bit - they say no leather shoes - but when I only have one pair of non-leather shoes, and they are by no means waterproof, there is no way I am going to risk getting them soaked on the way to the synagogue just so I can sit there for hours with wet feet. So I wore my (still damp) sneakers for the walk, and changed when I got there.
So that was my Yom Kippur.
Shabbat was sunnier - at last. It was nice to finally see a blue sky. We hadn't had one for over a week.
The fasting part went fine for me - it was the headache I woke up with in the morning that caused all the problems - it stayed with me all day, though it varied in its intensity.
It was not a particularly meaningful Yom Kippur as Yom Kippur's go for me (yes, I know, it should probably be pluralized as Yemei Kippur, but I am anglicizing the pluralization), partly due to the cantor we had, who did not know our tunes, and partly due to the weather. The liturgy has the potential to be so powerful with its combination of poetry and starkness. There is one prayer in particular that, if done properly, can bring a congregation to tears - or at least get everyone thinking and focused on the power of God and the idea of judgement. But that doesn't work when the tune so jarringly different than what you are used to. For those of you more familiar with the liturgy, you know that I am referring to the Unetane Tokef prayer.
For those of you not familiar with the liturgy, this particular prayer is at the heart of high holiday services. It describes God as a shepherd, counting his flock of sheep one by one as they pass before him and deciding the fate of each one. Then it goes on to list many of those fates: who will be born and who will die, who will die at their time and who will die before their time. Then it lists all sorts of ways people can die: "who by fire and who by water," and so on. I am forgetting the order off the top of my head, but it lists famine and thirst, earthquakes and plagues, and then more human-caused deaths like stoning. Point being, it keeps asking: who will die this way, and who will die that way. When led by the right person, those words can be so powerful. In my head, I can still hear the voice of the rabbi who usually leads high holiday services where my family goes - but alas, he was unavailable this year, so we had that other cantor.
So yeah, not such a meaningful year.
The weather also messed with things a bit. On Wednesday, as I traveled between my two schools in the middle of the morning, carrying not only my two school bags - one on each shoulder until I find the time to finally buy a backpack - but also a bag with my stuff to take home for Yom Kippur, I got rather soaked. Umbrellas don't do much when it's raining so hard that the water is bouncing up from the puddles on the pavement, when some paths are covered with a uniform layer of water that splashes up onto my ankles and into my sneakers with each new step I take. True, the top half of me stayed dry, but as I walked the five blocks or so from the subway to the school, my sneakers went from dry, to just a bit damp, to damp enough inside to wet my socks, to positively swampy. Even worse, my bags got wet - both outside and inside - so that even the extra pair of socks I carry with me - for precisely such occasions - was no longer dry when I pulled it out. Not to mention, dry socks + wet sneakers = wet socks. So my feet had to suffer through that for five hours.
It was a rather impressive rain - the kind that can soak you in the two seconds it takes to get from the covered subway platform onto the subway train itself - because this is all above-ground and outdoors where I work. The kind that is blown in at you by the air that is forced aside as the subway train pulls in. The kind that leaks in the window on the subway train and drips on the seats. The kind that turns streets to rivers - the puddles at the corners of the street were so big that I had to make detours to cross each street - and even then, the flow of water on the sides of the street was as wide as the parked cars on either side. I did a lot of jumping.
And then the weather continued into Thursday. Which meant that I had to bend the rules of Yom Kippur a bit - they say no leather shoes - but when I only have one pair of non-leather shoes, and they are by no means waterproof, there is no way I am going to risk getting them soaked on the way to the synagogue just so I can sit there for hours with wet feet. So I wore my (still damp) sneakers for the walk, and changed when I got there.
So that was my Yom Kippur.
Shabbat was sunnier - at last. It was nice to finally see a blue sky. We hadn't had one for over a week.
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Re: Theology
Date: 2005-10-17 06:01 pm (UTC)Or, if you're talking about asking for forgiveness for thinking about these things while you're supposed to be praying, if you're not going to be thinking about these things when you're praying, what should you think about when you're praying?
Just use that painful frustration of incomprehension and channel it into your prayer. Prayer is talking to God, after all, and you can say whatever you want. "I don't understand You, and I hate what you're making happen in the world!" is fine. Any strong emotion, be it positive or negative, makes prayer better.