In the Jewish calendar for this year 5786, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are now past with the start of this New Year beginning on September 22nd and the Day of Atonement falling on Oct 3rd. How does a non-Jew like me write about these holidays, actually "high holidays" as they are called in the Jewish calendar and capitalized the way Christmas is capitalized? Well, I started by reading back over the recent articles written by Jewish authors.
I'm betting that over the centuries there have been commentaries and analyses written by Jewish and non-Jewish critics, philosophers, journalists and everyone else who ever felt moved to write thoughts on the topic. I haven't read all those. I just wanted a definition and a description of practice.
In Christian calendars and mythology, Christmas is "Christ - mass" in church liturgy and it's the time of year when you hang up a stocking by whatever passes for a fireplace in your house and a big guy in a red suit breaks in and leaves presents. Then you overeat and fall asleep. You're not supposed to eat on Yom Kippur and it comes after Rosh Hashana but I'm starting with it, the Day of Atonement.
Those early Israelites were bad, always goofing off and disobeying the rules - and they only had ten of 'em for gawdsake. But Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement when you/they were supposed to just STOP IT and BE GOOD and SAY YOU'RE SORRY! Sounds like a mother I knew, and various babysitters.
Rosh Hashanah celebrates the creation of the world and of Adam & Eve and so recognizes a beginning - a new year. It looks like it only took those dudes ten days after that to get their divine overseer so pissed off that they needed that Day of Atonement, but it was actually the year 2448 with the problems around the delivery of the ten commandments. How about today?
Well, if I were a really wise person who had read a lot of those previous commentators down through the centuries, I'd have something really wise to say about those "high holy days", but I'm not and I haven't. That won't stop me however, from giving an opinion, probably recycled. Like this.
One person who really was wise and not only had read a lot of those commentators but had written things for other commentators to consider summed up a way of being by advising, "Remember that everyone you meet carries a deep wound". He was a medieval rabbi - somebody Moses, I think - but the medieval part is important because antisemitism back then usually meant setting fire to your place and often to you. It had to be one helluva wound to make them that cranky. And it would have taken a very kind and enlightened soul to consider that wound while trying to put out the flames.
Then there are these modern writers (like those of just last week) who consider what Yom Kippur will mean for them at the start of a new year, what atonement they will feel obliged to make, what cleansing of guilt for their "sins" of commission and omission. Yes, omission. I recall reciting the Apostles' Creed in our little Anglican church in Thistletown and acknowledging that we had "done those things which we ought not to have done and left undone those things which we ought to have done." Sounds like we borrowed the idea of grabbing all the guilt we could get from our Jewish ancestors. We may even have gone them one better by concluding with "And there is no health in us". Nice stuff for a kid to be raised with. Here's the take on Yom Kippur from some of the experts.
from Jewish Voices for Peace:
This sacred time of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur demands that we recommit to the work of tikkun olam, repairing the world. That means doing everything in our power to end the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians and build a future of freedom and safety for Palestinians and all people.
This is a moment of collective atonement. As you read this, the Israeli military is starving over two million Palestinians in Gaza to death. We call on the U.S. government to end its support for the Israeli government’s genocide, and we call on all people of conscience to divest from death and speak out in defense of life.
Judaism teaches us pikuach nefesh, that there is nothing more important than saving a life. We call on our fellow Jews and on all Jewish institutions to stop supporting the Israeli military as it commits genocide in Gaza, and to stop supporting Jewish supremacy and worshiping the false idol that is ethno-nationalism.
May the shofar be a wake-up call for all.
and from Independent Jewish Voice Canada:
Yom Kippur is a day when Jews are called to face our behavior and account for the year that has passed. We take responsibility for it, we resolve to change, and we make things right with those we’ve harmed in the year that’s passed. Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu. We have trespassed, we have betrayed, we have stolen. Not just as individuals but collectively, as a society.
Yom Kippur’s language of sin, of evil-doing, may sound stilted and uncomfortable to our modern ears. But when faced with something as stark and brutal as genocide in Gaza, Israel being shielded from any accountability and every legagcy Jewish organization in our country defending and advocating for Israeli occupation and apartheid, I feel that no other language will do.
The Egyptian-Canadian (I too hate hyphenated national identities but here it gives a necessary credential) Omar El Akkad wrote about the consequence of those sins in the lives of the perpetrators and by extension in the lives of all of us. He has won the Giller Prize for an earlier novel and this year produced this text as a record of atrocities and an indictment of our inaction regarding the genocide in Gaza.
from the last chapter of Omar El Akkad's book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
One day there will be no more looking away …
One day there will be an accounting, even as so often those who did the worst things imaginable in the killing fields were allowed to meld back into polite society. The man who put the bullet in the little girl’s head might return to coach Little League games. The patrol that opened fire on the starving civilians might meet up every now and then for karaoke nights, might celebrate what they did when it is still acceptable, but over the years grow quieter, and finally bond over a shared silence thicker than blood. The soldier who drove the tank over the handcuffed body, who heard the sound and felt the rupture, might come home to a high school sweetheart and get down on one knee and might have children of his own one day. People who proved themselves capable of the most monstrous things human beings can do to one another might be granted one final immunity, because what's the alternative? To look into a neighbor's eyes and see, barely visible, the kind of stain no amount of repentance will ever wash away? Who can live like that? Better to move on.
There will be people who never move on, who to the end of their lives struggle to unsee the image of the body turned to red paste, the child forced to eat animal feed, the bones pushing against the skin, the slow extinguishing of life at the hands of hunger, the older siblings who must tell the younger ones that everyone else is gone, the hastily dug graves vast against the horizon, like goose bumps on the flesh of the earth. And every time they hear a politician profess the supremacy of international law, of human rights, of equality for all, they will hear only the sounds of screaming.
And yet, against all this, one day things will change.
Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of Gaza. The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children. The congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference. The protesters, the ones who gave up their privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out. The people who filmed and photographed and documented all this, even as it happened to them, even as they buried their dead.
It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air.
Those are the heavyweights commenting on the great crime of our lifetime. Our parents faced the world at war in Europe and the knowledge that much of the carnage could have been avoided had they demanded their leaders take action sooner. My addition to the wake-up call here is the observation that I wrote as one small poem many years ago on a walk to some site in New Zealand deemed to be of some interest by the tour company.
from Lands of Long White Clouds
Trail Meeting
We smile at people met
on trails to cataracts
or chasms, battlefields,
or some historic site.
We sidle past, not touching,
nodding thanks for granted
narrow right-of-way perhaps,
and may not think
that every one we pass,
wherever, any time,
has come from or goes to meet
some watershed, or battlefield,
or some historic site
that only they can know.
and the final version of the sonnet penned a few weeks ago inspired by revisiting the 1970s photograph of the "napalm girl" and after seeing pictures of the starving babies of Gaza.
Conscience Poster
One photo stopped a bloody Asian war –
one screaming girl with napalm burning in
who'd wear the wounds her life upon her skin
became the conscience poster to implore
that we compassionate humanity restore
to expiate in part complicit sin
in military propaganda's spin
on manufactured reasons, weapons - more:
We could not turn away, pretending space
of distant battles distanced us from shame,
but made us finally confront our stain
on moral courage, and demand we face
the carnage we'd allowed upon the lame,
the innocent, that screaming child in pain.
Every new day we face a new opportunity, a new beginning. We have so much to be thankful for here in the safety of Canada, but events in the wider world teach us how fragile is that sense of security, how constantly in need of vigilant defence it is. Take action.