Options

It was the best of times...

Standing in a sun-drenched pavilion, in the center of a park in the center of the world. I'm surrounded by fellow Jews; some I know, some I have just met. We are all there with a purpose. We come to welcome the new year, we come to celebrate. We sing, we read, we pray, all in the beauty of the most gorgeous day of the year.

...it was the worst of times...

Somehow the High Holidays in America have become an exercise in awkwardness, a ritual in absurdity. Three hundred faces sit in their seats. Three hundred faces sit and look at me. Yes? Can I help you? Are you looking for something? Meanwhile, I try to pray.

And I do.

And those that get it are appreciative of my efforts, my authenticity, my passion. And there are those who don't. Those who stare. Those who spent more time worrying about the recipe for their kugel than their recipe for teshuva.

For a few days of awe-inspiring, humbling and utterly belittling liturgy, the longest prayer-days of the Jewish year, we have brought together the most far-flung members of our community to sit, and stare, and count pages.

...it was the age of wisdom...

I sit at a table with fellow learners. Our subject: Rambam's Hilchot Teshuva. Services of Day 2 have concluded. Everyone present is there solely out of a passion for Jewish learning. Old familiar faces fill the room. I teach, I study, I learn.

Yet within minutes, a gaping whole in the entire teshuva project, an unattended gap in Maimonides' schedule of repentance, is noticed. A woman, only two-minutes into her life as a Torah scholar, turns to me and asks, "When another person is mad at you for your action, but in all of your soul-searching and studying you still don't believe that you did anything wrong in the first place, is there teshuva to be done, are there apologies to offer, wrongs to right?"

I sit, and I listen, and I take it all in. I have no answer. But I smile. I smile because her ability to find holes in the text has proven itself immediately. I smile because I have been asking myself that very question for qeeks.

...it was the age of foolishness...

I feel stuck in a pinball game of life. I bounce from one obstacle to another, one cage, one restriction, one artificial construct to another. I see through the abstract creations and know them for what they are: empty existences no more real than the computer-code numbers seen through by Neo. So recently I thought I could blast through all these walls - place dynamite in their seams and break them apart into oblivion. And I've begun to wonder. Why not just stop the fight? Why not just leave behind the barriers altogether?

For years I abstractly considered this. Only finally, in this season of teshuva, this season of gorgeous days in the park and empty faces staring me down while I pray, this season of reflection and learning and growing and pushing and holding back, of feeling, feeling more than I care to at times, only now has it all begun to be so clear.

...it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...

So many competing views on the same thing. So many choices. So many views.

Comments

[zach]

"And I've begun to wonder. Why not just stop the fight? Why not just leave behind the barriers altogether?"

We need to chat.

[josh]

No matter how many times the building crumble, new ones will be built, bigger and stronger than those before it...
The truth of the matter is Rabbi Levi Brackman was right, there are some people called Reform Heretics... The game is wrong, so lets create our own...on a little piece of brooklyn, or miami, or ha'aretz.
And alas, there are those people that want you to come back begging for forgiveness when it is most certainly not halachic to do so...so what, move on, and do what is right, not what is called for, I am.