Sukkot moon in China

A few years ago Chip and I were on a kayaking trip with a guide who seemed to know a lot about a lot of things (why are so many expedition guides like this?). We were stranded on a beach, waiting for the tide to shift, and so I thought I’d ask him a question I’d often wondered about but never asked, because I assumed everyone but me already knew the answer. Turned out no one else did, except for our guide, who used the convenient rocks on the beach to demonstrate why the moon is full everywhere around the world at the same time.

Fortunately, blogs don’t have rocks, so I’m excused from explaining further.

But that is why, in case you were wondering, China’s Moon Festival and Sukkot are on the same day.

Yom Kippur

You fast (and don’t even drink water) for 25 hours, pray all day, wear no deodorant, hope you’ve made amends with all your friends, and at the end you still don’t know what God wrote in his book ten days ago. All you can do is stand in front of that ark for an hour, weak and thirsty, and pray he’ll change it.

I think it’s good I’m not Jewish after all. I already have enough to worry about.

Kapparot

I once worked with a very observant Jewish guy. He’d hang his black felt hat on a special peg in the kosher restaurant, then go back to a special counter they had for saying before-meal prayers. His wife wore a wig to cover her hair. He was never at work during these Days of Awe, and I always wondered what he did, other than pray.

Now I wonder if today he might be swinging a chicken around his head three times?

But what about the Jewish Easter Bunny?

Even though I’d still really like to be Jewish, I’m not doing a very good job of abandoning my Christian brainwashing. Recently one of my lucky-to-be-Jewish friends was telling me how her grandchild asked her (sotto voice since her younger sister was listening) whether their parents were really the tooth fairy. Thinking quickly, my friend cleverly suggested she could stay up all night to find out the answer for herself.

I said, stupidly, “Does she still believe in Santa Claus?”

“Well no, she’s Jewish,” my friend responded.

And then (I still can’t believe myself) I said, “What about the Easter Bunny?”

“Well no, she’s Jewish.” (Said with admirable restraint.)

I was conflating religion and culture, much the way our son did once when asked by a friend to sing “God Bless America.”

“I don’t know the words,” he replied. “We don’t go to church.”

Actually, that’s conflating religion and patriotism (or jingoism), the unfortunate result of a Reagan-Bush childhood.

But I can’t really blame Eisenhower for my myopia. Christian holidays are so woven into our culture that it almost seems natural to imagine a secular Santa or Easter Bunny, until you remember what’s being celebrated.

It’s lucky I figured all this out today, on the second Day of Repentance. I’m going to go apologize to her so God can change his book.

May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year

Growing up, I always wanted to be Jewish. I’m not sure why. I didn’t know very much about it; just that my most interesting friends were Jewish.

This Rosh Hashanah day, though, I have mixed feelings. It’s alarming to think there’s some sort of God up there with books, listing all our names and who will die and who will have a bad year. I know he’s God, but doesn’t his hand get awfully tired? Do you think he has a computer?

And if we have all those Days of Repentance till Yom Kippur to change his mind, why doesn’t he just wait? I guess maybe it’s more efficient, since he wouldn’t have to change the entries for all the non-Jewish people who don’t even know they need to repent during these ten days.

But I really like the idea of all this cleansing and repentance being just between me and God – no priest sitting in his Confessional shadows, listening to my secrets. I think I’ll go dump my pockets in a stream now, and start repenting.

Shavuot

I wonder if Jesus, assuming he really existed, meant for all the special days he celebrated to get turned into something else. I can understand why his apostles might have forgotten about Passover, given that he died the day after and then came back to life. But apparently they were still counting the omer 49 days after Passover, because there they were celebrating Shavuot when those tongues of fire appeared over their heads and all of a sudden it was Pentecost.

I’m not sure I get it. If they’d really seen Jesus along with his body going up into the sky, why were they celebrating the giving of the Torah just ten days later? And what happened the next year? Did they finally stop counting?

Patriots’ Day

It’s okay that the dates of Easter and Passover float around, since nobody knows when (or if) they really happened. But although three-day weekends are great, it just doesn’t seem right to me that Martin Luther King Jr. and George Washington always have to be born on a Monday; and that the Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought after the switch to the Gregorian calendar (so they really did happen on April 19), now get celebrated (albeit with the exciting Boston Marathon, which people probably need a weekend to get ready for) on a different day.

But we should all look up to Massachusetts – after all, they’ve led the way on marriage equality and universal health care. So I say they deserve their own holiday, even though they moved it to a Monday.

Passover

“The abolition of profane time and the individual’s projection into mythical time do not occur, of course, except at essential periods – those, that is,
when the individual is truly himself: on the occasion of rituals. . . The rest of his life is passed in profane time, which is without meaning: in the state of ‘becoming.’”

This, from The Myth of the Eternal Return, by Mircea Eliade, explains why I should have been born Jewish. I love rituals.

You’d think that, growing up Catholic, I would have had my fill of ritual. But it seems like in Catholicism the priests, and sometimes the altar boys, got to do it all – raising up the host, chanting in Latin (and now it’s not even in Latin anymore), clicking out the incense. All we did was kneel and watch. Jews, on the other hand, do it themselves: building cool huts in the backyard, lighting candles one by one, and, most of all, the incredibly complicated Passover Seder.

I would have done all of it, except maybe the Q-Tip yeast-scouring yesterday and the lamb blood. Eating parsley and bitter herbs and matzo and a sandwich (not to mention a whole meal) and drinking all that wine in between; the four questions (does it have to be a child?); and, best of all, the spooky extra place setting for Elijah.

Why rituals? Because they take us out of ordinary, boring, quotidian time; connect us with history and our ancestors; and transport us to something special, something eternal.

Now I’m ready to count the Omer.

Birchat HaChama

On the fourth day God created the Sun and Moon. Somehow it’s possible to calculate the exact position the Sun was in at the moment God did this, and today, apparently, it’s in this exact position for the first time in 28 years. And this day coincides with the eve of Passover, the only time in all of the rest of history that this will happen.

And so it is a very busy day for observant Jews: at daybreak they’re saying a special Birchat HaChama prayer, which hasn’t been said since April 8, 1981; they’re clearing the kitchen of yeast and preparing the Seder food; and, if they’re firstborn, they’re doing it all on an empty stomach.

Happy birthday, Sun. We’ll check back again in 2037.