This is the first year in a long time that I have wanted to be at services and am not. I didn't know I would feel that way until the start of the Days of Awe. I don't even know where I would have looked for a walk-in congregation around here. I know the year moves no matter where I am, the book in which lives are written opens (like wings, like a heart) and closes; I cannot do the things for which I need a community, but I can light the candles as I did last night, for the dead of my family by name and as always for the dead whose names I do not know, which I do not believe to be part of the common ritual, but it crept up in my family and it matters. I fast when my health permits. This year I'm drinking a lot of hot liquids.
Despite years of Reform services in childhood and a brief but intense period of Conservative Egal attendance in college and grad school, the only part of the Yom Kippur liturgy I retain by memory these days is the refrain of the Al Chet: v'al kulam Eloah s'lichot, s'lach lanu, m'chal lanu, kaper lanu. For all these things, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement. The words themselves are not enough to ensure forgiveness; they mark the recognition of the harmful behavior, to be followed by the work of not engaging in it further and making restitution for the damage it has done. That last is the tricky part, easy to fail (easy to see the failures all over the news these days). But the words are not unimportant. They are accountability. They are the consenting. They are looking at your life and deciding if these actions, this memory, is what you wish to outlive you. All you have is the world and the way you leave it. No one will remember me in the end (families die out, civilizations collapse, planets burn, the universe thins out to heat death), but that does not mean it is not my responsibility to do more healing than harm in the time I have, for the sake of as many generations as will follow me.
I feel a lot of the time like the story of the forest and the fire and the prayer. If all I can do is tell the story, then that is what I must.
And that is the sort of thing I think about this year on Yom Kippur.
Despite years of Reform services in childhood and a brief but intense period of Conservative Egal attendance in college and grad school, the only part of the Yom Kippur liturgy I retain by memory these days is the refrain of the Al Chet: v'al kulam Eloah s'lichot, s'lach lanu, m'chal lanu, kaper lanu. For all these things, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement. The words themselves are not enough to ensure forgiveness; they mark the recognition of the harmful behavior, to be followed by the work of not engaging in it further and making restitution for the damage it has done. That last is the tricky part, easy to fail (easy to see the failures all over the news these days). But the words are not unimportant. They are accountability. They are the consenting. They are looking at your life and deciding if these actions, this memory, is what you wish to outlive you. All you have is the world and the way you leave it. No one will remember me in the end (families die out, civilizations collapse, planets burn, the universe thins out to heat death), but that does not mean it is not my responsibility to do more healing than harm in the time I have, for the sake of as many generations as will follow me.
I feel a lot of the time like the story of the forest and the fire and the prayer. If all I can do is tell the story, then that is what I must.
And that is the sort of thing I think about this year on Yom Kippur.
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