Tashlich, Casting Sins

Above: Tashlich in Poughkeepsie. Click to enlarge.

Yesterday after services we went to the lake to symbolically cast our sins into the water. It's an old tradition, supposedly begun to give children something to do outside, and it's become popular of late. Traditionally you scour your pockets for crumbs to throw out, but you can also use stones. I started using stones after someone said that tossing bread can disrupt the ecosystem. Though stones disappoint the seagulls. I decided to choose just a few sins so I'd remember them: Ego. Lack of Discipline. Impulsiveness. Then I shortened them to: Ego. Indolence. Though those two don't cover the waterfront. I kept saying them to myself as I gathered more rocks and threw them into the water. Trying not to hit the birds. Trying to make the stones not look like food. The birds gather and wheel. One had orange on the top part of its wing. I thought it had gotten into some paint. Someone else thought that it was tagged. It seemed an odd way to tag a bird, though I have to admit that the orange paint made the bird easy to spot. I wonder if the other birds notice.

I used to think, as the bard put it, that I was more sinned against than sinning, or that my greatest sin was not appreciating myself, but I realize now that I was mistaken.



Above: King Lear, who was not Jewish

The New Year

This is the Gaon (Genius) of Vilna, allegedly my ancestor


It is the new year for us Hebrews (as we were called at Ellis Island) or Israelites (as we're called in France, because Juifs is too reminiscent of the Nazi occupation). My father used to say he was a WASH--a white Anglo-Saxon Hebrew. He wasn't Anglo-Saxon except in language. And much culture. I always think of my father during services, because he was known for whispering bons mots and sharing sugarless chewing gum. There's a prayer called the Aleynu, during which, according to tradition, Jews would kneel. That was discontinued because it was too much like Christianity, the rabbi said today. Generally, we bow our heads at one point in the prayer. The next sentence of the prayer begins with: Lifneymelech. See, it sounds like Lift, my father used to always say. Today some of us did kneel, because it is a high holiday. A big deal. Christians have Christmas and Easter, and we have Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Ten days apart. During which we are under judgment: Shall we be written in the book of life? Should we be allowed to live? Should we die? All this is metaphorical, at least to me. We twist the tradition this way and that in order to make it relevant. Or I do. When you look at the prayers, you can't *not* think about the Holocaust. If you're me. You can't *not* think about the professions of faith you're chanting, the images of divine light and protection you're conjuring. They believed all this (some of them), they believed they were protected, and they were torn from civilization and murdered.

There is a portion of the Yom Kippur service that recognizes martyrs through time. You are not encouraged to be a martyr, but I suppose the architects of the religion have thought that it's important to stay aware of the historical defenders of the faith. As a community we mourn them. Do we pay tribute? Perhaps. We make them (some of them) the stuff of legend. Role models in extremis.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg tells us: When the righteous Rabbi Akiva was flayed alive by the Romans for daring to rebel, we are told that the angels shrieked in horror. "It is my decree," was God's inscrutable answer. Or as Stanley Elkin once put it in his novel "The Living End" (this is paraphrase:) God is asked why he created so much havoc and suffering on earth. He answers: It made a better story.

As always, our martyrs are better than their martyrs. Our guerrillas are freedom fighters, theirs are terrorists. God's on our side.

Becoming a Better Person

Tis the season. Perhaps Rosh Hashanah is based on a Babylonian holiday, writes Arthur Waskow in Seasons of Our Joy. Every year after harvest, he writes, "was an occasion for pledging renewed obedience to the Babylonian throne." So the Jews got the idea to have a holiday to celebrate God's power, to hear the Torah being read and explained, to pledge to make their lives holier.

I have been thinking more about my judgment of people, my approval and non-approval. Yesterday I got on the L and there was a window seat next to a young man, who was sitting in the aisle. He got up so I could take the window. After he left, I had the window seat for a while and then a small tailored woman with a big tailored backpack got on the train and sat down. She was turned away from me and her backpack was in my side. She moved herself around and adjusted herself and she was hunched over, still turned away from me, reading her education textbook. Her hair was straight and highlighted in about three colors and her elbow was touching mine. I did not approve of her, even though she was reading an educational book. It was amazing that a small person was taking up so much space. I didn't say anything, just pushed back a tiny bit when her elbow touched mine. She was intent on not turning toward me or acknowledging me. I did not approve of her, and almost said to her, You don't ride the L much, do you? because she didn't know the etiquette.

On the way home, I sat next to a fat woman who was asleep in the window seat. Every so often her elbow would slide into mine, but I didn't blame her because she was asleep. And I was on the aisle seat so I had infinite space to expand.

I started out trying to examine my judgmental self and I ended up being judgmental. Maybe I am saying here that behavior is how I judge a person. Ha. I would like to think that about myself, but I am not so unbiased. Most of my women friends look like me--they don't wear makeup and they dress more for comfort than style. (I hope they don't take offense here.) And the ones that are stylish are already my friends so I don't judge them for it. (But that's illogical--how did they become my friends? I will skip over that.) My friends from high school are different. Some of them dress like they're in the Junior League (and what's more, they are!!). Why does everyone have to be like you, Cancer Bitch? Is it too much of a threat if someone is different? The truth is, I was raised to dress like them, and part of my identity is based on not being the way I was raised to be. Still. After all this time.

On the L yesterday before the Small Intrusive Woman came on board, I heard a young man on the phone behind me telling the person on the other end that to be with someone, "they got all of my body, mind and heart. That's why you know you can be with somebody. ...You can be physically attracted to someone without having sex." It seemed that he was trying to explain to this person that s/he didn't rate in all three areas. Then he told the caller to hold on while he took another call. It was about work. He was running late, thanks to the CTA. I don't know if he got back to first call. The I looked back and saw that he was sitting next to a young woman who put her head on his lap: "Do I have all three?" she asked him. "We'll talk about that later," he said and she closed her eyes.

Radio/Rosh Hashanah

I may be on the Thursday, Sept. 13 on 91.5 FM, between 9 and 10 am and again between 8 and 9 pm. The recording is from my post on my meltdown and the producers have added some cool echo-y audio to it. But it might be postponed again.

Wednesday is our new year's eve for year 5768. I was shocked to read that among the traditional foods eaten on the Jewish new year are black-eyed peas, which I always eat on the first day of the secular new year. So my Texas and Jewish heritages converge. The peas and other foods (such as sheep's head) supposedly arouse the heart to prayer. I am planning to make kosher gumbo, made without shellfish and also without the heads of fish or mammals. The fishmongers at Dirk's will even de-bone and cut up the fish for me. I recommend Dirk's for fish, but if you tell him that Cancer Bitch sent you, Dirk will not know what you are talking about.

My mother went to pick up her special security parking card today for her synagogue parking lot. This is in addition to her parking lot sticker, which was mailed to her. I am going to be taking the L to a little synogogue in Rogers Park, because the rabbi-who-married-us is no longer leading services at my usual place, DePaul. The little synagogue in Rogers Park is invisible. It meets inside a visible church. Just like our congregation met inside a Catholic university. In a way you could say we're hidden Jews but there are always signs pointing to where we are gathering. And if there are no signs you can just follow the guy on the street holding the velvet tallis bag.

I am reading "Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology" by Arthur Green. He doesn't talk (so far) about believing in God or not believing in God, but says that the Hebrew word for God is a verb, and that that verb is what's behind growth everywhere. And that we are all part of everything and each other, a notion that we would call Zen. Or physics. I know all this, that we are dust and air, and yet I am so critical of all who are Other. A blonde women in pink who is walking too slowly on Michigan Avenue. On the L a pudgy woman with dyed red hair in a housedress with mismatched seams, who is wearing earrings I wouldn't wear and whose sweat smells old. Should I move? Would it be rude to move? (She smells of hard work, lazy old Cancer Bitch.)

I'm equally judgmental about women who wear stiletto heels, because they show bad sense, retro politics and misplaced vanity. Unless they are reading books that I think show evidence of a live intellect. A therapist once suggested that I look at people as works of art. I have taken figure drawing and I should be able to do this. But I am critical. Of just about everything. Most of the thought that is underneath my thought has to do with comparing. I am trying to figure out if this person (in paisley, for instance) is as fat as I am or fatter. This is what girls are trained to do. Our comparing comes partly from our never being able to know exactly what we look like from the outside. Another part has to do with the patriarchy. The other other part has to do with keeping ourselves to ourselves. Yes, we are made of sand and ash like everybody else, but what if we really believed deep down to the bottom of our DNA that we were just made up of molecules and atoms and subatomic particles, just as everything and everyone else is--like this keyboard and the sidewalk and the person in paisley--would we then lose our outline? Would we merge with the rest of the world? Would our skin fly off and all our thoughts breeze away into the clouds?

Perhaps.

And that is why I am afraid of meditation.

This is all I have to say. Except: Read my scalp. (U.S. out of Iraq.)