Yom Kippur ended Wednesday night.
And for those who don't know what that is, it's the Day of Atonement in Judaism. The day where we all afflict ourselves by fasting and not bathing and not doing anything pleasurable while we reflect on all the bad stuff we did and said the previous year. We daven in the morning, we pray again in the afternoon, we study Torah in the afternoon, we honor the dead, we pray some more. We apologize to those we've wronged and hope that it's all enough to get us written and sealed in The Book of Life. All while we’re fasting and cranky as mules.
At least, that's what we're supposed to do. If you're a Good Jew™️, that's what you do.
I folded laundry. I can't imagine a worse way to afflict myself than that.
I mean, I fasted, too, but I don’t have a synagogue, so I didn’t attend services. This is the third year in a row that I haven’t attended services during the High Holidays because I’m not affiliated with a synagogue. And yes, I am aware that I could buy a ticket at some random synagogue and go there, but those aren’t exactly cheap and I’m a notorious cheapskate about certain things. I’ll pay $500 for a new KitchenAid stand mixer, but I won’t pay $200 to attend High Holidays at a strange shul where I don’t know anyone and everyone will want to know the entire histories of both sides of my family tree, all the way back to The Flood. It’s exhausting, and I’m already exhausted enough, so I bailed on services again this year. I did Zoom High Holidays in 2020, when the world ended and we all lived through it. It was… odd.
I chose that particular synagogue at random. It was vaguely familiar, and it was in the area, and I saw they were offering High Holiday services via Zoom, so I tuned in. The cantor performed like she was on Broadway, though. It was irksome. Everything else was okay, but I just don’t need a cantor belting out the Kol Nidre like it’s “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.” Sorry, not sorry. So, I decided not to join that synagogue, and I ended up working through the High Holidays last year, and this year, I decided not to even bother shul shopping for the right virtual services. I just stayed home and reflected. Did I atone? Maybe…?
I thought about John, who I wrote about in my essay “Maybe Therein Lies The Mitzvah.” I thought I could help him and ended up not helping him at all. There was another guy I found sitting under our trees at work. I fed him and offered to call someone, but when I called his mother she didn’t want anything more to do with him. She’d tried, she told me. He didn’t want help. I understood and I told her that. My own father was an alcoholic. And when I tried to call around and find a shelter that would accept the guy—I can’t remember his name now—he got spooked and fled. He thought I was calling the police. So, I didn’t help him, either. I mean, yeah, I gave him something to eat, but I didn’t find him a place to sleep or the help he needed. I reflected on that, too, and came to no real conclusion. I don’t know what else I could have done, but that doesn’t keep me from thinking I could have done more.
For the most part, I try to live a life where there’s nothing I have to atone for on Yom Kippur. It’s a tall order. And sometimes I don’t make it. But for the most part, I arrive at Yom Kippur trying frantically to think of something I need to atone for.
I was a kid when I realized I didn’t like lying. I got in trouble when I lied, and I didn’t like being in trouble. Plus, when I lied, I often had trouble remembering why I’d lied and what lie I’d told, so just keeping it all straight was draining. It was easier to just tell the truth, so I did that. I don’t like surprises now because they require a measure of dishonesty—if I ask you about something, and you tell me you can’t tell me because it’s a surprise, I have a visceral reaction. Not to mention that surprises feel manipulative to me. I’d rather you say nothing, then present me with the gift or the experience and just do away with the “It’s a surprise and you’re going to love it!”
These days, I try not to be mean to people. I was a really shitty person in my twenties and thirties, and I had to make myself change because even I didn’t like the person I’d become. But people think I’m mean because I’m honest and direct with them, and they’d rather I be nice about things that I shouldn’t be nice about. And I’m not talking about their weight or the way their makeup job looks or whatever. I don’t want to make grown men and women cry. But I definitely don’t beat around the bush anymore and I have to lead with a disclaimer: “This may sound mean because you aren’t used to directness…” I’ve also started asking them if they want the truth or do they just want an answer. They’re always taken aback. They tell me they want the truth, but when I give it to them, they don’t like it. Oh, well, not my problem.
But I arrived at Yom Kippur this year with nothing major to atone for again. And Jewish guilt dictates that I should atone for not having something to atone for. It sounds laughable and it is. And anyway, does it even matter? God (we say “Hashem”) already knows whether or not you have something to atone for before we get there. So, the point is just being honest, I guess. Because it’s not like you can just make something up. I have Catholic friends who tell me stories of their childhood confessions where they just made things up to tell the priest through the confessional. We can’t do that. But we can do the basic prayers during the Yom Kippur services. Unless we don’t go to services.
So, I guess next year I’ll atone for not attending services the last couple years and reciting the general issue blessings. Or maybe I’ll slip up and do something unforgivable. We’ll see. I have 350 days.
