In the middle of the afternoon, I had fallen asleep while reading the Koran, and lost about two hours of productivity, which seemed like a kind of karmic humbling after I had posted so grumpily about Muslims who snooze through their fast.
I bicycled back down to the United Church wondering if I would have to stand, but I found the crowd greatly thinned from the Kol Nidre the night before. I took a seat in a pew on the main floor toward the back, almost exactly on time for Ne'ila. This time, I could see the worship leaders. They were a man and a woman, probably both in their fifties or sixties, both wearing prayer shawls.
The Ne'ila service included repetitions of some of the prayers sung at Kol Nidre, and I was able to sing them better because their melodies and the Hebrew syllables were fresher in my memory than normal. I have been to enough Jewish services to navigate them well, even when the prayers are unfamiliar (which is most of the time), but the repetition made it even easier. I could raise my head out of the prayer book more and look around and sing with confidence.
Normally, my face stays pointed down into the book, because there is so much to look at, and so much to engage the brain within the pages. There are the elegant and yet meaningless (to me) forms of the Hebrew letters on one page. On the facing page, there is usually an English translation, and at the bottom of the page, sometimes (but not always) a transliteration to help the Hebrew-challenged follow along with what they are supposed to be singing. There is also occasional rabbinic commentary printed at the bottom of the page, or simply a footnote from the writer of the prayer book. Unlike a Christian hymnal, there is no musical notation. You have to follow the melodic example of the people around you.
Usually, at a Jewish service, I find that my concern about agreeing one hundred percent with the words I am singing is diminished. It's a false comfort, of course, born entirely of the fact that the meaning of the Hebrew syllables feels less present since I don't know the language. If I'm in a Chrsitian church, and a song like, say, "Have Thine Own Way, Lord" is on the agenda, I'll feel torn about singing it -- like it's maybe less offensive and more honest to be silent and non-participatory than to sing lyrics I might not mean, like these:
Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after thy will,
while I am waiting, yielded and still.
I feel dishonest, singing in English, about being willing to let God have His way with me, and about "yielding" to the shaping forces of a God whose presence I do not feel. And yet, that second line there, about God the Potter, comes up every year at the Kol Nidre service -- and every year I sing along. The image comes from the book of Isaiah, which both Jews and Christians accept, and the similarity between the religions of the images for God does not end there.
At the Ne'ila service, I sang for forgiveness from a G-d described as both Father and King in the Avina Malkeinu, and I belted out a series of metaphors about the human relationship to G-d in a prayer called Ki Anu Amecha. (Examples: "We are your children; you are our parent." "We are your sheep; you are our shepherd.") The shepherd metaphor, of course, to me, feels very Christian, as does God as King.
My colleague Rachel, in a conversation before the High Holidays, remarked to me that Yom Kippur feels like the most Christian to her of all of the Jewish holidays, focusing as it does on repentance and forgiveness. I replied to her that despite the thematic similarities (in fact, because of them) Yom Kippur in actual practice feels utterly foreign and extremely non-Christian to me, since it deals with those themes of repentance and forgiveness with absolutely no need for Jesus. It's a conversation directly with G-d, without the mediation of a bloody god-man sacrifice, and it introduces other not-very-Christian metaphors, such as the idea of a gate closing at the end of the holiday.
I understand the appeal of a one-time acceptance of Jesus for the forgiveness of all sins. It’s quick and complete and eternal, and I did it once myself. But for figuring out how to navigate human relationships and improve one's own life, I prefer the Jewish practice of checking in once a year.
So, the practice, I get. The belief, I do not.
At one point during Kol Nidre (i.e. day one), the cantor instructed us to page through an amidah, or standing prayer, on our own. She told us to listen to our own voices and the voices of those in prayer around us, and upon finishing the prayer, she told us, we should listen to the voice of G-d before sitting down. What does that mean? If I had obeyed, I would never have sat, and would be standing there still.
At the Ne'ila service (day two), one of the cantors read a prayer that used the phrase "the Eternal One" as a name for G-d. In the prayer book, I noticed, the text stated that "the Eternal One is a compassionate God and a gracious God." The cantor said aloud however that "the Eternal One is Compassion and Grace." I decided to file this away as a tactic for translating what people mean when they say "God." Since God is an abstraction, whenever “God” is combined with an adjective, why not just combine the words all the way, producing the adjective's abstract noun form as the name for God?
I followed this new tactic the next time I opened the Koran and discovered it works quite well for that text. Quite often, Muhammed follows mention of God with a comma and then two adjectives, like this: “There is no God but He, the Powerful, the Wise.” Or: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.”
To appropriate the cantor‘s formulation, then, “God" is Power, Wisdom, Compassion, Mercy.
As at the raga concert at the Hindu temple, I felt moved to dance at Ne‘ila when the music occasionally picked up a faster, more rollicking beat. Many of the songs were somber, of course, given the theme of the day, but as we got closer to the end of the service, the joy embedded in the songs seemed to emerge. Nobody danced, but many people clapped or stomped their feet, and I kept the beat by clacking the ring on my pinkie finger against the pew in front of me.
Is there a name for the type of Jewish song that breaks away from the Hebrew and just uses simple syllables? Ai, dai, dai, dai, la-dai, da-dai, dai, dai-dai. Those are so much fun to sing! A stuffy old Protestant church doesn‘t necessarily seem the right space for it though; I am put more in mind of dancing around a campfire (a pillar of fire?) in the desert, under the waxing moon.
It was during one of these more joyous interludes that the cantor announced that Fabrangeners believe that we are all priests, and we were encouraged then to accept our priestly role and raise our hands to bless each other as we sang. I put down my prayer book and raised one hand toward the older man seated to my left. On my right side was the wall, so I raised my other hand above the mother and daughter who were seated in front of me. They had raised hands to each other, until the mother noticed me behind her, and moved her left hand to bless me. She smiled broadly and I smiled back. We made bright, friendly eye contact, which seemed deeply pleasant. How often do we maintain a good-hearted gaze with a stranger?
I noticed some congregants raising over each other a split-fingered gesture that I recognize from pop culture as the Vulcan hand symbol -- which I found startling -- only to discover later that I had the origin of the gesture backward. It was a Yom Kippur symbol first; Leonard Nimoy appropriated a Jewish priestly blessing for his character’s alien greeting on Star Trek.
After the blessings and the final closing of the gates, three men in the balconies raised shofars to announce the end of the service. We all offered “shana tovas” to those around us.
Three days later, I would return to the United Church for a third time, and from the spot where the shofars ended the Jewish High Holidays, a powerful blast from a church organ would start another Christian Sunday morning service.
UPDATE, 10.13.08: The joyful, often wordless songs are called nigunim.
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