Yom Kippur (Ne'ila) and Durga Puja

After spending the day in reflection, as well as reading my Muslim texts, I washed my feet and hands and face and performed the Asr prayers before dressing for Ne'ila services and the conclusion of Yom Kippur. I was fasting for G-d, and for Allah, and for Durga, the warrior goddess who claims the final three days of Navaratri.

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.

Yom Kippur (Thank you, frailty?)

My friend, whom I'll call Jim, was raised Catholic. He just got engaged over the summer to his girlfriend (I’ll call her Suzi), who is Jewish. Jim and I have talked about religion a lot. I don't have anybody in my circle of friends who, as an adult, is as much a disaffected Protestant as me, but Jim probably qualifies as an equally disaffected Christian -- though my upbringing taught me that as a Catholic Jim should not be considered a "real" Christian.

Jim never attends Mass anymore, I don't think, but sometimes goes with Suzi to Shabbat services with the same young and progressive crowd as my colleague who read the poem about women's voices as vowels a few weeks ago.

Suzi invited me to her pre-fast dinner for Yom Kippur this year, starting at 4:30 on Wednesday, but I was too busy to get away from my office at that time of day, and had to miss it. I brought a full dinner to work with me that day instead, and ate it quickly at my desk at about 5:30, before rushing to make Kol Nidre services by 6PM.

The Shabbat group that Suzi and my colleague attend does not put together its own High Holidays services, though many of them join with a larger, older, progressive Jewish group in town called Fabrangen.

I have an older acquaintance who is quite active with Fabrangen, and through a tangled web of connections, I've ended up at Fabrangen's Kol Nidre for the past four years in a row. Like the Shabbat group, Fabrangen does not own a building or employ a rabbi. For High Holiday services, the group appropriates the space of a willing local church, and this year had found a space called The United Church, luckily only eight easily walkable blocks from my office.

The United Church is so named because it was formed (in the 1970s) when two different Protestant denominations, who worshipped two blocks apart from each other in downtown DC, decided to merge their services. A United Church of Christ merged with a Methodist Church, and one new "United" Church was born in the building that housed the Church of Christ.

When the Church of Christ was built, in 1833, it originally was known as the German Evangelical Concordia Congregation, and it served as something of a community center for a good portion of the city's German/Christian population at that time. The combined church still advertises German language services every first and third Sunday of the month, and the first thing I noticed as I approached the church was the tall stained glass window above the entrance, which bore a cross draped in a white sash marked with an elaborate phrase of German calligraphy.

Men and women in kippot and prayer shawls mounted the steps beneath this window, and I fell in line behind them. Inside, as usual, the Christian symbols had all been draped with Jewish art -- painted or embroidered stars of David, or Hebrew messages, or depictions of the Book of Life. I was just barely on time for the service, but I did not see any of my friends or colleagues, so I took a seat by myself in the center toward the back.

The service did not start on time, and worshippers continued to stream in, to the point that I started to feel self-conscious about being a bareheaded single Gentile with a fairly good seat, while whole families were peering around for a space to sit together. I still did not see anybody I knew there, so I rose and went upstairs by myself to the fairly empty balcony.

By the time services had started, I had relocated myself twice more to an ever-worse seat, ending up in the back row of the side balcony by an open stained glass window, which turned out to be a really interesting (and surprisingly comfortable) location for the services. For one thing, worshippers continued arriving even after services had started, such that there were people sitting in the aisles and on staircases, and spilling out into the upper and lower lobbies. This meant that the church grew stiflingly hot rather quickly, increasing the value of the refreshing breeze wafting through the open window.

Secondly, my back-balcony vantage point meant that I could not see the stage at all. I know that the cantor who led most of the service was a woman, but I have no idea what she looked like, or who else might have shared the stage with her. Her disembodied instructions on when to sit or stand, or which page to locate in the prayer book, floated up to the balcony like the voice of God. (God sings in a confidant soprano!)

Two and a half hours later, the soprano God announced that we had arrived at the conclusion of the Kol Nidre service "unconscionably early," and invited everyone back for the full day tomorrow before dismissing us. It took some time for all of the worshippers to file out of the church, which gave me the opportunity to spot Jim and Suzi and a colleague of mine I'll call Rachel in the crowd below. I gestured that I'd wait outside.

On the sidewalk, we chatted about Jim and Suzi's pre-fast meal, and everyone's plans for the next day, and Rachel asked me what part of the Kol Nidre service I liked the most. I answered with some comments about the al-chet portion of the service, a recitation of 44 types of sins, for which the congregation repents and asks forgiveness.

On a previous year, I had been quite moved by a modern adaptation of the al-chet prayer written by a Febrangener, which, as I recalled it, barely mentioned God at all, and really resonated with me as capturing the meaning of the al-chet and translating into a language easily understood by a 21st century… uh, humanist? Atheist? Gentile? (Me.)

The creative, modern al-chet also seemed like a convincing motivator for right action, couched in the sensible language of moderation, rather than the fiery language of condemnation or the moaning language of remorse. (Sample couplet: "For the sin of taking ourselves too seriously, and for the sin of not taking ourselves seriously enough." Sample couplet #2: "For the sin of demanding the power to change others, and for the sin of neglecting the power to change ourselves." If I were compiling a holy book, this prayer -- written a few years ago, I believe -- would be in it for sure.)

Glancing forward in the prayer book during Kol Nidre, I had felt disappointed by this year's al-chet that I saw coming up. Its recitation of sins seemed old-fashioned to me, and not so relevant, and a little ridiculous. It called for repentance for sins that are meaningless to me, like desecrating God's holy name, or for sins that I'm pretty sure I haven't committed, like bribery or extortion or "casting off the yoke of Heaven" (whatever that means).

However, when we got to the al-chet, the cantor did not go by the book. We sang a few Hebrew verses of the prayer, and then the cantor opened it up to the worshippers to raise their hands and volunteer a sin. With each suggested phrase, the cantor would sing it back, and then the congregation would follow it with a short section of the Hebrew prayer. After each three or five sins, we would return to the book, and sing a full couplet, and then take more suggestions from the group.

"The cantor took the personal and made it liturgical and I found that very powerful," I told Rachel. "Sin is a weird concept to me, and I have a hard time coming up with what I think my sins are, but when I hear someone else throw out 'the sin of pettiness' or 'the sin of holding onto anger,' I know I'm implicated too, and there's something really close and human and supportive about everybody admitting frailty together and making a vow to do better."

Congregants offered up the sins of "not caring for our planet" (I thought of how I don't dry my clothes on a line), of "not caring for the poor" (I can't say I'm a champ in that arena either), and two people offered variations on "holding onto anger with parents" (I guess this one's pretty universal).

Rachel asked me if I was planning to return for the full day of Yom Kippur services the next morning. I had planned to take the day off from work as one of two annual "personal holidays" we are allowed, but I told Rachel that traditionally I only attend Kol Nidre, and spend the next day in personal contemplation. Rachel encouraged me to change my plans this year.

"You don't even have to follow along through the whole thing, if you don't want to," she told me. "I bring my own readings sometimes and will sort of hop in and out of the service as I feel moved. You could bring something else, if you want."

"Well, I didn't manage to finish all of my Ramadan reading last month," I told her. "I could bring my Koran, or some of the other books on Islam that I'm reading, like No God But God, or The Muslim Jesus."

Rachel treated it as a joke, but I had been serious.

Her instant reply was that bringing Muslim books probably wouldn't be a good idea, and then there was a split second where I think it wasn't clear to either of us whether my suggestion was utterly out of the question or whether a progressive Jewish congregation with no rabbi meeting in a Christian church might happily endorse an ex-Christian reading Koran in the pews on Yom Kippur.

"Well, think about it," said Rachel. "You could at least come back for Ne'ila at the very end. It should be starting around 5:45."

"Yeah, come back for Ne'ila," Suzi chimed in, breaking off a side conversation with another congregant, and looking as enthusiastic and serious and emotional as I have ever seen her. "It's at the end of the day, and the sun’s going down, and you're so empty from the fast that it's easier to be ... filled."

"I'll think about it," I said, as our sidewalk group disbanded, and I walked back to my office to retrieve my bicycle.