Sukkot: Koheleth

Koheleth says that life is futility.
The preacher says that life is vanity.
The philosopher says that life is useless.
The teacher says that life is meaningless.
The quester says that life is smoke.

I could imagine a short play for five characters who squabble about the meaning of life.

They parse the shades of meaning between the very similar language they use to express their thoughts. Perhaps each would use some sort of representative prop that helps define him or her as a character; the quester carries a map, for example, or the preacher a holy book. The reveal at the end of the play is that the characters are all the same person.

The five sentences above are inspired by five different translations of the Hebrew text that came to be known in English as the book of Ecclesiastes.

Preacher/vanity comes from King James, philosopher/useless from the Good News, teacher/meaningless from the New International Version, and quester/smoke from the Message. I keep each of these texts on a shelf in my house.

Koheleth/futility comes from the translation printed in the prayer book at Tifereth Israel, the synagogue I attended for Shabbat/Sukkot services Saturday morning. Koheleth is the actual Hebrew term, which many sources (including a footnote in the Bible that translates it as "teacher") state originally meant "member of the assembly." In synagogue this morning, we treated it more or less as a proper name. (“Let’s see what Koheleth has to say.”)

The word that has been rendered as futility, vanity, useless, meaningless, and smoke apparently shows up as "breath" elsewhere in the Hebrew Psalms.

I had selected Tifereth as my synagogue of choice this morning, because they advertise American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation for their Saturday morning services. I don't know Hebrew, but I'm competent in ASL, so after reading four versions of Ecclesiastes during the first four days of Sukkot, I was eager to see it rendered in ASL -- a language of face and body rather than a language of voice and breath or a language of the printed page.

Services were scheduled for 9 - 12:30, with ASL translation beginning at 9:45. I woke up late and didn't leave my house until around 8:45. I thought of biking, because Tifereth is nearly an hour away on foot, and the bus is sometimes unreliable, but I decided arriving just in time for the ASL to begin would be fine. I preferred to take the hour to clear my head on a crisp fall morning, and I knew from a previous visit that most congregants don't arrive until around 10.

To get to the synagogue, you walk about four blocks from my house toward the Unitarian Church. At the Unitarian Church, you turn left, and then walk a straight-shot north of about fifty blocks or so, passing literally dozens of other houses of worship (Seventh Day Adventist, Greek Orthodox, AME Methodist, etc.), as well as the Carter-Barron Amphitheater and the Walter Reed Medical Center.

I strode up the street in grey wool pants, a black silk shirt, blue corduroy jacket, and black boots, listening to music and admiring the morning light and the slight turnings of color on the trees' leaves. I dialed my iPod toward a list of “recently played” tunes, which eventually cycled around to a song from Dolly Parton's 2005 album of 1960s-era covers -- her bluegrass version of Turn, Turn, Turn. This song, made famous in 1965 by the Byrds, is, of course, a musical rendition of the most famous section of Ecclesiastes.

To everything, there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born, a time to die;
A time to plant, a time to reap;
A time to kill, a time to heal;
A time to laugh, a time to weep;
A time to build up, a time to break down;
A time to dance, a time to mourn;
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together;
A time of love, a time of hate;
A time of war, a time of peace;
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain, a time to lose;
A time to rend, a time to sew
(A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.)

Dolly Parton can play the part of Koheleth today, I thought!

She sang her way through the entire song, and I had the same problems with the text of that Scripture as I always do. I love most of the couplets and the overall message about duality in life, but if I were to record a version of this song for myself, I could not record it as written.

For one thing, the “time to kill” line triggers not only with moral issues with the text for me, but also raises concerns about the overall logical consistency of the poem. The rest of the couplets all present opposites (gain/lose, rend/sew, etc.). “Kill” and “heal” are not opposites.

The opposite of “to kill” is “to resurrect.” The opposite of “to heal” is “to injure” or perhaps “to sicken.”

Furthermore, the other verbs all refer to human activity. But for the most part, humans do not heal. I suppose that across time doctors and prophets and others have been considered people who heal, but I don’t think healing is the same sort of universal human activity as dancing or laughing or weeping. And killing?

Broadly speaking, I do not believe in killing. We could parse out the lines of argument on all sides of many divisive issues, from capital punishment to assisted suicide to abortion, and I'd start to nuance things a bit, but even at that, "killing," like “healing,” ruins the universal appeal of the poem. Society absolutely restricts legitimized killing -- to medical professionals, to law enforcement, to soldiers.

A believer might say that killing and healing are activities that should be left for God, and they don’t belong in a poem about the dualities of human life.

Rather than “heal," humans nurture. We nurture each other and hope that it leads to healing.

I don’t know what the original Hebrew for this couplet meant. But I do know that to coax the poem to make consistent moral sense to me -- to make it into something I could recite or sing -- I wish to edit the line about healing and killing.

If I could edit Ecclesiastes 3, I would change the third verse to read:

A time to nurture others through their pain, and a time to accept nurturing for our own.

I would not be the first to make a change. The final line of Turn, Turn, Turn, (“a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late“) does not exist in the Bible, and Dolly-as-Koheleth also tragically eliminates two of the best couplets from Ecclesiastes:

A time to search, a time to give up;
A time to be silent, a time to speak.

*****

Tifereth is a conservative synagogue that requires kippot, so I pulled mine out of my pocket and bobby-pinned over the baldest part of my head when I was about a block from the building. Tifereth’s sukkah, like the orthodox sukkah in the park, was made of a metal frame hung with white and blue plastic. The roof, however, rather than being made of fronds, was composed of branches from deciduous trees (tulip poplars?). The branches appeared to be cut, rather than fallen, and their still-green leaves were drying to a sickly gray.

I entered the building and hung my corduroy jacket in the coat room. I accepted a program and a supplemental prayer book from a woman in a flowered suit and pink hat standing at the door to the worship space. The woman and I greeted each other with a “Shabbat Shalom,” and I noticed that she gave my head a quick glance to check for kippot, much as Zaki had slipped a quick glance at my wedding ring finger at the Ahmadiyya mosque. I took a seat toward the front, but off to the side.

The ASL interpreter was not working yet, and as it turned out, she wouldn't start translating the service until about an hour later, when one deaf woman arrived alone. As a result, when the reading of Koheleth/Ecclesiastes began a few moments later, I did not get to see the ASL version. Rather, I followed along with the English translation in the supplemental book, and also raised my head to watch the speakers.

Tifereth employs one rabbi and no cantor, and encourages its congregation to accept leadership roles in the service. So, four chapters of Koheleth were recited by a combination of six people (three men and three women), including the rabbi. Their voices varied along a continuum of chanting versus singing. Five of them held their books aloft, in front of their chests, though the third reader left her book resting on the podium in front of her and gripped the sides of the podium tightly with both hands. She wore a white crocheted kippah and a white shawl over a simple brown dress, and she wore her thick, brown hair very long, to her waist. Her interpretation seemed, to me, the most intense of the six of them, and I wondered what I was missing by not knowing how she was accenting or emphasizing or shaping the phrases of her Hebrew to color its meaning. Her voice was huskier than Dolly Parton's and her delivery was more forceful than Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam's.

After the section of text chanted by the rabbi, he took note, in English, that he did not approve of all he had just said. I wondered if he disapproved of the same section of text as I.

Tifereth's standard prayer books don't have phonetic transliterations in them, so when we moved on to the Torah portion of the service, I couldn't follow along very well. I fell largely silent during the bat mitzvah portion that included a 13-year-old girl and great crowds of her relatives and friends leading the congregation through the annual text from Exodus (the section where Moses asks to see God, and God says nobody may see His face and live, so God shows his backside instead).

Of the supplemental texts on Saturday, the first was from Numbers, a text that lists God's desired offerings on the different days of Sukkot ("On the fourth day, prepare ten bulls, two rams, and fourteen male lambs, all without defect ... On the fifth day, prepare nine bulls, two rams, and fourteen male lambs, all without defect…” etc.) The second was from Ezekiel's prophesies about Gog and Magog descending on Israel only to be destroyed by God ("I will execute judgment with plague and bloodshed. I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulfur... and so I will show my greatness and my holiness.")

The girl sang all of this beautifully. She was afterward congratulated by the rabbi who praised her intelligence and creativity and compassion for the poor, as recently evidenced by a marathon jump-rope session she organized to raise money for charity.

The rabbi took this moment to illuminate his earlier comment about the disagreeable section of Koheleth. He did not zero in on the "time to kill" or the "time for war," but on the paragraph immediately before this section, which begins with the sentence: "A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work."

The rabbi noted that there is more to life than this, and he predicted a lifetime of devotion to God and to others for the girl who was being bat mitzvahed.

Through all of this, my view of the interpreter, after she started her work, had been partially obscured. I was too far from her and at too much of an angle to see clearly, especially with other congregants shifting into and out of my line of sight. Also, I realized after a while that part of my problem was that the interpreter was left-handed, which is not a problem in normal conversation, especially for the fluent, but for me -- a relative newcomer to the language, and sitting at my weird angle -- it sometimes confused me. (Imagine a person whose speech is already muffled using an upside down mouth.)

I couldn’t catch nearly everything the interpreter was signing during the Hebrew prayers, and it was only after she had repeated a certain construction many times that I realized a sign I was apprehending as "school" really meant "praise."I stifled a laugh as the full phrase "Thank you God and we praise you" flooded into my consciousness.If I’d been interpreting, I probably would have made “praise” a bolder sign, and probably would have done it with an expression of enthusiasm and rapture on my face. Both signs look a bit like clapping, with “praise” looking more like “good job, way to go," and “school” looking more like “pay attention, class."

I knew "school" couldn't be right because it was a noun, positioned where a verb should be. And while a native ASL-user might not have found humor in the mistaken substitution (since school is always a noun in ASL), my native-English brain enjoyed the idea of "school" as a verb.

"Thank you God, and we school you."

It's slang, sure, but "to school" means …
to teach a lesson...
or to show better…
or to correct.

It‘s not much of an interpretive leap to: “Thank you, author of Ecclesiastes… and we’ll edit your text.”

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.

Ramadan, part seven (iftar)

By the middle of the afternoon on Sunday, I was feeling recovered from the Equinox party, though hungry for dinner.

I'd planned to make a vegetable side dish for the self-described progressive iftar in the suburbs, but there were enough dates and tabouli leftover from the night before that I decided to take them instead. Around 5:30, I slung the same bag over my shoulder that I'd carried to the Shabbat potluck, with the same big, blue Tupperware bowl inside, and headed for the Metro.

I'd found this group of progressive Muslims online, and I'd been invited to the iftar by a woman I'll call Tish. I arrived early to the apartment building in Fairfax where the iftar was to be held in the community room, so I sat on a bench and scribbled in my journal for a few minutes while the sun was sinking. A few minutes before 7, I walked into the building, and found the room I was looking for labeled with a small sign by the door, just past the front-desk of the building. The doors into the community room were glass, with glass panels on either side, so I could see into the room, and saw that maybe 30 to 40 people had congregated.

Entering, I approached a waist-high bar by the small kitchenette, where the others had deposited their potluck offerings. I placed my food amongst the rest of the bowls, and introduced myself to the Arab woman behind the bar, and to the white woman standing by my side. After a short conversation with the white woman, who was busy getting things ready, I surveyed the room. A long dining table with seating for 25 or so sat to one side of the room, with sofas and padded chairs, in a sort of generic hotel or airport style, sitting in a circle off to the side with a low, blocky table in the center. The group appeared to be mostly Arab or black or multi-racial; only one or two other obviously white people joined the group. Of the 15 to 20 women in the room, perhaps four of them wore headscarves.

One man sat on the padded furniture apart from the sparsely populated table, while others stood in groups around he room. I joined the man and introduced myself and we began to chat about the fast. His wife joined a few moments later and greeted me in Arabic, which confounded me. I felt silly having to ask her to repeat herself, and then stumbled over my apology for not understanding. She instructed me on the appropriate Arabic response to her greeting, which I repeated to her and promptly forgot, and soon others joined our small group. The conversation spun away from me and my ignorance, moving on to topics like the upcoming progressive Muslim paintball outing, and who had lost or gained weight during Ramadan.

When the sun was down, someone announced with little fanfare that we should all get something to eat, and a woman in a headscarf circulated with a tray of dates as we queued up with our small paper plates. I lingered toward the back of the room, not wanting to be one of the first to eat. Making small talk with those around me in line, I asked a man if he could point out Tish to me, so I could thank her for inviting me. The man gestured toward a white woman in a flowered skirt, who was holding a child with bright eyes and bronze skin, and talking to a darker-looking woman in a black blouse and black pants. The woman in black was Tish.

After filling my plate, I returned to the circle of furniture and sat near where I had before, though the other seats filled in with a different collection of people. My interest here, of course, was religious and theological, but I quickly realized that the focus of the dinner was social, so I felt bad wanting to quiz everyone I met about their beliefs in God, or what they do at prayer time, or how their interpretation of the Koran informs their outlook on life. "What makes you progressive," I wanted to ask everyone, "and what do you find in Islam that conflicts with your values? What do you do when you find conflicts? What makes you want to be Muslim in the first place?"

I overheard the first white woman I had met by the food counter say to someone next to her the phrase "when I converted," and I also overheard that she is a vegetarian. Quickly, I formulated a plan to bond with her over the vegetarianism and then quiz her on her religious conversion, but I wasn't close enough to strike up a conversation. I limited myself to the conversation around me: a discussion about a photography class, for example, and someone confessing to breaking the fast to go on a hike.

Eventually bored, and sitting there sipping water with an empty plate in my lap, I got up to throw my plate away, and when I did, someone moved in to take my seat. I thought I would go find Tish to introduce myself, but she was deep in conversation and surrounded, so I floated back against the wall and observed. Feeling self-conscious, I decided I had to go the bathroom. And I did have to go... just enough to justify stepping out of the room for a moment. "Maybe Tish will be less busy when I get back," I thought. "Or maybe my chair will be free again."

I was in my stall, buckling my pants and about to flush, when the door to the restroom opened, and someone came in to wash his hands. I'm shy about running into people or talking to them in public restrooms, so I decided to linger in the stall a moment longer. Suddenly, the bathroom door opened, and I heard many more footsteps come in, with dozens of voices rising in a mixture of English and Arabic, until I could tell the restroom was full of men, and I realized that ritual washing was happening -- and quickly. There was barely enough time for a rinse of the hands -- nevermind a full cleansing of face and feet -- before the stampede was gone as quickly as it came, and I snuck out of the stall to wash my hands myself.

By the time I got back to the community room, prayers had begun. I couldn't see who was leading, and the first thing I noticed was that not everybody was praying. A group of men who were not praying had stepped out onto the patio. A group of women who were not praying sat chatting (chatting!) on the padded furniture. One man sat silently next to them. Those who were praying were arranged in rows, on mats, facing east. The men had all lined up in the front, and the women lined up behind them -- all now wearing headscarves. A pile of shoes sat by the door.

I slipped in and sat next to the only man in the room. He did not speak to me, and despite the example set by the women, I felt uncomfortable speaking during the prayers, so I kept silent as well. When the prayers were over, Tish pulled off her lavender headscarf and wrapped it around her neck. The iftar was winding down, and I slipped over to introduce myself. In addition to Sunday's iftar, she has invited me to her own home for study of the Koran as well as an iftar in one week, so we chatted briefly about the logistics of how to get there, and then I grabbed the rest of my tabouli and headed back to the Metro.

Ramadan, part four (Jews and Unitarians)

I walked to Shabbat services on Friday, carrying the vegetarian dish I had prepared for the potluck in a canvas bag slung over my shoulder, while listening to a sermon from my sister's non-denominational Christian church on my iPod. It occurred to me that I had heard about groups of Orthodox Jews who would forbid carrying my shoulder bag to services, and I made a mental note to investigate later what the deal is with carrying things on Shabbat.

The group I was joining for the evening is a gathering of mostly twentysomethings and early-thirtysomethings who have formed their own self-led congreation. There is no rabbi, no cantor, no ark, no giant Torah scroll. Members of the congregation take turns leading the service, or introducing the guest speaker, or leading the clean-up effort after the potluck. There is no synagogue; the congregation meets in another organization's space, which it has over time outgrown, and is now looking for a larger venue, perhaps the basement of a local Unitarian church.

I had accompanied my friend to services once before, on a night when the congregation sat in a circle, and the songs were accompanied by a guitarist. Last Friday was different; it was an a cappella service, with the chairs arranged in rows facing east. I own a kippah, acquired on a previous visit to a more traditional synagogue that required one, but I do not tend to wear it to my friend's congregation, because they are not required. A quick survey of the room revealed that about 10 percent of the men and maybe 50 percent of the women were without kippot.

The kippot issue is a good one to illustrate the spirit of my friend's congregation. They welcome all, and they also want to respect tradition. The group therefore offers a basket of kippot for attendees who have arrived without one, and who prefer to wear one. Originally, this basket was placed on the table next to the prayer books. However, my friend informs me that there were those who felt this placement might mistakenly imply an enforced pro-kippot stance on the part of the congregation, and so the basket was moved to the floor. This placement struck other congregants as disrespectful, and now the kippot basket resides on a chair next to the prayer book table.

Bare-headed, I selected a seat at the very back of the room, and my friend sat with me through the musical portion of the service, until she needed to step forward to introduce the guest speaker (a representative from a local nonprofit organization that provides low-income women of color with free child-care). My friend introduced the speaker by reading a poem written from the perspective of a woman who was present when Moses descended from Sinai. The woman had not written down her story, said the voice of the poem, because her hands were always full of children. Her voice, said the poem, is like the vowels of the Torah -- missing but implied. It is up to us to fill in her voice.

The guest speaker provided background on her organization and offered congregants the chance to sign up to provide child-care for those in need. She connected her organization’s mission to the poem, describing the child-care opportunity as a way to take children out of their mothers’ hands long enough for them to participate fully in public life in a way denied to the women at Sinai and beyond.

By chance, on Sunday, two days later, I heard another stirring sermon on themes of gender and race, delivered by a professor of Politics and African-American studies from Princeton University. I had decided to attend services alone at a Unitarian church about three blocks from my apartment, and it turned out that day that the Unitarians were also welcoming a guest speaker.

The guest preacher/professor began her sermon with these words: "I am a cradle Unitarian. My mother was a white woman who was raised as a Mormon, and my father was a black man who shared a room at Howard with Stokely Carmichael, so for our family, in the 1970s, in northern Virginia, there was no other place for us to worship, but in a Unitarian church."

She went on to preach from a children's book (Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct), after noting that one of the things she loves about being a Unitarian is "You can preach on whatever text you want!"

Her message was what I have come to expect from a Unitarian service -- a blend of social justice exhortations, encouragements toward optimism in the face of despair, a reminder of the Unitarian commitment to embrace everyone, and a few somewhat understated liberal political messages, including jabs at current conservative leaders and candidates, and props for the current hope of the Democratic party.

I know that I have heard Unitarian ministers talk about God before, but I do not recall the guest professor invoking a deity in her sermon. The core of her message, it struck me, was deeply humanist in its outlook, and this message was underscored by her sermon's structure. Periodically throughout the first 2/3 of the sermon, after describing a human-caused tragedy that reflects negatively on our nature as people (the public whipping of an innocent black woman in turn-of-the-century Ohio, the failure of government response after Hurricane Katrina, etc.), the professor would utter a string of negative pronouncements, such as "Democracy is dead" or "There is no benevolent spirit of love and life to answer our prayers."

When her sermon turned a corner toward a more hopeful outlook, she modified those negative pronouncements from earlier, making them more positive. "What if democracy is only bruised," she asked, for example.

When it came time to reverse the assertion that there is no benevolent spirit to answer our prayers, she phrased her modification like this: "We are the ones who are here to answer each others' prayers."

I enjoyed her sermon immensely but was feeling shy when services were over, so although the professor and the church's minister both stood together on the outside steps to shake hands with the congregants as they exited -- he in his black robe and sash, and she in her sleeveless hot-pink shift dress and three-inch pink heels -- I slipped out a side door and avoided them.

Ramadan, part three (community)

As the ten of us sat in our silent Quaker-meeting circle in the Agatha-Christie-style parlor on Sunday, I did not find it difficult to sit still, but I did find it difficult, in my mind, to tamp down my desire to interact with the others. This was quite the surprise because I consider myself far more naturally introverted than extroverted.

And yet, there I was, scanning the room, feeling a bit amused and frustrated by the lack of connection I felt between the ten adult humans sharing this space together. Most of the others in the room had their eyes closed, and as I scanned the room, and met each face, I realized that I would probably feel a twinge of shame for my lack of inwardness, if I should meet another pair of eyes. But I did not meet another pair of eyes. All eyes were closed or downcast.

At points, I closed mine too, but they would not stay that way.

I wanted to ask the man sitting across from me if it was hard to hold his hands they way he did, curved upward in front of him, knuckles facing each other and almost touching, hands elevated off his lap. I wondered whether the older woman in the red armchair would appreciate a nudge when she fell asleep and began softly to snore. I felt moved to bond over a love of the nearby farmers' market with the two women who came late and tucked their vegetable-filled shopping bags underneath their chairs.

After about thirty minutes of silent thought, I was surprised that more than anything I found myself wanting to treat the meeting room as a space for performance art. I've been taking some acting workshops over the past nine months or so, and have found the rehearsal space to be space of (for lack of a better word) magic. I began to feel as if gathering ten people into a rehearsal space might make for a more transcendent Sunday morning than this hour of shared silence, and I felt a wholly inappropriate desire to burst out and confront the Quakers with a bold gesture or advance, just to see what reaction they might give, to which I might then react myself.

I was reminded of a question that emerged with an actor/director friend of mine once over a late-night bottle of vodka: "If we have art, why do we need religion?" Neither of us could provide an answer.

As I left the meeting, somewhat disappointed that my old housemate was too busy to go have a chat and reflect on the morning, I wondered how it might have been a different experience if I already had a sense of community with the others in the room. If some of us had been serving soup to homeless people together the Saturday before, or served together on the finance committee for the meetinghouse, or something, would silent "worship" (as my housemate pointedly called it) in the parlor have felt different?

Similarly, I realized that a sense of community is the dominant lack in my experience of Ramadan right now.

So far, I have broken each of my fasts alone, or with friends who were not fasting and did not know that I was. Each night this week was a repetition of that theme, until Thursday night -- last night -- when I broke the fast with my friend Mohammed.

A refugee from a religious Islamic upbringing, Mohammed had decided to observe Ramadan this month again for the first time in many years. Earlier this week, we discovered that we are both observing, and so decided to take iftar together at a West African restaurant located midway between our two apartments.

I asked Mohammed if he had a take on how I might make the five prayers meaningful, and he did not, but seemed approving of the yoga-substitution for the Fajr. I asked him to tell me about celebrating Ramadan growing up in Saudi Arabia, and he told me he did not always participate growing up, because children are not always expected to fast. He compared the first Ramadan fast for a Muslim child to a bar mitzvah or a First Communion, and told me about how children at his school would compete to be the most holy -- and tear each other down for their lack of piety.

"Other kids would make you stick out your tongue," he said, reflecting on the beginning of a schoolyard challenge, which would be followed by a bogus claim that the tongue showed proof of sneaking food on the fast. Then the instigator would run to a teacher or other grown-up shrieking: "Mohammed ate! Mohammed ate! Mohammed ate!"

"Was there that same type of competition to be most holy in your Christian upbringing?" he asked me.

It was a good question that I had not been asked before, and I gave an honest answer.

"There was not, at my church," I said. "Maybe sometimes at church camp there was, when everybody was new and jockeying for position. But in my own church, I have to admit to feeling piously confident that I WAS the most holy child there, and I probably just felt that I did not have competition. I knew my Bible, could quote it from memory, and followed all the rules. I knew how much I loved Jesus, and as a child, it was probably inconceivable that anyone could love Jesus more than me. So, no competition."

I smiled, a little embarrassed at the answer that had tumbled out.

"I mean, I suppose I was insufferable," I said. "If I had grown up to be the logical outcome of my childhood, we would not be having dinner right now, and you'd probably hate my guts."

Mohammed laughed, and we moved on to comparing the Koran and the Bible, talking about the role of money in religion, and pondering what a fractured Islam would look like if it had been split into as many different brands as American Christianity has in the 21st century.

I continue to search for more observers with whom to break fast over the next 19 days of the holiday, but in the meantime, tonight, I am invited to Shabbat services with a friend, where I will break fast at the vegetarian potluck afterward -- the largest community I will have been amongst at mealtime since the start of Ramadan.