(dis)respect and atonement

On Friday night a week ago, for the first time in perhaps 45 years I attended a Yom Kippur service, and I both connected to, and confirmed my disconnection from, “my people,” those who came before me whose lives and actions led me to be born in Newark, New Jersey, United States of America, more than 60 years ago. While attending the service, I simultaneously had a living picture in front of my eyes showing a slice of the lives of my forebears, and underwent a suddenly deepened rift from them.

I simultaneously loved them and respected them for everything they went through, for how they survived and retained identity via family and education and the continuity of their religious and cultural practices that I was now witnessing, and loved their understanding of a unitary G-d force whose true name cannot be spoken …

… and also felt angry and disrespectful of them for having corrupted the beautiful purity of that vision, for having perpetrated such patriarchal laws, for idolizing a book written by men for men containing examples of some of the worst behavior and beliefs, for the juvenile relationship to a deity who they believe we need to look to for rules and regulations, for the way the laws and past/present culture denigrate women and other groups of people, for their exceptionalist belief that they are “God’s chosen people.”

The overlay of all these conflicting thoughts, while standing in a shul (Yiddish word meaning an Orthodox synagogue, from the German word for school), listening to a couple hundred congregants chant their ancient Hebrew and Aramaic prayers (none of which I knew nor understood, having not been raised as an Orthodox Jew), was just too much for me. Recognition and love and respect and disdain and, most of all, alienation just swirled inside me and grew and grew until I found tears pouring down my cheeks. I tried to shut them off but couldn’t.

I cried because I still did not belong. Because I had always been branded as a misfit, “different”, not fitting in, and not approved of yet told I am supposed to honor and continue the religion. Because no measure of “respect” and “understanding” on my part would bring me to accept the laws and customs and mythology. Because maybe (I truly don’t know) the culture and traditions should be continued, but I would play no part. Ironically, I was sad to contemplate the prospect of the traditions that are several thousands of years old just disappearing, yet I could find neither value nor place nor community nor meaning in what, by birth, was supposed to be my own cultural heritage — at least could not find enough to make it stick, to make it mine. I finally turned and walked out of the sanctuary (a word that could not have felt less accurate), said goodbye to the practices of my forebears, and sobbed out in the lobby. A nice woman gave me a tissue and patted me on the shoulder. “A lot of things can come up,” she said.

Yom Kippur is considered the most important of the Jewish holidays, the “Day of Atonement.” The purpose of the holiday is not to purge sins, for in most schools of thought within Judaism there is no “sin”. And there is no “hell”. There is only your own conscience, your own direct line of communication with an omnipotent (and, if you follow the Book, male) God. And your conscience and God might even be the same thing. If you displease one you displease the other. If you choose actions that feel right to one (presuming you have taken pause to make such an inward consultation) you have done right according to the other. The conscience of a Jew is an inescapable thing, even if you “don’t believe in God” — you have been told and your parents have been told and their parents and your ancestors going back several thousand years, that you need to consult your conscience. [Thus I think those Jews who act in hurtful ways towards others must be particularly dissociated and ill.]

The purpose of the Yom Kippur holiday is “to atone,” although not so much in the dictionary meaning of “to make amends,” but rather to recognize and contemplate and grieve for your own missteps mistakes misdeeds, and even more so to express “collective atonement” for the community of Jews and of humankind, for all our actions that contradict and defy and defile the values we just know in our heart we should be living by. This philosophy of the holiday holds much value to me, for I do feel that in our human interconnectedness, in this grand experiment called Life a/k/a being spirit in a mortal body, the joys of one are the joys of all, the pain of one is the pain of all, and the missteps mistakes misdeeds of one are also of all.

Perhaps when I have a word with my own conscience, when I atone for my own mistakes and those of my community, country, and fellow humans, when I sense a nameless unitary force coursing through everything in the world, when I feel awed and mystified by the mere fact of being alive, of sucking in my next breath — perhaps in these times I am extracting for myself the most important and beautiful bits of what it means to be a Jew. There are also several portions of the Torah (the “Old Testament” to Christendom) that I value highly — the stirring cosmology of Genesis, the existentialist dilemma of Koheleth in Ecclesiastes, the steamy love in the Song of Songs.

But this is the extent of my “buy-in.” I prefer to do without the laws that make women unclean, without the superior men who don’t count women when a minyan of 10 is needed for a service, without literal belief in a bible that has fathers trading their daughters for political gain and husbands raping slaves to ensure their progeny, without the angry Daddy In The Sky God — the “king of the universe” in the prayers — who punished and killed people, without the concept that only humans are “made in God’s image” and that we should “fill the earth with our people”, without the propaganda that Jews are “God’s chosen people” and without the way history and Word are perversely twisted (contrary to what I see as the best of Jewish values) to justify the formation of Israel and the subsequent oppression and even persecution and murder of other people.

Why did I decide to attend a Yom Kippur service to begin with? I am looking to decolonize myself. Thus I need to explore the ways that I am a colonizer, and the ways I am colonized. With regard to the latter, I have discovered that the key offenders in the Colonization Of Ilyse have been (1) patriarchy (with deep impacts from sexual assault to economic struggles to alienation from an ambition-driven society to the travails of raising two daughters on my own without aid, having been the one with the uterus) and (2) the dominant Euro-American Christian culture (with impacts ranging from having to tolerate hundreds of “Merry Christmases” every year, to truly painful prejudice [targeted at me or just overheard] and attacks on my person and horrifying ethnic history).

And my predecessors were “reverse-colonized” for two thousand years, in every European country and city they lived in for a while, and were then expelled from (or removed from for slavery and extermination). The persecution starts or the inquisition is declared — pack up your family, your books, the Torah, and flee to another country, another city and village, the next ghetto. Open the books, build a shul, continue your traditions. Rinse and repeat, surrounded by yet another culture that might tolerate you for a while but will then come for you.

So I attended a Yom Kippur service in a congregation that adheres to the practices of my great-grandparents 120 years ago — and of my progenitors for a couple thousand years before that, the practices of the Jews of the Roman/European diaspora — hoping to connect and understand more about their insularity and their survival through ages of flourishing and persecution and rebuilding lives and flourishing and persecution. And I did “connect” in that I could see and feel, viscerally, this experience through the assembly of people right in the room with me.

I had told myself that I would be visiting the East River to practice the Yom Kippur tradition of “throwing your ‘sins’ in the river” (in the form of breadcrumbs and prayers). Again, this is about collective as well as personal atonement. I have felt so raw since my experience on Yom Kippur, and have been ill for the past week, and have not made it to the river (a 5 minute bike ride from my apartment). I might still do this, though we are now outside the traditional window of time.

Perhaps through atonement for myself, for Jews, for Europeans and Christians and Americans and for men … perhaps I can forgive myself for rejecting the very beliefs and traditions that are the only reason there is still a Jewish community. Perhaps by tossing all this in the river, by letting go of what I reject, I can stanch the grief flowing from my ripped out heartstrings and find my footing.

And once I have my footing perhaps I can settle back into, reconnect with, my own roots, grown through six decades of experience and love and loss and struggle and joy and friendships and motherhood in this lifetime, and, yes, also (selectively) informed by the “city of ancestors” who reside invisibly yet almost tangibly Here With Me Now. For I do feel them. I do converse with them often. At times I even see them as an overlay on “Now.” There is another level of wisdom and healing available to me via all kinds of ancestors, perhaps particularly via my own, available regardless of cultural and religious practices. Perhaps I can bring healing to them, too.

And in spite of, and because of, all of the above, yet I am a Jew. Being a Jew is an inescapable thing.