As a New Yorker, a Jew and a mother, September is a curious mix of beginnings and endings.  Every year I remember and relive 9/11; every year, I celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the new year; and every year, my kids return to school with new teachers, new classes and sometimes, a new school.  This past week was filled with an almost eerie, concomitant sense of beginnings/endings.  It started when my father called to tell me that the Dow had closed on 9/11 at 9605, the same as it had eight years ago on 9/11/01.  I said what a funny coincidence.  Daddy said, "You think it's funny?  I think there's more to it than that."

Immediately, I understood that this "coincidence" was actually a sign from the heavens, and since I am personally always looking for signs from God, I asked daddy what he meant.  Daddy, however, said he didn't want to tell me but he was pretty sure that the end times are closer than we think. The End Times have been close my entire life.  That's what happens when you grow up evangelical on a farm in Indiana. In addition to wreaking havoc in the world, Satan and his demons were never happier than when they were causing mayhem in our home.  My father would often despair that, "Satan has got one foot in the door!" at which my sister Mary would under her breath say, "Well, slam the door, then."

A few days later, I was in Chicago for my cousin Ruthe's fiftieth birthday celebration.  A group of 19 women, we sat in a circle to "gently welcome Ruthe" to her 50s.  Without going into too much detail, our hostess led us in a spiritual ceremony that entailed lighting candles while sharing an intention for Ruthe, presenting an "offering"--a poem, a gift, a letter--to her, and then writing down on two separate pieces of paper what we personally wanted to close the door on this year, and what we wanted to open the door to.  The mental image of a door opening and closing reminded me first of Mary's sarcastic "slam the door on Satan" comment, and then, of Rosh Hashanah, ending the old year, beginning a new one.  While the doorway is a transition in place, Rosh Hashanah is a transition in time.  Both transitions have long been feared and for good reason--they offer one the freedom to come and go, but they might also allow invisible, dark forces to enter.

Within the Jewish tradition, the months of Elul and Tishri (September and October) correspond to the autumn equinox, which marks the transition between autumn and winter. This was the time when evil spirits roamed the earth. The gates of heaven were open, souls were awaiting justice, and with such openings, the evil spirits could slip in, as well.  How to prevent them from entering?  Bells on the hem of the High Priest's robes, and loud noises, like the blowing of a ram's horn, would scare them away. 

College is the ultimate transitional place and space.  It is a time between high school and getting a job, while living in a temporary place amongst a temporary group of people.  We dropped our daughter off at college in Chicago, and as I watched her walk with the rest of her classmates under the arch that marks the entrance to the campus, I thought about Ruthe and how we gathered around to usher her from one place in time to the next.  I thought, again, about my father and decided that he is right.  It is the end times of a sort, for the times are always ending.  Which means another time is beginning.   On Rosh Hashanah, we'll close the door on 5769, and open it onto 5770.  Gently, and with bells on, let's welcome the future. 

 

 

Following an afternoon of serious Labor Day sale shopping downtown, in which Lili and I each buy the same multi-colored, plaid dress, which is surprising because I am a good nine inches taller than Lili and we tend to have vastly different tastes in clothing, Lili admits to me over an organic salad in the East Village, "I hate it that Judaism took anthropomorphism away.  I mean, it makes more sense for God to be walking around and talking.  It's much more personal."   

"Me, too," I agree, and not just because we have bonded, improbably, over the plaid dress.  "And animal sacrifices.  I hate it that they're gone." 

We've been talking about revisionist history for the past half hour.  It started with me self-righteously pointing out that Elul, which is the current Hebrew month, is actually a word of Akkadian origin.  That is, Jews took "Elulu" which might mean something like "to become pure and holy" in Akkadian, and adapted it as our own month, Elul.  However, over time, we've imposed other meanings upon the word, and now it's common to view "Elul" as an acronym for "Ani L'dodi V'dodi Li."  A verse from the Song of Songs, it translates "I am to my beloved and my beloved is to me."  In this case, God is the beloved, and therefore Elul is all about drawing closer to God, which is not a bad thing under any circumstances and is particularly recommended in the month before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, judgment day.  You'd best get on God's good side.  Nonetheless, this beloved thing is a much later interpretation, one that was imposed upon the word as part of revisionist history.

Lili sympathizes with my purist, call a spade a spade, view of the world, and thus, she's willing to concede that the God of the Torah who walked in the garden of Eden, who spoke with Abraham, who physically wrestled with Jacob, who is described as having loins and a face and breasts, has been sanitized, too, much like the month of Elul, and that's why she says she misses the more primitive, anthropomorphic God.  Today, our God doesn't hang out at the local coffee shop, and goats are not slaughtered as sacrifices to God.  The acceptable, party line is that God is distant but present, and that our prayers are our sacrifices to God.  But who are we kidding?  We know that that's not the way it used to be. 

From whence is this urge to tweak history, we wonder.  Is it because there's a tacit understanding that the actual facts themselves need to be revised, perhaps because the real history is too embarrassing or reveals someone or some event in an unflattering light or is it because we want our history to reflect where we are today, not where we were then?   We compare this propensity to how people will talk about going on lots of dates and doing all sorts of amazingly crazy things in college.  We, however, suspect that those stories are vastly exaggerated.  Mostly, it was the sluts and the slackers who were inclined toward that.  (Of course, it's possible they did actually do those things, and we're revising their history since we weren't.  Sour grapes.)

We finish our iced mint tea and walk outside into an end of summer, mid-Elul afternoon.  The tattooed and pierced and unbelievably cool-looking young men and women of the East Village are fun to gawk at, as we don't see many of them on our Upper West Side streets.  Then, immediately after our bitter revolt against inauthenticity, we find ourselves behind two young women holding hands.  Once they're safely out of earshot, I turn to Lili and say, "You know, I can't tell if they're gay or not.  It's not that I care, but I just want to know who's who and what's what!" I rail tempestuously, as if there is a vast conspiracy out there of people trying to conceal the truth from us Truth-Seekers. 

Lili tells me that she once saw two elderly Asian women walking down the street hand-in-hand and she couldn't decide if they were gay or not.  It didn't matter, "And I know I shouldn't judge," but she wishes that there were more obvious signs one way or the other, because she figured that if they weren't gay, they would be shocked that others might perceive them as such.   "I don't like confusing signals," she says. "The church lady who dresses like a church lady, I assume she isn't into S&M."  This analogy makes sense to me, though I am somewhat surprised that Lili is going immediately into S&M to make her point.  The East Village is having an effect on her.

Lili and I agree, once and for all, that it doesn't actually matter what the "truth" is, as long as we know what it is.  Naturally, Lili and I can't impose our will upon others, and force them to reveal the truth, but we sure as heck wish we could.

There's another meaning that has been floated for the word "Elul" and that is "search."  Search one's heart in order to draw closer to God.  Search to make things right before Rosh Hashanah.  Search to reconcile with our beloveds, on earth and in heaven.   I like this word "search", since it lends itself to so many possibilities.  Search for the truth. 

Approaching Columbus Avenue and home, we conclude that our plaid dress is a real find and how fun is it that it works for both of us?   Like Elul, which can contain a multiplicity of meanings (though only one true one!), the dress takes on a totally different look depending on who is wearing it.  It reinterprets itself, re-fits itself, re-invents itself to suit its owner.

None of this, however, justifies stripping God of His/Her bodily parts, and I continue to mourn the absence of animal sacrifices.    

 

Two thousand six hundred years ago, they were laid to rest in their burial cave.  Over the years, family members placed gifts of pottery, silver and gold jewelry, glass bottles, oil lamps and amulets in a repository under a burial bench in the cave.  Meanwhile, in the world of the living, the First Temple stood just a short walk from the tomb. King Josiah was on the throne, and Jeremiah was direly prophesying impending disaster for Jerusalem.  For his trouble, he was thrown into prison.  Nobody wanted to listen to a doomsayer.  Jerusalem had not yet been sacked and burned by the Babylonians, nor had the people been taken into exile.  

Those bones and the gifts for the deceased remained intact in the burial caves throughout the destruction of the first and second temples, the 1,900 year Diaspora of the Jews and their return to the land.  Then, in 1979, a bored 13 year old boy on an archaeology dig knocked the floor of the cave with a hammer and revealed this 2,600 year-old treasure trove of over 1000 different items dating from the First Temple period.  

This past week, watching the funeral of Senator Ted Kennedy, I was suddenly reminded of those long-dead souls and that stash.  During Kennedy's funeral service, the archbishop raised his hands and in English said, "May the Lord bless you and keep you.  May the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you.  May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace."

While obviously the Torah is sacred to Christians, I'd never heard the Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly blessing which is found in the book of Numbers, as well as other places in the Bible, spoken within a Christian context before.  Undoubtedly, I haven't been paying much attention.   Rather, I'm familiar with it from the Jewish world.  On Friday nights at the start of the Sabbath, Jewish parents use those exact words to bless their children.  In the upcoming month, we'll hear the priestly benediction during the high holiday services when the kohanim, the priests, chant the blessing in synagogue on behalf of the congregation.  It's almost exactly this same prayer for God's blessings that was etched in the silver amulets that were found in Ketef Hinnom, the burial caves outside the Old City of Jerusalem. 

That this prayer has been in use for a long time and is based in antiquity has always been known.  Traditional Judaism dates it, as well as the five books of Moses, to the Exodus (somewhere between 1440 BCE and 1200 BCE), when God gave Aaron this blessing to recite on behalf of the Israelites.  But how far back it can be traced incontrovertibly, with archaeological or extra-Biblical evidence to back it up, is another matter.  Until this discovery, the oldest known written version of the priestly blessing was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  No writings dating from the First Temple period that reference Biblical material had ever been uncovered. 

I'm struck by what, based on these findings, one can infer about the actual historicity of the Torah, and I'm also moved by the fact that words endure, reaching across vast distances of time and place. But more than that, I'm somewhat surprised that these words were used by Jews as a talisman to protect their dead and to ask God to deal kindly with them on their way to Sheol.  A little research corroborates that post-biblical and medieval Jewish commentaries, including the Midrash Rabbah and Yalqut Shimeoni, associate this blessing with the dead and with the netherworld.  Most modern-day Jews of my acquaintance leave speculation and worries about the afterlife to Christians, and express a vague hope for the world to come.  In Judaism, there's no elaborate system of heaven, hell, purgatory or limbo, nor are there special passwords or incantations that you need to get in.  This has always bothered me.  Not that I think anyone actually knows, but watching the Kennedy funeral, I could tell that many of them believed, were certain, that there was a plan for the next world.

I'm as big a proponent as anyone of the importance of staying in the present moment, and concerning ourselves most with how we live our lives on earth, but let's be honest.  We're going to die.  Other people will die.  It is reasonable to hope that the God who blesses us in this world will continue to bless us in the next.  Thus, we write God a little note and place it with our dead.  Or, we say the words out loud in a cathedral.  But one way or another, we want God to hear these words which, after all, God authored in the first place. 

The blessing aside, the silver amulets contain one of the earliest extra-Biblical mentions of the personal name for God, "YHWH".  When Moses asked God who he was, God replied "YHWH," (albeit in Hebrew), the meaning of which is some form of the present tense "to be."  I exist, or I am present.  That is, there was nothing before God, and God was not created by someone else.  In English YHWH is translated as "I am that I am." 

With this personal God appearing three times in the priestly blessing, it is no wonder that it's come to be used for the individual.  For this God is not just the God of a small, middle-eastern nation but also of each individual soul, from the Judahites in Jerusalem to the Kennedys of Boston.  It's this God who is the source of all blessings, and who simply is.  Not just in this earthly existence, but beyond, God is present.

 

It's an open secret amongst my family and friends that I have a thing for rabbis.  I really do.  When a rabbi walks past on the street, or when I bump into one at a Jewish event, my girl friends will giggle and poke me as if we are in junior high school.   I am not particularly picky about age or affiliation either.  Reconstructionist or Orthodox, with sidecurls or without - I'm flexible.  Talk to me about God, and my heart goes pitter-patter.

So at a recent wedding when the rabbi's wife turned up wearing a tight, low-cut dress, and all the guests were gasping at the shande, I thought it's a good thing I didn't marry a rabbi (not that anyone asked, but still).   How could I have given up fashion for a man? 

This past week, how women dress or don't dress was much in the news.  In Central Park, women were marching for the right to go topless.  This, I have to say, I don't completely understand.  Whom does it benefit if we women go topless?  It just means more sunscreen and worse sunburns, and one more body part that will be judged by others, whether you want it to be or not.  And then there's the cumulative effect of gravitational pull to consider.  But by all means, if you want to go topless, feel free, bearing in mind it will definitely exclude you from being a rabbi's wife.

Then, there was Michelle Obama and America's ongoing fascination with her bare arms (woo-hoo!) and now, her vacation wardrobe.  She wore short shorts to the Grand Canyon, and this week in Martha's Vineyard she's been seen in cotton summer dresses, in case you haven't been keeping up.  What she wears very much affects how she's perceived by the average American and how much we're willing to like her.  Her clothes can't look too snobby, and she has to be mindful of the fact that we're in a recession, which is why we are tickled pink when she turns up in Gap T-shirts and J Crew cardigans.  On the other hand, when she dons her bright-colored, slightly offbeat designer duds, she does us proud because she's saying to the rest of the world that Americans are unique, fun, vibrant risk-takers!   

Obviously, whether you're male or female, your choice of clothing or lack thereof sends a message to others.  It can telegraph your personal taste, perhaps your ethnic background, your socio-economic status, your education, your availability, maybe even how artsy or conservative you are.  But one thing I personally feel your clothing doesn't do is reflect your relationship with God.   The notion that a "religious" woman, especially a rabbi's wife, should be covered up is common to most faiths, for all sorts of reasons, some of which have to do with exposure=sex =impiety.   For quite a while, the church in which I grew up required women to wear dresses that hit the middle of the knee. Apparently, if it were even slightly above the knee, mayhem would ensue, men might not be able to restrain themselves, and God would be in a wrathful way.

I don't know that God has a dress code, but I do find it funny (as in funny ridiculous) that we women continue to judge one another based on a male God supposedly whispering "what women should not wear" fashion tips to the men!

It's a good thing, for many reasons, that I settled for marrying the son of a rabbi.   It's hard enough putting together an outfit that is neither too matronly nor too mutton-dressed-as-lamb.  If I had to take into consideration my husband's congregation, I might rebel and join my sisters in Central Park, sunburn and sagging be damned.

 

In my twenties, I fancied myself a poet.  No one else did.  I labored under the delusion that I was, if not profound, at least mildly interesting.  I was not.  I abandoned all notions of being a poet some time ago, and the world is better for it.  However, like a shocking and unexpected pregnancy (actually, not quite like that - I've had a few of those, too, and poetry is adamantly not like gestation and giving birth, even if poets will insist on making that parallel), a few words, half sentences, random thoughts popped into my head last week, and I gradually recognized them as the nausea of early-stage-poetry.

The words "what if" were what started it off.  Sitting with my friend Gena and my son Daniel in a restaurant in Portugal, I was enjoying the last evening of a music festival. We were eating sardines and salad and smugly congratulating ourselves on our heart-happy meal when I posited the question, "But what if we're wrong about it all?"

"Doctors know these things." Gena, whose daughter is a doctor and is mean-fisted when it comes to Gena's triglyceride levels,  was sure. l shook her head.

"What if they don't?"And it wasn't just because I was slathering butter on my roll that I was asking. 

Then, we moved on to talk about port wine and I said it pissed me off that we can't carry Portugal port on board the airplane. Since it weighs down my checked luggage and I resent having to pay extra for an overweight suitcase, I probably wouldn't be taking any back at all.  These airport security rules are just excessive and stupid, I declared.

"They're necessary," said Gena of the healthy heart.

"What if they're not, or at least not all of the rules are, and everybody knows they're not but they have to pretend to agree with the established opinion?" I countered.  I hate being badgered into siding with popular opinion.

Thereupon "what if" became my mental refrain, and the words took on an insistent rhythm - though not necessarily a rhythmic rhythm, despite my two week exposure to Mozart and Mendelssohn.  Caught in the grip of the urge for self-expression (some might call it self-indulgence), I jotted down the fanciful fragments, much as I had 25 years ago when an orange-red sunset or a broken love affair urgently demanded that poems be written about them so that others, who had never experienced them as deeply and passionately as I, could be enlightened.

Pen in hand and mentally channeling the thesaurus, I finally realized that poetry, which I'd firmly squished any pretensions of harboring a talent for, had surfaced and, like a tick on a dog, it wouldn't let go.

Perhaps I've gotten better, perhaps now I can make words dance, I can transcend, I can capture the ephemeral, I thought.  Perhaps I wasn't that bad back then, after all, and I should never have given up!
 
The truth is I don't like poetry much.  Much of it bewilders me.  But writing poetry so as to inflict it on unsuspecting friends and demonstrate my depth is another story altogether, and so with an optimistic heart bursting with omega 3s, I set off to give birth to my poem.  

I started with the intention of being mindful of meter and rhyme and alliteration.  In fact, I actually attempted to make the poem rhyme.  (I like rhymes.  I'm not ashamed to admit it.)   It was when I began to seek out words that rhymed with the last word in each couplet, (Whole?  Soul?) that I arrived once again at the dismaying realization that poetry is not my medium.  Poems are subtle, sometimes mysterious.  I'm not.  They should not state things dogmatically.  I am never so satisfied as when can state things dogmatically: "Airport security checks suck." (Hmm, rhymes with suck - Buck?   Duck? ...)

Yet, despite knowing that it would never stand up to any serious or even kindly scrutiny, the couplets kept coming, and this is my long apologia to explain what prompts this
kind of/sort of
poem called:

What If
What if: whole milk is
better for you than skim?

What if: you would do well
to talk to strangers?

What if: you do have a soul and
this world is not so bad?

What if: airport security is stupid and unnecessary and everybody knows
but is colluding in the notion that the emperor is wearing clothes?

What if: guardian angels exist and
it's not that complicated at all?

I wanted to put in a line asking what if you questioned conventional wisdom and trusted yourself to fly out of the box of what "everybody knows", connecting this somehow with the angels, but I knew it was too didactic and dogmatic, and wouldn't even make the cut into an overwrought Rosh Hashanah sermon, so I'm clunking it in here instead.  "Soul" was going to rhyme with "whole" (milk), but I reluctantly caught myself; however, you can see that I got "knows" and "clothes" to rhyme without much effort, for which I'm proud. 
 
Oscar Wilde's comment, "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," comforts me.