Returning to a New Landscape
A year ago in the Jewish calendar, I showered, got dressed, chose a machzor and sat in my room for two hours, unable to make myself go to services. It was an extremely anti-climatic beginning to a very untraditional Rosh Hashanah. Despite the assumptions people make based upon my punk appearance, my religious practice has historically leaned toward the more traditional side of the spectrum. So, what followed, felt like a transgression against G,d and my normal way of doing things, my personal halakha.
Not knowing what to do with myself I began walking. I took a book, my phone and wallet, and my earbuds. I wandered all over for two hours, weaving through neighborhoods while trying to avoid seeing other Jews who, I was convinced, would immediately know that I was a fraud. That I was a pretender who put on a front of Jewish practice for other people, but openly flaunted it in private. I just knew that they would somehow sense my sins and berate me.
None of that happened. No one cared about me and what I was doing. They simply went on their way to their dinners, while I went to mine at the local Thai restaurant.
It felt peculiar. One of the holiest days in the calendar was suddenly just a day. The only thing setting it apart were my meals and the general aura of special time at home, where the Jewish family I lived with was deep in the holiday.
The next morning, I got up early to potentially go to services, perhaps last night was a fluke, and once again I found myself unable to move. Unsure what was happening, I felt emotionally frantic despite my calm exterior. What did it mean that I, then in my last year of rabbinical school, was skipping Rosh Hashanah?
The social reality of this experience caught up with me when I went to my friend’s homes for meals, I believe I skipped at least one of them. Everyone was talking about where they went to services (how the d’var torah was, if they were leading, about annoying tone deaf community members, etc). I just kinda nodded along and tried to avoid talking about my experience by simply sharing that it’d been a weird one that I didn’t really want to talk about.
Roughly a year before this, I was living in Jerusalem. I attended services with my favorite minyanim in Jerusalem, I went to and hosted meals, I did all the things. And then October 7th happened. If the horrors of that day weren’t enough, people around me began advocating for genocidal retaliation, and, as the days, weeks and months went on, it became clear that their prayers for retribution were coming true.
Almost immediately following October 7th, I began faltering in my religious life. Prayer became harder and more disturbing given what was happening an hour and a half away. Shabbat, similarly, became more difficult to observe, although I appreciate the respite and managed to hold onto her. And, as the holidays rolled around, it became harder to participate.
In a sense, it’s only natural that the system I was living in was slowly crashing all around me. My fragile sense of the divine showed cracks and then shattered. My relationship with the wider Jewish community was, strand by strand, being burned away by a form of McCarthyism that has not yet ceased. My sense of who I was has forever been tarnished by my proximity to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
For a year, I allowed myself to not pray. To not observe holidays to their fullest. To embrace (a)theological inconsistency. To not believe in G,d. To do things that I wasn’t expecting from myself. To be inconsistent and sad. To let myself be vulnerable enough to begin healing.
This year, now a new rabbi, I’m going to services, or at least trying to. I’m still struggling with all of it, but living in a college town with a non-existent Jewish community, I’m craving the familiarity of Jewish practice and prayer. I’m trying to do teshuva, in a way. I know that I can’t return to who I was, but I’m trying to discover the contours of a new landscape that I can begin calling home.
