A New Year
I am writing this on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, also known as “the Jewish New Year.”
This two-day celebration of “shouting and blasting” sets off Jewish High Holy Days, a ten-day period of self-reflection rightfully dubbed the “Days of Awe.” It culminates with the “Day of Atonement,” which most people know as Yom Kippur.
Connected with an agricultural festival of the ancient Near East, this fall holiday is a time of bringing in the harvest⎯of celebrating a new beginning. I was raised in a quasi-religious fashion. My grandfather, Gustave, would sing after each holiday meal in Yiddish-inflected Hebrew, an act which, for reasons I’ll never know, was called “benching.” We had to pay rapt attention⎯if any of us were talking, he would bang on his prayer book until we stopped.
Gustave and his wife, Ida, spoke Yiddish as if they had just stepped off a boat direct from the far reaches of Eastern Europe⎯the likes of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. While I always found my grandparents’ seriousness compelling (they demanded the same kind of attention listening to a difficult symphony or deciphering a particular painting might), Gustave and Ida were not what anyone would ever call “fun.”
Every Rosh Hashanah featured a feast and justified the arrival of tons of relatives, including my super sexy teenage cousins. The volume of yelling attested to the amount of love in the room⎯a true “shouting and blasting” ritual if there ever was one. But mixed in with the joviality of food and family, we also had to sit for hours on end in a synagogue, waiting for the sounds of the Shofar blowing before breaking the fast by Yom Kippur’s nightfall.
I think fondly of those times, even though they were not without a fair share of tears and tantrums, some verging on tragic. Through the emotional upheaval, one thing was always very clear: you don’t play around with Yom Kippur. It really puts the fear of God in a person to realize that yes, things could begin again… but things could also end again. You can sort of influence the results, but everything is mostly out of your control. At some point in my development, as happens for many progressive Jews, the “God-Image” moved from the Yahweh of the Old Testament to a more personalized manifestation; in my case, it was a symbolic meditation on the homosexual (see the image from the Whitney below).
Even though I have removed myself from the religious aspects of this holiday, it still provokes within me a degree of awe. At its core, Rosh Hashanah is a holiday about time and how it fucks with all of us. Things begin. Things end. The cycle goes on. God opens the Book of Life and reveals your story, inscribed alongside the stories of everyone else, and allows you ten days to read it over and consider the ways you have treated yourself, your relations, and your relationship to the sacred. For better or worse, this reckoning culminates with the heaviest day of all: Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. Beat your breast. Atone for your sins. Fast for twenty-four hours⎯that includes no smoking and no noshing! Only then will God make his assessment.
He will close that book once more, and it will be decided: will you be granted another year to live and make more mistakes, or will your bucket finally be kicked?
Yeah, maybe that doesn’t sound like a super fun New Year…. but who ever said being Jewish was about having fun? Though, I will admit it is kind of fun to hear the shofar blowing at the end of Yom Kippur and repairing home to break the fast! Because Rosh Hashanah takes place during the Fall Equinox, when the season changes, I’ve always found myself rendered melancholy⎯ a nice word for “depressive.”This new year, I am in New York City, the place of my birth, to see my 92-year-old mother.
Always sweet, age has (thankfully) dampened my mother’s gift of gab and penchant for worry. She is quiet these days and seems okay with the way things are. She sleeps more each day, her sharp focus on “this” and “that” lessened as one day slips peacefully into the next. I am sad, yes, but I am also joyful.I walked into her room at the Assisted Living Place while she was asleep in her bed. She didn’t know I was coming, but the moment she felt my aura, she shook herself awake and said, “My Douglas, you came! You came for the New Year!”
Lately, I have felt my mood shifting almost as if it were a moon, my gravitational pull spinning me away from thoughts and toward emotions. Maybe my 25 years as a psychotherapist has finally triumphed over my needy, inner intellectual.
I have a friend and former romantic partner with me. Alex and I were together for five years, nearly a decade ago. We loved each other deeply but broke up due to conflicting values⎯ones no longer relevant today. Go figure. We are reconnecting in a new way, as neither friend nor partner. Is there a word for that?
Last night we went to see ‘Hadestown” on Broadway. It’s a contemporary rendition of the Orpheus seen in Ovid, Virgil, Plato, Rilke, and Ashberry. Orpheus plays the lyre, falls in love with Eurydice, his feminine half, only to have her snatched away by Hades.
To find his lost love (or “anima”), Orpheus goes on a journey into the underworld (Sound familiar? It’s
a homosexual story too⎯think Gilgamesh and Demeter). The simple, single set was designed by Rachel Hauck. It depicts a recognizable idea of a “dark place”⎯ a basement jazz joint that miraculously turns into the furnace room of Hades’ factory.
With the combination of the singing, the star-studded stage, and the hot AF men, both Alex and I were moved by this story of death and rebirth. After realization dawned that Eurydice would not be coming back to her lover from Hades’ factory, the performers gave us a quiet coda at the end which suggested that, even if we fail, we are faced with the compulsive opportunity of trying again and again. There is always a new beginning.
Jews don’t really have the concept of hell⎯isn’t life hellish enough?⎯but I can see the parallels between this staged tragedy and how the sweetness of Rosh Hashanah will descend into its own dark reckoning with the Day of Atonement. It is a necessary path-⎯without it, there will be no harvest, no new life. The ritual of the sounding of the shofar and “the breaking of the fast” also signals a new beginning⎯that first slice of challah and butter after a day of fasting definitely feels like a fresh start!
There is hell enough in our world: our own march towards authoritarianism, the war crimes in Ukraine, the tragedy in Iran. But there are still glimmers of hope. Hades is not some other place into which we descend but is rather the place we notice as soon as we wake up. With our two feet on the ground, we enter a place of “shouting and blasting” and must harvest for ourselves the truth of a new beginning.
These are strange times. I know I am not alone in feeling disoriented. Rest assured, I will be writing often during this holiday to honor the beckoning calls of a new life. Nothing, I’m certain, will be the same!
L’shanah Tovah,
Dr. Doug
