Blasphemy, I hear you cry, but hear me out before getting your challah in a twist. 

But first, a Yom Kippur 101! Every year on Yom Kippur, Daddy God inscribes all the Children of Israel’s fates in one of three books: The Book of Life, the Book of Inbetween, and the Book of Death. The goal is to get into the Book of Life, which is achieved by fasting for 25 hours, dressing in pure white, and repenting for all your transgressions. No drinking, eating, or fucking is allowed, and failure to adhere to the rules lands you in the Burn Book. 

No shtupping on Yom Kippur? That doesn’t sound like the HaShem who’s obsessed with copulation (hashtag not MY HaShem). The Torah doesn’t actually require us to abstain from sex, but the custom has been observed since the Rabbis That Be decreed it a big no-no. Notably, God did tell Moses that “work” is forbidden, so blowjobs are most definitely off the table. And a warning to the wise, don’t ask the Rebbe if it’s kosher to eat pussy (because I already did). 

Nu, between grumbling stomachs and Yom Kippur Breath (YKB), what the heck is so horny about the Day of Atonement? The answer lies in a mind-blowing ancient tradition, babes, and it’s the biggest, jewciest, kept secret the rabbis don’t want you to know. 

In the titillating Talmud, first-century Rabbi Simeon Ben Gamliel recounted that back in the day Yom Kippur was one of the happiest days for Jews. Like Tu B’av (Jewish Valentine’s Day), all the single daughters of Israel dressed in virginal white dresses and danced in the vineyard to seduce eligible bachelors for marriage. “Young man, lift up your eyes and see what you choose for yourself,” they sang. “Don’t set your eyes upon beauty; rather, set your eyes upon family. [For] grace is false and beauty is vain, a woman who fears the Lord she will be praised.” 

Lies, you seethe, but nay! A sizeable chunk of Torah scholars have accepted that Yom Kippur went from a day of matchmaking and makeouts to one of fasting and repentance. Da fuqq?? It sort of makes sense, Rabbi Chaim Joseph David Azulai believed, ‘cause afterall, when a Jewish couple weds they’re forgiven for all their naughty sins, so a courting ritual on the day of forgiveness checks out. But why, oh why, did the great sages deprive us women of the ultimate day of seduction? Rav Dessler understood Lamentation 1:4 “the maidens are unhappy” to mean that the holiest practice (heh) was blacklisted after the fall of the Temple. 

So, when the Sages pulled the five prohibitions of Yom Kippur out of their tuchus’ — no eating and drinking, leave the leather shoes at home, no bathing, no spritzing of perfumes, and absolutely no sex — it was a means of transforming the holiest day of the year filled with sexual climax to one defined as the emotional, super sad and totally not pleasurable, climax of Judaism’s High Holidays. Presumably, these rules were put in place to deter single Jews from courtship, because who in their right mind would swap YKB breath and stick their dry tongue down someone’s throat? As if the hunger pains and body odor weren’t enough to repel horny Jews, the rabbis redundantly ended the prohibition list with  “don’t have sex,” a true nod to Coach Carr. 

Back to the dancing Jewesses. There were three types of brides at the men’s disposal: the beautiful ones, those of prestigious lineage, and the fugly ones. I kid you not, the Talmud literally says “the ugly ones.” The hot ones seduced men by being hot, the daughters of kings and priests flirted with the promise of fertility, and the uggos, unable to elicit an erection from anyone, cried in desperation, “make your acquisition for the sake of Heaven, as long as you decorate us with jewels.” 

When Yom Kippur was downgraded from a joyous day filled with sex and shidduchim to one of sadness and abstinence, the three catefories of brides, who symbolize the Children of Israel, remained in the recitation of Selichot, but with a notable edit. Today, the fugly dancing maidens sing, “You know that our ‘ugliness’ is not our true essence, but imposed upon us by the spiritual poverty of galut,” which basically means the children of Israel became unfuckable when the Second Temple fell and the Jewish exile began.

If our ugliness is tied to living in the Diaspora, then repugnant Yom Kippur Breath is a direct reaction to antisemitism. Only Moshiach can end galut and restore us from ugly ducklings to white swans, and in our wait, the 10th of Tishrei remains a day of sadness and nursing blue balls. Nice Jews finish last, because only the Moshiach gets to come first, and you can blame the Romans for that. 

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Halfway through the “Death Café” my leg started shaking—tremors so slight I couldn’t see them, but strong enough that when I put my hand on my thigh I could feel that I was shivering, as if in fear. Which was weird, because I was actually having a lot of fun.

I had not begun the day planning to spend one of the final evenings before the Day of Atonement sitting in an anarchist feminist bookstore and talking about death with a circle with strangers, but the chance seemed too seasonally appropriate to pass up.

“Death Cafe is a place to wonder together about the mystery and meaning of life and to discuss death comfortably and openly,” according to the Bluestockings’ website. (Bluestocking has repeatedly hosted one of the city’s multiple unaffiliated Death Cafés, but was not involved in organizing this particular event.)  Originating in London in 2011, these gatherings respond to what planners and participants see as an unhealthy silence around the subject of mortality in daily life. We all know we are going to die someday, so why not admit to that awareness, and talk about our feelings on the matter?

Organizers describe the result as a “free-wheeling, self-facilitated conversation around death and dying, inevitably touching upon life and living.”

The Jewish calendar, too, knows living and dying are inextricably linked. On Rosh Hashana we celebrate the New Year by eating round foods and looking forward with friends and family to the year to come… and by reciting all the possible ways we might die before it is complete. “Who by water, who by fire?” the chazan chants as we look furtively round the sanctuary.

And then just ten days later we are back, pleading to be be written in the book of life—but also declaring our acceptance of whatever fate the year holds.

That kind of acceptance—of our bodies’ mortality, of a certain lack of control over our own continuation—is something I struggle to achieve. Even as I say the words, my mind can’t quite believe that I could really (ever!) die.

And so the Death Café sounded like a good chance to practice putting myself in the mindset of acceptance.

The format of the café is simple. We were broken up into small groups, and asked to share our names and what had brought us there. My group included a woman who’d spent time at a Zen monastery and was interested in hospice work, a young hospital doctor looking to engage more fully with the deaths of patients, and a teenager in ripped jeans who described how losing a family member to suicide at a young age had changed her worldview.

In plastic chairs surrounded by books about urban planning and DIY radicalism, we asked each other increasingly personal questions.  Whether we really believed in a self, what kinds of burials we wanted for our bodies. Which, we imagined, might upset us more at the moment of death—the sorrow of leaving loved ones, or the fear of the unknown?

In the calm, cookie-and-tea fueled atmosphere, words poured forth from all of us. Throughout the evening, snippets of other circles’ conversations, equally compelling, were audible. There was so much to talk about, and, as we repeatedly acknowledged, who knew how much time we had to talk about it? Yet somehow the quality of the conversation remained unrushed.

One death café veteran in our group described the feeling of “having your head opened” that these conversations give her, and I could understand what she meant. Admitting that we are going to die one day—really thinking about it—is taboo, is downright scary.

But it is also necessary and important. On Yom Kippur, our petitions to be written in the Book of Life act as an additional wake-up call, a push to do teshuvah and change our ways for the better. And while many justifiably find the “sin=death” correlation this implies troubling, the reminder that we are mortal is indeed a powerful impetus for living well.

The organizers of the particular Death Café I attended say their inspiration to hold it came out of a conversation between friends about what a “good death” might mean—and that although they were still looking for the answer, they were sure that part of it was a living a life in which you treat others well. By thinking forward to the end, we can perhaps pull back a little, look at the larger patterns in our behavior, do better.

Every year in my parent’s synagogue, we read a text that describes Yom Kippur as just that kind of practice.

“One year. Give me one more year. I’m not finished. Not yet. We’re afraid. We don’t want to die. But Yom Kippur is about dying. We enact the drama of our dying. We put on our kittels. We stop eating. It’s over. How do I let go of this life? How I forgive everything, everyone, myself, and let my life fall… Give up your little story. Give up your small self.”

At my parents’ synagogue, since I was a child, we’ve read that text just before the Aleinu. I kept thinking of it as I sat in my circle of strangers, nibbling on a cookie. When I got home, I looked it up. The author, Bruce Fertman, describes the full prostration as another kind practice death, a surrender.

But it doesn’t stop there:

“Bowing is not just about about giving up and going down. It’s about giving up and going down in order to get back up. All the way up. Up, more easily and further than you have ever been. Up, with fresh energy, power, openness. Up, with renewed purpose…From where does our strength come? Our strength comes from God. But sometimes we’ve got to go down to get it. We rise with strength renewed.”

Wishing you a good practice death, and a good renewal and rebirth. Gmar chatima tova.

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Night:

2007, The Peak of My Religious Piety: It’s 11pm on Yom Kippur eve, but I’m not that tired. I reach for a book about rabbis from the Talmud. There’s one about a rabbi who confronts a Roman empress:

Roman empress scoffs: “What does your God do all day?”

Rabbi answers even-temperedly: “God makes matches between man and woman.”

I believe, with a kind of simple faith that’s synonymous with virgins from Laura Ingalls Wilder-esque novels, that God has made my match. I’ll meet him when I’m approximately 20.

But no later than 22. I silently cry. There’s little room at the High Holiday hearth for a female singleton.

I chase any vestige of fear by reciting the whole entire shema prayer and by learning two pages of the Chofetz Chaim’s “Guard Your Tongue.” I gently wrap a blanket over my chin and breathe happily: There. I’m amassing good deeds so that I can soon be a young Jewish bride.

I don’t know yet that I’ll spend the next 8 years as an untouched, un-romanced woman.

2017, The Peak of Newfound Secular Living: It’s 11pm on Rosh Hashanah eve and I’m alone in my apartment. I watched Stephen King’s It a couple of weeks ago. I’ve slept with a light on since because—yes—the thought of a fictional demonic clown is still too terrible to bear in the dark. My roommates will murder me after reading September’s electricity bill. I’m scared of them too.

And are you not scared of God’s wrath? My brain suddenly shrills. His vengeful wrath as he smites you for being so apathetic on His New Year? He’ll punish you and deprive you of love, luck, and—I try to shut it up.

After watching Netflix’s Jerry Before Seinfeld, it finally dials down to a background murmur. Irreverent Jews will always find comfort in one another. Thanks, Jer.

I manage to sleep.

Morning:

2007: Walking to shul on Yom Kippur morning, I cross paths with a dark-eyed, charmingly scruffed yeshiva boy. When you’re a hetero 17 girl surrounded by only women every day, almost all XY chromosomes emanate sexy musk from their pores. I grow excited.

He’s wearing a black hat and his eyes are pinned to the ground. He can’t bear to look at my hands or face—the only parts of my body that are naked. Everything else (from collarbone to toes) is safely tucked away under a long sheath, patiently awaiting God’s blessing.

I avert my eyes from him too. We’re both conscious of this aversion and it’s so beautifully awkward.

2017: It’s Yom Kippur morning and I’ll walk towards a Dunkin Donuts. (Thank God I won’t allow the Day of Judgement to infringe on my iced latte cravings.) Men will trek back from shul. I’ll worry that they’ll smell my crushing pile of sin. They’ll know, through some inexplicable Jew-y antenna of theirs, that I used to be a servant of Hashem. I’ll pull up my yoga pants to expose less belly.

After I pick up that iced latte, the paranoia will fade. They’re too fixated on their growling stomachs to care about your sin, you self-absorbed little girl. Caffeine works wonders in tethering me to reality.

After a latte, I’ll meet my boyfriend and kiss him three times on his cushion-like lips. Make that ten times. No—20. Lawless lovers will always discover peace in one another.

Afternoon:

2007: Religious Jews are advised not to nap on Rosh Hashanah because it can foreshadow a spiritual lassitude or a physical fatigue that may hang upon them for the rest of the year. Sans nap, TV, or phone, my friends and I have stretches of time to fill before another holiday dinner. We decide to stroll on Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway and schmooze like a couple of bubbies:

Me: “In shul today, almost all the women were wearing Valentino heels and Chanel dresses. Why does shul have to be a fashion show?”

Tali: “It’s loshon hora (gossip) to talk about people like that in your shul! Please stop! It’s Rosh Hashanah!”

Me: “Alright.”

But I hate this. I want my friends and I to be walking copies of an Ok! Magazine: equal parts disgusting and unbridled fun. There’s isn’t any laughter on these days. Always somber. Always serious. I scream internally.

Is this the scream bubble that germinates my inevitable dissent? Perhaps.

2017: This Rosh Hashanah, my boyfriend and I lazily lounge on the couch, our conversation quickly taking the pleasurable shape of gossip. But I soon cut the verbal whippings about neighbors, co-workers, and acquaintances short.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because it’s Rosh Hashanah and the pintele Yid, the ‘little Jew,’ does not die.”

My Bais Yaakov teachers warned me about the pintele Yid: “Even the most filthy, immoral Jew will always contain a spark of God,” they said. Now, I know.

Neilah, the Climax of the High Holidays:

2007: I stand united with my congregation. Yom Kippur is racing to the finish line. The heavenly gates are quickly locking, our fates quickly solidifying. Quivers of desperation ripple through the sick, the anxious, the poor, the lonely. For a moment, my burning tears speak when I cannot. For a moment, I see God eagerly collecting our collapsing bodies into his expansive chest. For a moment, we fit.

2017: It’s the last hour of Yom Kippur, the moment when spiritual listlessness crawls up my skin like a hot rash.

As a distraction, I turn to social media. There’s more news about Kylie Jenner’s pregnancy. And I think: How can I daven to a God that allows the Kardashians to infest the world’s collective newsfeed every minute? I grow increasingly fatalistic. And then nihilistic.

But cynicism crumples upon itself to expose a little girl mourning a faith that once felt like home. What do you do when you no longer believe, but miss believing?

I sigh and then slip on my headphones; I know, at the very least, that God is unblemished in music. This turns into passionate, fastidious prayer.

Rebecca Mordechai has an MA in English Literature and used to teach teens. But now she writes about her ever-evolving identity and lots of other Jewy things.

Image via Pixabay

The post Ten Years Later: The High Holidays for an Ex-Orthodox Jew appeared first on Jewcy.

It is happening again. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the 10 days of Teshuva— repentance— are upon us once more. While many of us are taking stock of another year gone by, contemplating our acts and wondering how we can be better people in the year to come, I want to suggest something perhaps unexpected: Watch Twin Peaks. Every mystifying second of it.

25 years after its cancellation, Twin Peaks was resurrected this past summer for an 18 episode limited run. Appropriately named “The Return,” like most viewers I took the revival’s title to be nothing more than acute self awareness on the part of the writers. The show has returned! Yay! But, it quickly became clear that the title of the show was signaling more than just a celebration of its own resurrection. Twin Peaks: The Return is about the very nature of returning. How do we do it? What do we even do to return? With the High Holiday season in mind, it is easy to think that the show could have instead been titled Twin Peaks: Teshuva.

Twin Peaks addresses Teshuva from two distinct angles. The first is by telling the story of our hero Agent Dale Cooper returning from the Black Lodge (an extra-dimensional place of evil) to our plane of existence. As we watch Cooper readjust to the world, as Lynchian and weird as his circumstances are, it seems reminiscent difficulties each one of us have in returning to God, to our families, and to our friends after we have gone astray. When we see our gallant hero comically bumble through life under his new identity of Dougie Jones, we see just how easy it is to lose our way and forget that there was ever something noble we strove for. When we see the once commanding Agent Cooper being mindlessly pushed through life by his wife, his boss, and his coworkers, it should make us wonder if we are still the masters of our lives, or if life is dictating our paths for us. When Cooper wistfully reaches out for a police officer’s badge, a symbol of the life he once lived, it should make us calls out: “Wake up Cooper! Wake up! You’re so close.” I imagine that God often cries out for us to do the same.

Of course, Agent Cooper isn’t the only one returning to Twin Peaks. We, the viewers, are as well. However, the world we encounter now is startlingly different from the one we were introduced to over two decades ago. The Twin Peaks we left was filled with captivating raw emotion and teeming with life. Whether it was the confused feelings of angst, lust, and romance of teenage youth, the goofy and quirky charm of the community’s many eccentric characters, or the nightmarish horrors bubbling beneath the surface of the innocent town, the original Twin Peaks always felt alive in a way that was both unsettlingly and accessibly real. The Twin Peaks we return to, though, is one that all too often feels sterile and cold. Sex is used to assert power or, for the banality of obtaining moments of selfish pleasure. Characters no longer stare out contemplatively into the moonlit forests; instead they gaze blankly at their computer screens. And it is silent. So silent. Gone are the lively jazz accompaniments or the rising musical refrains. The sound of Twin Peaks: The Return is mostly a barren stillness that leaves us constantly wondering where the warmth of this plane has gone.

It’s easy to reduce Twin Peaks to a cynical take on nostalgia. That we can’t ever return to the world that was, and oh— by the way, that world never existed in the first place. But like all good art it’s more nuanced and complicated than that. Just because we can’t return to that world, doesn’t mean that we can’t return to ourselves. We may lose our innocence, but that doesn’t mean we have to lose our goodness and be corrupted by the grayness of life’s journey.

This third season of Twin Peaks serves as an 18 hour meditation on the journey of return. It can be baffling and confusing, and truth be told the show often seems to have no internal logic or any semblance of a coherent plot line. But that’s OK. Too often we are looking for clues and signs in an attempt to figure out an order to the world. To treat the High Holiday season the same would be a tragedy. Teshuva should not be reduced to a transaction with God – that with enough prayer and good deeds God will tear up that bad decree and reward us with a good one in the year to come. If nothing else, Twin Peaks reminds us that at this time of year it is most important to give ourselves over to an emotional logic, to take the time to embrace the powerful symbols around us and submit to the feelings they evoke.  That’s how we return. As the Torah teaches, Teshuva is not hidden in the heavens or distantly across the sea. Rather, the power to return is found within each of us. It’s in crisp suits, cherry pie so good it’ll kill you, and a damn fine cup of coffee.

You may be far away.
So listen to the sounds.
You will find your way back.
To a place that is both.
Wonderful and Strange.

Shana Tova.

Photo via Showtime

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Regina Spektor is out with another album, her first in four years, and the indie queen is in fine form with an album up to her usual standards: deeply thoughtful and emotional, a bit experimental, but all the while still playful, quirky, and melodic.

It’s no secret that Spektor’s complex Jewish identity (her family left the Soviet Union when she was a child) informs her work; this is often overt, from songs exploring Biblical themes (like the beautiful “Samson“), to moments like her cover of “Eli, Eli.” This new album is less explicit in its influences, but they’re no less present.

For starters, it’s entitled Remember Us To Life.

If that title sounds familiar to Jewish listeners, it’s because it’s a refrain during the High Holy Days (“Zochreinu L’Chaim” in Hebrew), when we await God’s annual judgment of each individual, and express both hope and fear for the coming year. Similarly, Spektor’s new album, released immediately before the High Holy Days began this year, struggles with ideas of justice, mortality, and the harsh passage of time.

At moments, the album seems to evoke “Unetanneh Tokef,” the part of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur liturgy in which worshippers question who will die in the coming year, and by what methods (Leonard Cohen took this on directly in his song “Who By Fire“).  In “Tornadoland,” for example, Spektor looks death in the face, one’s end as a classic act of God. The song’s refrain is: “Everybody’s time has come/It’s everybody’s moment, except yours.” The holidays that make us face our individual mortality in a huge group often bring up thoughts of not only your demise, but that of everyone around you.

In other cases, Spektor uses this time of year to express not an immediate anxiety, but an ongoing melancholy about the years slipping by in several songs, such as “The Visit,” which could be read from the perspective of an elderly woman looking back on her life.

Every Jew, regardless of their personal belief, has considered on the High Holy Days the unfairness of praying for a favorable fate (i.e. not dying) based on the year’s previous performance, as well as present repentance. If only the wicked or unrepentant died in the ensuing year, the world we live in would look far different. Spektor seems to express this in “The Trapper and the Furrier,” where she explores the world’s injustices, summing up: “What a strange, strange world we live in/Where the good are damned and the wicked forgiven.”

While these songs are largely metaphor,”Sellers of Flowers” is more literally autobiographical, in which Spektor summons a memory of walking with her father through a Soviet marketplace, and notes that the flowers alive despite the cold are still doomed (If not “Who By Fire,” then a sort of “who by ice”).

In a recent conversation with NPR about her new album (and on becoming a mother!), Spektor said:

“To explore Judaism for the first time — it was really hushed in the Soviet Union and I knew I was Jewish, but we didn’t get to celebrate any of the holidays really, or know anything about our culture.”

While this album is universal in its themes, its timing and title are reminiscent of the heritage Spektor reclaimed in the United States. She recently remarked to Reddit how the album’s release date is a happy coincidence, and how yes, its name came to her during a Yom Kippur service.

“I think that people’s culture and heritage are such a great part of who they are,” she wrote, “They of course come through art.”

Remember Us To Life shows she has the capacity to both love and fear the High Holy Days with ambivalence.  As we already knew, she caught on Jewish culture just fine.

Finally, the deluxe edition of this album includes a song titled “New Year.” While the lyrics do reference a midnight countdown and Times Square, signs of a Gregorian event, for an album released in the early fall, what other new year could she be referring to than 5777?

Images via Wikimedia

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What’s an apikores to do on Yom Kippur? If you were an anarchist in London, New York, or Warsaw in the early 20th century, there’s a good chance you would have attended a Yom Kippur ball for the express purpose of eating, drinking, and thumbing your nose at tradition and the religious establishment.

The creators of the new comedy series YidLife Crisis have captured that heretical spirit, added a dash of irony and Yiddish profanity, and served it up for free online—with a side of poutine.

YidLife is the brainchild of Canadian comics Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, who play Leizer and Chaimie, respectively. The web series follows the two thirty-somethings as they contemplate the modern Jewish condition against the backdrop of Montreal’s iconic restaurants. The best part? YidLife’s dialogue is spoken almost entirely in Yiddish.

In “Breaking the Fast,” the first episode of the series, Chaimie tries to persuade Leizer to ditch the whole Yom Kippur thing and indulge in some poutine, which, for the uninitiated, consists of French fries slathered in cheese curds and meat-based gravy—essentially a very delicious, very treyf heart attack in a bowl. Leizer doesn’t need much in the way of convincing, though he makes sure to keep his cheese curds and gravy separate. As Leizer himself puts it (in Yiddish), “If I have to break the fast, fine, but I will not mix milk and meat!”

Watch  “Breaking the Fast” below, and stay tuned for an interview with Batalion and Elman!

Related: Jews, Proselytizing, and Comedy Collide in ‘Jewvangelist’

The post New Web Series Celebrates Poutine, Lactaid, and Jewish Angst—in Yiddish appeared first on Jewcy.

I own hardly any white clothes, a fact that took me by surprise, once again, last Kol Nidre.

This is equal parts vanity and common sense: white is a color that highlights your shape; it emphasizes largeness and form. And in New York City, where I live, every surface is dusted with low-grade filth.

I owned one pair of white jeans that rode too low and never came out clean, no matter how I washed them. I had one sheer jersey dress, an ill-fitting gift that I couldn’t face throwing away. So come Yom Kippur morning last year I trotted them out, cobbling together an outfit. My giant tallit covered the rest. I looked ridiculous, but that was the price I had to pay for my failure to plan, I told myself. Next year, I promised, I’d get my act together in advance. I made a lot of promises that week.

Draping oneself in humble whites on Yom Kippur has been a traditional Jewish custom for millennia. It’s also the custom of the exuberant, neo-traditional-hippie Jewish community that I gravitated towards in adulthood. While I do not own a kittel (the white burial robe that men traditionally wear on their wedding day and Yom Kippur), I like the gravity of donning a garment with the weight of death; the effacement of self-expression when approaching divine judgment. But the notion of purity—so central to the Yom Kippur prayer service—that’s harder for me to swallow.

Last month, I listened to one of my favorite rabbis singing selichot, the penitential prayers offered before the high holy days. With his studied persuasiveness, in a gravely voice that gets me every time, he offered his annual plea: Do something to prepare yourself for the Days of Awe. Don’t let the holidays creep up on you. Do the spiritual work.

I do not believe that the work he envisioned was online dress shopping, but that is exactly what I did as soon as I got home—until 1AM. I was dismayed to find scores of white dresses at full price after Labor Day. (Are no sartorial traditions sacred anymore?) I recalled my ambivalence while white dress shopping for my wedding, the appalling 600 percent markup on anything a bride might consider wearing. Same symbolism: death, rebirth, purity, humility. They are very expensive symbols.

And there were so many ways to sort and filter the results! White, of course. Not short, maybe long or mid-length? The thought floated through my mind that this was perhaps not the type of work that would best serve my most sincere repentance. But imagining myself embodied on Yom Kippur was weirdly helpful. What would it be like to slip this dress over my head or zipper it up? How would the fabric feel on my skin? I rejected outfits if I didn’t think I could move freely in them, or ones that looked itchy. With this time investment, at least I’d get to skip the nagging guilt of failing to prepare.

Except that I found nothing. I filtered until there was nothing left. Everything was too short, or too cleavage-enhancing, or made of some unearthly polyester. These dresses were not designed for a solemn occasion, for beating one’s chest or praying through tears.

I thought about the time a few years back when I tried to do the Great Aleinu—the full prostration—in high heels and a very reasonable skirt. I remembered being totally distracted by my clothes, and how I had obviously not done the work—the unglamorous, practical work—of making sure that I could pray the way I wanted to. My body’s shelter, inside my community’s shelter, was totally ill-suited for the task.

One Yom Kippur when I had just moved west, I attended a Jewish Renewal service in Oakland. One congregant in particular caught my eye. She was standing up, swaying, arms pointing heavenward, and full-throat singing literally the whole time. I don’t know what she was on, but I wanted some. Her flowing caftan housed her corpulence, and I realized that she was free to really be in her body. It was hers—and God’s—to see. I wondered if that was what it was like to be invisible and also really, truly seen and present.

With no acceptable white dresses online, I went to H&M, and was immediately overstimulated by the ritual thud of dance music. But in the clothing-to-junk cycle of seasonal fashion, there were no more white dresses. I had not prepared early enough. Thumbing through racks, I thought about how nobody seemed interested in selling women clothing for solemn occasions; clothing for simply being present in our bodies—as opposed to being gazed upon by judges, male and female. It seemed so obvious. Obviously nobody wants to sell me that.

When I was a kid, we looked really nice on the High Holidays. This was my mother’s rule, and her mother’s. No runs in stockings. Nothing scuffed or stained or ill-fitting from last year. The clothes weren’t white, but they were pristine and considered in advance. It wasn’t spiritual per se, but it was a big deal and the community custom.

I remember visiting that congregation during college. A teenager was wearing a barely-there fuchsia and black party dress with spaghetti straps. She looked miserable. I preferred to imagine that the misery preceded the dress, a spirited teenage protest. She wasn’t allowed to skip services, but she could wear that dress. Or perhaps she felt miserable because she realized she’d committed an etiquette misstep.

I was not offended by her dress or her body, but I wondered how she felt, if she was conscious of others’ eyes on her, or perhaps blissfully unaware. I wondered if her dress helped her get what she wanted out of that service or that day, if it helped her do her work.

I was never much moved by the soul of that suburban temple. But I did notice that we’d all shown up, even those of us who probably would not return for another year. The room contained a kernel of somber optimism, a desire to hold for a moment the belief that with the work, one can find in oneself a fresh heart. That our days can be renewed. God knows, we can’t do it alone.

Back on the internet, I lowered my standards. I found myself considering my shopping filters and realized that they described some odd form of modesty, a concept I hold with profound suspicion. I think of modesty as a construct, a matrix of community norms—people looking at other people, and women worrying about what other people think we look like. There is so little I can do about this. I can maybe control my own feelings, and I can learn better not to project a bunch of baloney onto other people. But my tools to resist unreasonable standards—the same standards that demand me to wear clothes I can’t do my work in—are limited, because I’m a person. I wanted a modest uniform for this day of extreme humility, not to serve someone else’s needs, but to do my work. It’s not exactly that I wanted to be invisible. Rather, I wanted an outfit in which I felt safe revealing the innermost core of myself, beating my chest, shedding my tears, whatever that looks like.

I filtered the results again, optimistically. Mid-length, sure. White or off-white. Natural fibers or natural-looking. The results that popped up were mostly sheer, with peek-holes, or sundresses that would give me a chill. There was nothing left.

The part of me that wanted to look polished, like my mother would strongly recommend, that part of me was not on good terms with the part of me that would like to not be seen, to just buy the damn kittel already. But I couldn’t look good and be unseen at the same time. Wearing the men’s uniform wouldn’t solve this dilemma. It wouldn’t undo the tensions between seeing and being seen, by community, by God, by myself.

So I just bought a dress and accepted its imperfections. It’s not designed to solve my problems. No dresses are. It’s too big. It’s 80/20 cotton/polyester. It was on sale, but not by much. But it has pockets and falls to a comfortable length above my knee. It’s like a boxy house, though it looked more like a stylish and modern house on the model than it does on me. The fabric is thick and spongy, and I’ve been added to the store’s email list, from which there is apparently no unsubscribe. I’m more terrified than ever about my limited capacity to do this work—the real work under the clothes—but this feels like a durable shelter, a start.

(Image by Vanessa P., via Flickr)

The post Say Yes to the Yom Kippur Dress appeared first on Jewcy.

I’m not an observant Jew. Maybe if I’d grown up in Montreal or New York or another Western capital, where WASPs drop “oys” like ice in scotch, and where being openly Jewish is a non-issue—maybe then I’d attend Kol Nidre or give up beer for Passover.

But back in the USSR, I knew next to nothing about Judaism. Religious practice as a whole was marginalized, and if you happened to be Jewish, keeping it to yourself was a survival skill. The sum total of my knowledge of 5,775 years of Judaism was equal to the contents of the cardboard box that landed on top of my dresser every spring. The box contained the spoils from my father’s clandestine run to the city’s old shul, which operated unofficially on some holidays. There, on Passover, a handful of resolute Jews lined up for boxes of matzoh to take home to their families. The matzoh sheets were stacked inside the boxes underneath pink paper napkins. As soon as one of those boxes arrived at our apartment, it was stuffed on top of the dresser to be accessed with caution, away from gentile eyes. To my non-Jewish friends, who sometimes spotted a renegade piece of matzoh lying around, I would nonchalantly offer said piece as a cracker. Frankly, that’s what it was to me anyway: a Jewish cracker.

We fled the USSR in 1988, when I was 16—thousands of Soviet Jewish refugees leaving in a modern-day Exodus. On our way to the States we were stationed in Ladispoli, a sleepy coastal town outside of Rome, where we waited for our U.S. visas. There, on the Mediterranean shore,we learned for the first time about Jews as a people. A Chabad mission was set up in town, headed by Rabbi Hirsch, who worked morning, noon, and night reaching out to every lapsed Soviet Jew. That spring, we sat down to our first seder inside an Etruscan castle. Hundred-foot tables were filled with families like ours, and we finally heard the story behind the matzoh we used to hide under the pink napkins. For many Soviet Jews, that first seder marked the beginning of their return to their lost faith. For me, it marked the beginning of a life-long love affair with jarred gefilte fish.

That year, I also heard the sound of the shofar for the first time. My main memory of that Rosh Hashanah was the rabbi talking about praying to be sealed in the book of life for another year, and the obligation to purge one’s pockets of ‘sins’ into the nearby canal. I had 2,000 liras in my jeans, which I lifted from my dad’s wallet earlier that day with the intent to buy licorice. Despite the Rabbi’s passionate sermon, there would be no purging on my end. I was not giving up my stolen licorice money, High Holidays be damned.

We finally made it to Chicago. No longer scared of being outed as Jews, we were now discovering what it meant to be Jewish. We settled in West Rogers Park, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood filled with synagogues and kosher pizza parlors. But there was so much more than Judaism for a curious a 17-year-old to explore: my daily existence was divided between running to painting classes at the School of the Art Institute in the morning, and running the cash register at Dog On It (a kosher wiener joint) in the afternoon. My classmates introduced me to their friends as “Inna, she’s from Russia.” There was no time to think about being Jewish: I was too busy trying to fit in as a Russian among non-Jewish, non-white, non-conformist art students.

I suppose the physical proximity to all things Jewish precipitated a gradual awakening of my Jewish identity. The Jewish holidays arrived in West Rogers Park with a bang; religious or not, you were greeted with a “Gut Yontif” at every turn. My first Yom Kippur in Chicago was appropriately bleak: my grandmother had just died in a Chicago hospital. She’d been ill for most of her life in the USSR, and arrived in the U.S. too late to benefit from Western medicine. Dog On It was closed for the holidays, so I spent my day shuffling around the neighborhood. I tried thinking about the meaning of Yom Kippur and my babushka being with God, but the concept felt as foreign to me as the rest of America did at the time. There was no God with her or me that day, just the bad weather and the reality of her death and—a combination that felt almost clichéd.

Then I went to Israel. In Ladispoli I’d met some Israelis who had come specifically to encourage the Soviet Jews to immigrate to the Holy Land. Some of those “ambassadors” were particularly good looking, and I decided that Israel was worth a visit. So, during my second year in Chicago, I saved my cashier money, enrolled in an overseas program at the Hebrew University, and flew to the land of milk and honey—and good-looking people.

In Israel, the divide between religious and secular Jews felt bigger than the divide between Jews and Arabs. A Jew like me would get frowned upon for wearing a sleeveless shirt on a bus full of religious Jews, while on her way to visit an Arab friend. Still, a measure of superstition infiltrated secular Israel on Yom Kippur: no one got behind the wheel that day, just in case there was a God, and He decided—God forbid—to punish you for driving. On the eve of Yom Kippur, crowds poured into the streets in every neighborhood and children skateboarded safely on car-free roads. People fasted because, you know, tradition. I fasted too, out of solidarity. God knows I didn’t do it out of faith.

I returned to Chicago a year later only to find that my family now kept kosher and went to shul on Friday nights. There was no picking up the phone or driving on the Sabbath. I didn’t get answers to how it happened—it just did. That’s when I first felt conflicted over competing definitions of Jewishness. I had just spent a year in Israel and felt more Jewish than ever; but I simply didn’t see how giving up the car on Saturdays would make me a better Jew. My parents eventually downgraded their religiousness and found a middle ground, which balanced their yearning for a Jewish identity with their modern-day needs. My brother continued on a religious path. Today he’s an Orthodox father of seven living a few blocks from our first home. He goes to the same shul, keeps kosher, and observes all Jewish holidays. As I write this, he’s probably saying selichot.

Perhaps the closest I came to the Jewish faith was during my return to the former USSR a few years ago. I came to Kiev to work as an advertising executive and went to shul on Yom Kippur to see for myself the state of post-Soviet Jews. They had come a long way from lining up for camouflaged matzoh; there was even jarred Manischewitz gefilte fish at break-fast. On that Yom Kippur, I felt thankful for their freedom and mine, though I still wasn’t sure who I was thanking.

On this Yom Kippur I’ll walk around my city as I often do, remembering past Yom Kippurs. I won’t be asking for forgiveness or praying to be sealed in the book of life. I will be thinking of that early Yom Kippur morning in Jerusalem, 20 years ago. I saw an old lady who seemed lost. She summoned me over and asked, “Is today Yom Kippur?” I said yes. “Oh good,” she said, “I’m glad I forgot to eat.”

I’d like to think God was good to her for another year.

Inna Gertsberg is an advertising writer. She lives in Toronto with her husband, two sons and a cat. You can follow her on Twitter at @twigstr.

(Main image: Yossi Gurvitz via Flickr)

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For Jews born in September and early October, birthdays and High Holidays go hand-in-hand. Checking the calendar to see if Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur falls your birthday becomes par for the course. Birthdays might be spent praying or eating apples dipped in honey—or fasting—and festivities are often postponed.

I’m a September baby myself, but Rosh Hashanah has only fallen on my birthday twice. The first occurrence—and I had to look this up—was in 1988, when I turned two. I can’t say I remember it, but I do remember being wished a happy birthday and Shana Tova the second time, in 1999, on my thirteenth birthday. It was a unique day at synagogue; a blend of birthday wishes and Rosh Hashanah ritual. I spent plenty of time with friends during services (we celebrated my bat mitzvah in October).

Philip Wolgin, who lives in Washington, D.C., will be celebrating his birthday as Rosh Hashanah begins on Wednesday. For him, this is nothing new. “My birthday is September 24, so it almost always falls during the chagim,” he wrote in an email. “I’ve never been the biggest birthday person, particularly since mine is so late in the year, pretty much everyone in my class had already had their birthday by the time mine rolled around. Honestly, I don’t mind it.”

Even though Wolgin’s used to having a High-Holy-Birth-Day, one year really stands out, and it was a big one: “My 21st birthday was erev Yom Kippur, so of course that put a bit of a damper in the plans!”

New Yorker Rebecca Eskreis has also had a birthday fall on Yom Kippur. In fact, she has had several. “I’ve been ‘blessed’ with having my birthday, October 9, fall on at least four or five Yom Kippurs (either erev, or the actual holiday),” she explained in an email.

Having experienced a birthday on both “days”of Yom Kippur (Jewish holidays run from sundown to sundown, spanning two days on the calendar), Eskreis, who lives in New York, has come down in favor of a birthday on the day of Yom Kippur, as opposed to the eve. “It’s actually better because after fasting the whole day you can really pig out and have lots of cake without feeling guilty!” she wrote.

While adulthood has led Eskreis to an appreciation of the birthday cake/break-fast correlation, as a kid, she used to view the day differently: “It meant I also got to have the day off from school,” she explained. It’s fair to say there are adults out there who approach the day with similar levels of excitement, even if it’s not their birthday.

A birthday on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur can also mean a chance to spend time with family and friends. Last year, Lindsey Schnitt was delighted when Rosh Hashanah fell unusually early, in the first week of September, coinciding with her birthday. “For me, I am such a big birthday person, but I love being with my family, and I also love this time of year being at Temple,” she said.

“I think I went into services being excited that it was my birthday, not really making the day about me, but it was very special to be alongside people who have known me my entire life,” she explained.

Not everyone likes sharing a birthday with the High Holidays. Tiffany Nassimi’s birthday falls during Rosh Hashanah this year. “You can never celebrate on your birthday,” she wrote in a Facebook message. As for the social media perks of a birthday, “no one ever ends up writing on your [Facebook] wall.” She pointed out that birthday or no birthday, the timing of the High Holidays has always been awkward, given that they fall at the very beginning of the school year. This year, her friends want to take her out after the holiday, “but we’ll see.”

In the end, how you feel about your birthday falling on a High Holiday is pretty much moot point—it’s part of the reality of being a fall baby. Eskreis summed up the experience well: “I don’t look forward to having my birthday fall on [a holiday], but I’ve also learned to make the best of it.” This year at least, she has a reprieve from a Yom Kippur birthday.

As for me: I’m looking forward to my next Rosh Hashanah birthday, but I just checked the calendar and I’ll have to wait until 2018. Until then, honey birthday cake for the other September babies.

(Image: Shutterstock)

The post Happy High-Holy-Birth-Day! appeared first on Jewcy.

If you watched QVC on Saturday, you’d have seen fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi selling his products as usual on Isaac Mizrahi Live. The problem is that last Saturday was Yom Kippur and Mizrahi’s appearance on the show, and on Twitter, upset many in the Jewish community, seeing as Mizrahi comes from an observant Jewish family. There are even talks of boycotts.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach had a few words on the matter, the New York Daily News reports:

“It seems now G-d isn’t going to be one of his customers, because it is a pretty big account to lose,” Boteach told us. “Modern people have to learn to put values before money, and if Sandy Koufax could give up the World Series for Yom Kippur, then Isaac Mizrahi could give up a few hours of hawking some of his wares.”

We like your logic, Boteach.

(Photo from Isaac Mizrahi/Facebook)

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