My Rosh Hashanah 5776

Last year.

[I’m writing this post in response to one of my resolutions, below. Yeah, I’m usually anti-resolution, but strange times call for strange measures, and since this secular year’s theme is still “liberation” and I am still working on it, here goes.]

So, first, a dirty little secret. (The likelihood that you will “get” the detail level of this is low if you’re not an initiate into things Jewish, but here it is, for the sake of full disclosure.)

The reason I haven’t been saying as much about the synagogue this year is that it turned into a problem last fall. The reason is my allergic reaction to someone who moved to the neighborhood, a rabbi who’s the chaplain at the local military base, and who’s become sort of the co-rabbi. The original rabbi, whom I’m a big fan of, is an introvert, but definitely a Chasid, which makes for an interesting combination (how does the leader of a group dedicated to mysticism spread his message if he’s essentially retiring? But I respect him more because he is so unpushy and so emotional in non-demonstrative ways). The new guy is a mitnaged Litvak. I suppose that on points, I should identify more with a Litvak than a Chasid, but I get more than enough intellectualism on a day to day basis and what I’m looking for is that emotional connection with the divine I’ve found in Chasidism.

(Hineni, the prayer that opens the Musaf for Rosh Hashanah II. In my synagogue you would hear it without the piano. English text here.)

So last fall, when I got back, I started going to shul again, feeling at first like I was really at home, but quickly I realized that the summer away had been decisive. While I was gone, the nusach had changed from the tuneful exuberance of the Chasidic service to the mumbling Ashkenazic rush (why spend a lot of time singing at prayer if the main thing you’re supposed to get from the service is the Talmud lesson?). Even more than that, the new rabbi seemed to be hostile to prayer, often talking loudly over the Chasidic rabbi while he was leading services. During the Torah service itself, instead of leaving the reading (which is split up into 7 segments, or aliyot) uninterrupted, he would offer his thoughts on each segment as it was finished. Often these were simply thoughts off the cuff, and not Talmudic at all; just shtuss (a little like his homily today about the Akedah, which was mostly about the significance of beards in traditional Korean culture — I never caught the connection to Abraham’s aborted plan to sacrifice Isaac). Because Litvaks are Ashkenazim, their prayer service is longer, and he insisted on all of his required prayers being inserted into the Chasidic liturgy at the appropriate places — but then never participated in prayer. (The particular thing that annoyed me was Anim Z’mirot, in case you’re wondering, which Chasidim don’t say on Shabbat. I love the song and it would be fine with me to add it, but it’s murder trying to sing it while someone is shouting some mishegoss over you).

Now, usually, if there’s a man I don’t like in shul, it’s easy to avoid him (one of the few benefits to the rigid gender arrangements of Chasidism). Women sit on one side of an opaque barrier and men sit on the other, which makes it much easier to tune out. A lot of people who give a d’var Torah don’t even bother to speak so that they can be seen on the women’s side, so if you want to pay attention, you have to work hard at it. This fellow, however, is it pains for his lessons to be audible on the women’s side, so he poises his lectern at the head of the mechitzah and makes sure that we have to pay attention. I’ve never met an orthodox man who’s so interested in what’s happening on our side of the screen. He’s constantly over on our side, telling his wife what page we’re on, asking what’s up with his daughters (he has a large family).

An important mitzvah (commandment) for Rosh Hashanah is listening to the blasts of the shofar. This is actually a lot like it sounded at my shul. Listening to this always leaves me feeling a little odd. Maybe it should. Our rabbi is really into the mystical meaning of it, though.

One Shabbat last fall, Chol HaMoed Sukkoth, I’d had a stressful week of work and I needed that connection to the divine. I went to shul, but the Litvak prevented anything from happening in terms of flow. First, the mumbled Ashkenazic Shacharit — and once he finished his part of it, he retired to the rear of the shul to talk with a friend, so that I heard the conversation more than the prayers. A Torah service with constant interruptions (somehow he managed to connected Hitler to the parashah, more than once), with him on our side of the mechitzah at least five times. At one point he said, to me, Are you all right? Do you have a headache? I felt like every time there was a chance of me connecting, this man personally interfered to prevent it from happening. Because it was Chol HaMoed, we needed to say Hallel (which was, at least, the very lusty Chasidic Hallel), but by that point the previous stuff had really tried my patience, and I was looking for the service to end when the Litvak rabbi announced that because it Ashkenazi custom, we would now have to read Koheleth in its entirety. Foreseeing another situation in which he would force others to fulfill his minhag but sabotage my kavvanah, I decided to go.

And the guy has a daughter who’s a bit Asberger-y and immature as well and as I left, she trumpeted across the whole shul, Why are you going now?

Something in me snapped. I drove straight to the Best Bar on the Planet and ordered and drank five 10 oz. goblets of St. Bernardus Abt 12 from the tap. The bartender even asked me if I was okay. At 10.5%, I had to stay there quite a while to be able to drive home after that.

I did not like that feeling — that compulsion — it is the only time in my life I have ever felt that if I didn’t have a drink right that second I might commit homicide. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about what happened on that day, what triggered my reaction, and whether there is anything I can do about it. As near as I can put it: when I go to pray there, I am expecting to have that specific, almost mystical experience of prayer. I open up all my shields and try to connect with the divine. But it’s like that “inside” that I open up is a piece of sticky tape and when that fellow starts to speak and pray, it’s like someone heaping up dust and dirt onto the sticky tape in the place where G-d should be.

Sigh.

Normally in a situation like that, a woman would appeal to her husband — but I’m not married and as a woman, I’m not part of the minyan. I have my history of difficulties with the gendered nature of this kind of worship (and its consequences for women in particular), but my reaction in this situation left me completely without a voice. Usually, I’d have resorted to Pesky to make my feelings known — but the other piece that had developed over the summer was that Pesky jr. had become the Litvak rabbi’s best friend. I discussed it with him once but it was clear that that wasn’t going to be a mechanism for me to express my dissent.

So, I’ve been avoiding shul when I know from gossip that he’s going to be there. Which is most of the time.

I want to stress that this is my fault: I am responsible for my feelings and when I am exposed to this man who pushes every button I have, I have not been able to control buttons or my feelings. Which means I have to stay away. He’s a lot more important to this congregation than I will ever be, not least to the Chasidic rabbi, who didn’t get much help with anything religious until this man showed up.

But the avoidance has been getting on my nerves. So I decided I was going for the holidays, that I was going to wear a huge hoodie and keep it over my head while I was praying, and sit in the most remote possible corner. The point was going to be doing the mitvot for the holiday, hearing the readings and whatever songs people sang, and reminding myself of the divine and the possibility of the experience of flow, and to think my own thoughts otherwise. Not to try to connect again, per se, but just to remind myself of the potential that was there.

Which turned out to be okay until his wife said to me, today, you’ve hardly been here the whole year, and you really feel it when you’re praying, when you’re not here, we don’t feel it as much, we miss you.

Sigh again.

But in any case, I had a lot of time to think and I have three conclusions which I am operationalizing as resolutions (for a change):

1. I need to address head-on my self-esteem issues. They are not becoming smaller, and indeed they are starting to harm me in practical ways, including in terms of my writing.
2. I need to recharge my flow experiences, even if they are not going to be in that synagogue.
3. I need to return to being emotionally open and honest here — in the place where I have generated a lot of flow up until last fall. I need to recapture the feeling of being able to say most of what I was feeling from the current, walled off situation in which I suppress most of what I feel and what does come out not only reflects unhappiness but also often makes me unhappy.
4. It’s clear that I do not feel the need to overeat and overdrink when I do not feel myself overstressed. So I have to work harder at cutting off the mechanisms for stress — which means not so much leaving stressful situations as learning not to allow myself to experience stress in them.

Better flow will lead to better balance and the abandonment of stewing in private should lead to a return to creativity.

So. I’m going to try again. Let’s see what happens.

שנה טובה ומתוקה!‎

And here’s to liberation!

~ by Servetus on September 16, 2015.