Yom Kippur? I barely know her

Alternatively: I once again attempt organized religion, with predictably mixed results.

I arrived in Giffnock, the Jewish part of Glasgow (if such a thing exists), late Sunday afternoon. My host, Micheline, had sent me the flat information in Hebrew, and I lacked the confidence to tell her I didn’t know any Hebrew so I had the internet translate her instructions.

I arrived the same day as her other tenant, Ilan, a 25 year old Orthodox Jew from Canada who had spent his preceding weeks in Israel. Yom Kippur would begin the same evening, and for weeks I had enjoyed the thought of our odd little trio fasting together. Really I had imagined it as a play.

After explaining to Ilan, as I had to Micheline, that I was here to learn more about Judaism and observe the holiday together, he was like, great, we have about three hours to eat as much as humanly possible before we have no food or water for 25 hours and all the Shabbat rules kick in. I cooked a big shakshuka for us and overdid the paprika and cumin, but remembering a trick from my mom, added in a little sugar for balance. While cooking I realized that I could be anywhere in the world, and if I had access to a kitchen where I could make food, even just for myself, I would be pretty happy.

As we shoveled egg and tomato into our mouths I began asking Ilan about Judaism. He pointed out that I had a very Christian vocabulary for talking about religion – I asked if he had "grown up in the faith" and whether there was a "confessional" aspect to Yom Kippur.

Ilan is, by far, the most religious person I’ve ever had a sustained conversation with – although he would correct me on this; he would say observant, not religious. Our conversation returns to this distinction again and again; it is the hardest part for me to understand, that for him there is an axis of belief and an axis of behavior, and these two things are only tenuously connected.

When Ilan kept Shabbat in undergrad, his dorm room opened to a hallway with automatic sensor lights, so he would not leave his room for the entire day to avoid triggering them. And when he later lived with friends in a flat, if they were watching TV on a Friday night, he would go to his room and put pillows over his ears to block out the sound. He lost 20 pounds in his first three weeks in Scotland because he couldn't find anything sufficiently kosher. Eventually he gave up and started eating non-kosher peanut butter. He sees this as a failure.

He doesn’t like that I use the word “axis.” To him observance is binary. There's no gradient for being observant, no points system, no "shopping cart" Judaism, as he called it--- either you follow all the mitzvot or you don't.

Before we leave for shul Ilan tells Alexa to play Taylor Swift and we turn on all the bathroom and living room lights. I ask if what I’m wearing is okay: leggings, a shelter staff sweatshirt. Predictably, it isn’t okay. Do you have something that isn’t leggings, Ilan asks, looking pained.

There’s a prohibition against carrying things within city limits on Shabbat. I offer to carry the apartment keys to shul for him, but there is a rule, he says, that prevents this --- if another Jew breaks Shabbat for him, he has broken it for himself. I don’t remember the name of the rule, and I wasn’t sure, until he said that, whether he saw me as a Jew. We take the keys anyway because the apartment door locks automatically.

…

In the last few years this shul has moved from conservative to conservative-Orthodox. We’re late, arriving mid sermon. The rabbi has a strong Brooklyn accent. I sit in the second to last row (pew?) in the glass box for women at the back. Earlier I had put on a knee-length dress over the offending leggings and added a sweater, all in muted colors ("You look so Jewish," Ilan had said, seeming amused.) Most of the women in the box are septuagenarians wearing fabulous hats (“The temple population is aging,” someone tells me later), except for one girl my age, who is immaculately made-up and dressed in a smart skirtsuit. Apparently looking Jewish and modest does not have to mean looking dowdy. I try to smooth my sweater. When I sit down the skirtsuit girl is davening with her eyes closed, swaying more dramatically than the people around her, and I hate her immediately and viscerally for performing a profound experience of religion.

I sit by a very chatty older woman, Ruth. When the Hebrew starts she whispers, "I just stand when other people stand and say amen when they say amen." She tells me about her work as a hotel concierge and asks me about America; we are eventually shushed and given a withering stare by the skirtsuit girl. My hatred, I decide, is vindicated.  

There are half-moon shaped stained glass windows all around the space, but the blues have an uncanny florescent quality, like a too-bright phone screen at night. I realize the “windows” have been mounted onto solid wall and backlit; no natural light is coming in.

The service lasts for what feels like three hours, and there is so much standing and sitting that I get a little lightheaded. When we do all the repenting (I repent for gossiping, I repent for vice, I repent for stealing, etc), Ruth whispers "I should have done some of this stuff, I would have had a fun year." My thoughts exactly, Ruth. I spend some time reflecting on atonement and conclude that I have never done anything wrong in my life. Kidding, kind of. I decide I could probably talk less about other people. The rabbi says: "It's not about the sin; it's about the opportunity for change." It’s the first thing he’s said that resonates.

When services (finally) end, I leave with Ilan – exiting gender-segregated doors, of course. It’s pouring. And we can’t press any pedestrian crossing buttons because of the Shabbat electricity issue. We’re soaked through our coats in minutes. Water trickles into my ears, under my shirt.

This is a stupid tradition in a stupid religion, I think. Rituals inculcate meaning and the people who came before you have been doing this for thousands of years, blah blah blah. Nobody in Egypt was avoiding pedestrian crosswalk buttons. No one is honored by us standing in the rain, hoping a goy will come by. This kind of anachronistic pedantry is why young people leave this synagogue and don’t come back. This is not about atonement or transcending physical discomfort; it’s just about being uncomfortable, following rules as penance, clinging to arbitrary scraps of suffering for their illusory religious significance. I don’t believe in this.

I keep these thoughts to myself. The moon is a waxing gibbous, glowing yellow through the rain. I ask Ilan whether it’s kosher for him to shove me and for me to trip and fall into the button, something about the principle of intervening actors. Eventually there’s a pause in traffic and we run across the street.

I will admit, I cheated twice that night -- first I had some water before I went to sleep, straight from the bathroom faucet, and second I read on my phone in bed. This is my first Yom Kippur, baby steps, just don’t mess up again, I thought, knowing these were rationalizations for my inability to take any of this seriously. I knew Ilan wasn’t cheating. This is where belief meets behavior, I thought, what you do when no one is watching. Even now I feel no guilt about my rule breaks; it remains unclear to me why I was doing any of this, other than some misguided sense of solidarity, and because I thought I could write about it later.

…

I do not have a "Shabbos alarm" (an alarm that turns itself off automatically) so Ilan knocks on my door to wake me up and I zoom back to shul. I cheat a third time, using Google maps to get there. This seems fair, I reason, as it would have been net worse for my Judaism if I couldn’t find the shul at all.

I’m volunteering with Sydney, the youth coordinator who connected me with Micheline. We’re running the nursery school programming for Yom Kippur, including a reenactment of the story of Jonah and the whale. It occurs to me that I have no idea what happens in that story before or after Jonah gets swallowed– like one of those movies you see as a child and think you can recall, but when you apply mental pressure the plot shatters into discrete, unsequenced images.

There are a few other volunteers -- all women, of course -- including two teenagers named something like Sienna and Heather and a woman a little older than I am who usually attends the reform synagogue. She and I share something of a "these Orthodox folks don’t like women too much" conversation in euphemisms, and she gives me recommendations for where to get my ears pierced in Glasgow. With her is another woman of indeterminate age, who asks me why my skin is so dark. This is just my skin, I say. I had thought that in a space like this I would finally be ethnically unambiguous. In retrospect she was probably trying to ask if I’m Sephardi, which I’m not.

Working with the nursery children (1-4 year olds) I feel primarily the strange solitude of my age – the teenagers have each other, and relate to the children as older siblings, or just bigger kids. The other women are mothers or old enough to act like mothers. I circle aimlessly around the clumps of children, unsure what to do with my hands, sort of hoping a child will fall down near enough to me that I can have purpose in righting it.

For the first half hour all the children simply run around in Brownian motion, yelling in high-pitched Glaswegian accents. At least one kid is crying at all times. One of the mothers is particularly loud and harsh in her disciplining, and it makes me uncomfortable --- I really hate when parents punish their children in a severe, public way, probably because my own parents were so gentle. One of the girls comes up to me and tells me that I look familiar. From what? I ask. She shakes her head, bites her lower lip, and walks away.

We organize a game in which the kids have to try to make one another smile (how this is related to Yom Kippur, a notoriously somber holiday, is beyond me) but none of the kids can make any of the other kids smile so they all get frustrated and start crying. We transition away from this into a discussion group about the Jonah story ("Why didn't Jonah go to nuhnuhnuh?" one of the more sentient children asks.)

The children are told very vigorously to do what god says to do. I am surprised and put off by how didactic the “discussion” becomes; I shouldn’t be, this is an Orthodox synagogue. One of the little boys starts asking the right questions. He’s like why, what's the point. This questioning – perhaps because it seems more about being disruptive than being existential – is not met with encouragement from the mothers. I want to take him aside and affirm his radical, skeptical spirit, but decide that such a move would be a major violation of the Prime Directive.

After the games and the story and the discussion, all the kids get lunch, and the pretzel sticks in their sticky hands make me cramp with hunger, so I figure I can leave. I chat with a few people on the way out. They ask where I’m staying. When I say Giffnock, a man says, "Ah, so you're in the Jewish ghetto."

…

Back in the women's box (to get there I had to walk all the way around the outside of the shul building, as the other entrance was the men's; I wondered not for the first time why I was willingly capitulating to this, something I might judge other women for; was I here as a Jew or as a tourist, and would that make a difference) I sit behind Ruth again. I think about many things, like what I would cook for dinner when I could eat again, and how the sound of so many voices chanting in Hebrew reminds me of a discordant middle school orchestra warm-up. Ben Lerner, I think, all sound at once, promising the very possibility of sound. I don’t feel the thirst anymore, just the hunger. This is an endurance exercise, how long can I stay in this room before I can’t. I pull out a book (a pocket history of Scotland) and read from the beginning up to the Viking invasions. The old women in front of me talk about their children; I study their hats. I realize I have no way of monitoring the passage of time, in this room with glass windows that aren’t windows, aside from pathetic attempts to read other people’s analog watches. I want a watch, I want to write down a note to get a watch, but there’s no writing on Yom Kippur, that’s the hardest part. I can barely think without writing things down anymore. All the while we keep sitting and standing and sitting and standing. No one has their clearest reflections when they’re this hungry. Everyone around me at times seems peculiarly three dimensional, like chess pieces, until I feel like I’m watching them on a screen. My reflection in one of the ersatz windows gets fainter and fainter, like I’m watching myself dissolve.

…

I leave shul on what is supposed to be a break, and head back to the apartment. (An automatic light flickers on in the hallway, cheat number 4, although I would later question Ilan about the importance of intent.) He is super jetlagged, and to avoid another five hours of thinking only about food, we play a long game of scrabble and then analyze the contents of Micheline’s apartment – she has giant Kleenex boxes, for example, truly the biggest I’ve ever seen. I go to my room and lie in bed with my eyes open, watching the shadows cast by tree branches get darker on my wall.

At around 7:30 pm an alarm sounds, and repeats. Ilan had accidentally set it for half an hour too early. We can’t turn it off. Fortunately it’s a sweet, soft little melody, unobtrusive even as it continues relentlessly. We stand in the kitchen in the dark, staring at the oven clock, waiting for it to be 8:01 pm. This waiting in darkness is an experience I realize Ilan has probably had countless times in his life, and I feel a vicarious nostalgia. It’s so easy to miss pain when it’s familiar; I think of how much I miss the miserable all-day drives to Pennsylvania we did when I was little, visiting my grandmother.

At 8:01 pm we cheer, Ilan high-fives me, turns on the light, turns off the alarm, and starts playing Taylor Swift again.

I drink two mugs full of water in quick succession and then eat a piece of bread with avocado, then Ilan hands me the heel of the bread, which I eat with peanut butter and honey ("Very Rosh Hashanah of you," he says.) He eats cold pesto pasta and and reminisces about his Yom Kippur fast break last year, when he cut an entire loaf of bread horizontally, filled it with cheese, and then ate it as a sandwich. The subsequent minutes we spend eating companionably as Alexa plays Cruel Summer feel more spiritual than the preceding 25 hours of fasting.

We’re both still hungry so we make a trip to the grocery store next door, and purchase some food for the rest of the evening and the next few days, including Neos, a British Oreo knock-off that has a diameter about twice as big as a typical Oreo.

I roast and eat two pans of broccoli, plus a few Neos. Then we watch Gilmore Girls on the couch until I leave to go to sleep. So passed my first Yom Kippur.

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