and supported by the Forward and then expanded considerably for this book. I promised readers I’d dissect and digest every single Jewish holiday, no matter how obscure, promising to write before and after each major one—to share my preparation first, my experience afterwards. (For the less famous holidays, one chapter seemed sufficient.) I aimed to climb the scaffolding of a more rigorous Jewish life without knowing the outcome.
Yes, I could predict all the roadblocks:
1. Judaism’s schedule is a bear. I committed to writing about eighteen holidays because when I started counting them, I came up with between eighteen and twenty, depending on how one tallies the major and minor festivals and fasts. I leaned toward a clean eighteen since it’s a significant Jewish number: every Hebrew letter has a numerical value and the word chai (life) adds up to eighteen. Chai also means “raw” or “uncooked,” an apt adjective since I considered myself an unbaked Jew.
2. The Sabbath is considered the most important holiday of all, but I thought I’d lose my audience if I wrote about all fifty-two. I wrote about two, without counting them in the total eighteen.
3. I like eating. The idea of graduating from one difficult fast (Yom Kippur) to six didn’t electrify me.
4. Synagogue services are typically long, and, let’s be frank, not always riveting. I decided to research and visit different temples and independent prayer groups across denominations, which would mean significant pew time.
5. My kids and husband didn’t sign on for this. Now, not only did they have to participate (at least a little), but they’d have to hear about it (a lot). They said that they were game, but I wasn’t so sure. I apologized in advance because I’d be absent at odd times (one penitential service, Selichot, began at midnight; on Shavuot [the giving of the Torah], people study all night till sunrise).
6. I apologized to my Central clergy because I’d be peripatetic for a year. I apologized to my husband because I’d be running off to spend hours without him, sitting in other shuls on the High Holy Days when we normally sit side by side.
7. I realized my method might appear quirky or hypocritical: I would be observing Jewish holidays without being observant, eating ritual foods without keeping kosher, designing a personal seminary without getting a degree. This would be an expedition, not a conversion. I was clear, but others might not be.
8. I worried that I’d be perceived by the Orthodox as a tourist or trespasser in what adds up to their way of life. Even though, even in Orthodoxy, there is no one way. I’ve met observant Jews who don’t keep every fast, who parse kosher rules very personally, who discard one rite but wouldn’t skip another. Judaism has become highly customized, and the labels of Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox are all moving targets.
9. My Hebrew is pathetic. I first learned the language in college (taught by a dynamic professor who used the Israeli Top-40 pop countdown to drill vocabulary), then promptly forgot everything I’d mastered because I stopped using it, then relearned enough to chant my Torah portion, then recently went on Craigslist to find a tutor and found Joel Goldman, a very sage, very Orthodox instructor who looks anxious for the Jewish future every time I read aloud.
10. Okay, The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs was a brilliant book. I went to high school with A.J., I know A.J., A.J. is a friend of mine. But he and I agreed that my voyage would be different—A.J. followed the Bible’s scriptures, I’d be the holiday pilgrim. He gave me his blessing. And he kindly wrote the Foreword to this book. So everyone can stop bringing up A.J. already.
I noted the hurdles and then pressed ahead:
I printed out a Jewish calendar and taped it to my fridge.
I ordered a shofar (ram’s horn) on Amazon.com. (FYI, they can be malodorous.)
I picked out white clothes for Yom Kippur. (We’re supposed to dress in the white of our burial shroud.)
I polished my candlesticks and found a recipe for hamantaschen (the Purim pastry).
I researched a place to go for Selichot (penitence before the High Holy Days—who knew we atone before we atone?) and a place to observe Yom HaShoah (Holocaust remembrance). I was drawn to places where a holiday would be highlighted; not all synagogues program every holiday.
“Most American Jews don’t see identity as an enterprise of labor, a matter of toil,” Wieseltier told me. “So in America now it is possible to be a Jew with a Jewish identity that one can defend, and that gives one pleasure—and for that identity to have painfully little Jewish substance.” I wanted my Jewish identity to have Jewish substance. I wanted more “toil.” Wieseltier’s prescription for Jewish meaning—a resonance I craved—was to “get into the fight.” It was time.
First stop: Rosh Hashanah.
Rabbi Michael Strassfeld
ON ROSH HASHANAH
Rosh Hashanah is about possibilities and births, new beginnings. In some ways that’s the potential of cyclical time. You think you’re just a year older, but you can start again.
Jonathan Blake
ON ROSH HASHANAH
It’s like you’re on cruise control, mindlessly going down the highway, when suddenly you’re confronted with lights and sirens and you have to think fast and take control of the pedals or you’re going to end up part of the emergency situation up ahead.
That’s Rosh Hashanah to me: Yes, it’s a sweet time, a time for apples and honey, but even more it’s alarm-clock time: the piercing wail of the shofar that shakes us out of the stupor of the daily routine. We understandably crave comfort and convenience: the chaos of the world around us practically demands that we insulate ourselves with regimen and regularity. Rosh Hashanah bolts us awake. It says: “Life doesn’t have to be like this.” You can change. Your hurting relationships can be better. Your unfounded anxieties and petty fixations need not strangle you forever in their grip. Your accumulated, tough scar tissue need not keep you from feeling. Your life holds possibilities—beautiful opportunities—some of which you’ve falsely assumed out of your reach, some of which you haven’t even dared to dream up. That’s Rosh Hashanah to me, a blast of the possible.
9. 22. 14
THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL from the Israeli company that shipped my shofar (the trumpet made from a ram’s horn, blasted during the Jewish New Year) says the blowing technique can be learned by “filling your mouth with water. You then make a small opening at the right side of your mouth, and blow out the water with a strong pressure. You must practice this again and again until you can blow the water about four feet away.”
Rosh Hashanah (literally “head of the year”)
