Written the morning of October 2, Yom Kippur, 2006.
A Yom Kippur Prayer
The bars on the synagogue windows are white. Ella wraps her hands around them making little fists, and brings her face close. She wants the light to fall on her face, so her husband, reciting prayers inside, can spot her if he lifts his eyes.
It is Yom Kippur in Herzilya, Israel, and the women are beginning to gather outside the small, almost make-shift synagogue in Gordon. They have walked here, each from their own home, flanked by a warm breeze and hundreds of ecstatic children on bicycles. This is the holiday all children in Israel wait for. With no cars on the streets, parents open their doors and the young pour out, roaming freely in pigtail gangs. Tonight, and until the shofar blows tomorrow at 6p.m., these children will rule the streets.
Secular, religious, confused or conflicted, no one drives their cars in Israel during Yom Kippur. Occasionally, but very occasionally, you’ll walk past an open window or Israel’s strange tilted shades, from which the heartless blue light of a television shines, accompanied by disembodied voices that have no place in this stretch of time in Israel. No place on this day.
But the streets are quiet. Not dead quiet. Alive quiet. You’d feel the need to talk in whispers if not for the streams of children, some not more than three-years old, some in their teens, speeding back and forth on their three-wheelers, two wheelers, roller blades, roller skates. The excitement of their liberation brings the night to life. And their entitlement to these streets, which they will carry with them their whole lives, can maybe, just maybe, be traced pack in part to the Yom Kippurs of their youth.
Pressed up against the white bars of the synagogue, Ella watches two solemn men slowly remove the holy scrolls of the torah from an old and lop-sided wooden cupboard. The chanting inside intensifies in volume and in depth. These scrolls are like a volume dial, she thinks, and as they move around the room the dial spins outwards, but also inwards, calling out words from the caves in men’s hearts which they have prepared for God, hoping He will enter, but that remain empty until then.
Ella searches her conscience, looking for her own prayer. It is Yom Kippur, and like all people she has much to ask forgiveness for. She searches, wanting to find the words that will bring meaning to her fast.
Etai, her husband, looks up. He sees her, he smiles, she makes a funny face, and he smiles more. She pretends she is trying to tear apart the bars with her little fists, and he laughs. The Torah passes him, and he lifts his talit from his shoulder, kisses it, and presses his kiss against the Torah. He looks at Ella again. She is proud of him. Proud of his little kiss of the Torah, of his knowledge and love of Jewish traditions, and for repeating the traditions of her grandfathers and their ancestors. He is carrying the flame in there, she thinks.
And me, she wonders. What am I doing?
Behind her the women are gathering. They come later than the men because they have no intention of praying. This synagogue is small, and there are only three rows of seats in the woman’s section, assembled in the back and separated from the men by a billowing white curtain.
The area reserved for women had been occupied hours earlier by the wives and daughters of the most religious men in the temple, who now huddle around the rabbi’s pulpit. There is a little standing room also, but how much more commitment it would be for the women outside to stand out the prayers; to watch the billowing cloth, and to read, or half-read, to feel interested, or half-interested, to experience a transformation, or only the dull sense of duty.
So the women gather outside. They have raised their families and loved their husbands. They have cooked every Pesach, Passover, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur meal for the last 30 years. They have knit their family together over bread and memories every Friday night for Shabbat (and the family has come because the food is good and the company is their blood). These women have listened to their sons’ and daughters’ stories from the military, and to their husband’s troubles at work, and the aches and pains of his body. They have tried to help their own brothers and sisters as they’ve struggle with money and the hardships of their own children. They’ve flown to New York and Australia to visit children who left home and made new ones, and they’ve fought back tears at airports as these children have promised they would come home, they would come home, they would come home soon.
And now it is Yom Kippur, and they have gathered outside the synagogue. Going inside to pray feels like too much. Maybe tomorrow night, before the blowing of the shofar. But tonight, they know exactly who they are, and the men inside are happy to know they wait for them in the courtyard.
The women gather outside. They collect into groups, and they gossip. They drag plastic chairs towards the most familiar faces, women whose children went to kindergarten with their own children, whose husbands work together, whose cousins work together. And with so much life in common, they gossip.
The children who have come with their mothers sit on the side and make fun of their parents. They youngest don’t see the fun in sitting at all, and collect into mini-gangs and chase each other around the courtyard, sometimes taunting each other, sometimes holding hands, releasing gleeful yelps and long drawn-out giggles.
These children know it is Yom Kippur, but they do not yet know the need to ask for forgiveness. They are forgiven each day for their wonderful, innocent little sins. And they are blessed also with the ability to forgive themselves.
Ella loosens her little fists, eases her grip on those white metal bars, and moves her head back into the shadows. The women have gathered behind her. The children run past her and around her feet. The men inside have stopped chanting and are praying quietly, rocking gently to and fro.
Ella turns to the women now filling the courtyard. Ruti, Etai’s mother is there. She smiles at Ella with easy kindness. She knows Ella loves her son.
Ella walks over to Ruti and takes a seat between her and a girl who passed through Ruti’s kindergarten 16-years ago. Ella’s Hebrew is improving, so here and there she can understand, here and there she can join in.
The women have gathered around her. She is one of them now. But what a long road it will be, she feels, before she has earned her sense of place among them; before she can share their peace of knowing that her family is grown and strong, that her marriage has survived because the right sacrifices were made, that the food of her kitchen was good, and that thousands of miles away her sons scold their own wives for not being enough like their mothers.
The women are gathering inside her now. Their voices all hushed like muffled heart beats, echoes against her ribs and stomach and throat, against the inside of her skin. Their fingers move inside her, like they have moved over endless bed sheets and washing lines, and dried perfect red tomatoes, and sliced cucumbers and onions, and poured vinegar over cabbage, and fried eggplant on the balcony. Their fingers move like they have moved over challa on Fridays, and though their children’s hair, and like they have moved when wiping away tears, and applying bandaids, and taking pain away by telling stories.
The women’s fingers move inside her, and turn their palms upwards with unspoken questions. Can you do what we have done? they ask. Can you make your heart so selfless as to be what we have been? Will you care for our sons as we have cared for our husbands? Will your sons love you as our sons love us?
The women have gathered inside her now. Ella’s eyes close, 30-years of moving fingers gathered in her heart. A prayer begins to form on her lips.
From the courtyard outside the synagogue in Herzilya, she turns her closed eyes to the sky, and asks forgiveness for all she knows she will never be.
A Yom Kippur Prayer
The bars on the synagogue windows are white. Ella wraps her hands around them making little fists, and brings her face close. She wants the light to fall on her face, so her husband, reciting prayers inside, can spot her if he lifts his eyes.
It is Yom Kippur in Herzilya, Israel, and the women are beginning to gather outside the small, almost make-shift synagogue in Gordon. They have walked here, each from their own home, flanked by a warm breeze and hundreds of ecstatic children on bicycles. This is the holiday all children in Israel wait for. With no cars on the streets, parents open their doors and the young pour out, roaming freely in pigtail gangs. Tonight, and until the shofar blows tomorrow at 6p.m., these children will rule the streets.
Secular, religious, confused or conflicted, no one drives their cars in Israel during Yom Kippur. Occasionally, but very occasionally, you’ll walk past an open window or Israel’s strange tilted shades, from which the heartless blue light of a television shines, accompanied by disembodied voices that have no place in this stretch of time in Israel. No place on this day.
But the streets are quiet. Not dead quiet. Alive quiet. You’d feel the need to talk in whispers if not for the streams of children, some not more than three-years old, some in their teens, speeding back and forth on their three-wheelers, two wheelers, roller blades, roller skates. The excitement of their liberation brings the night to life. And their entitlement to these streets, which they will carry with them their whole lives, can maybe, just maybe, be traced pack in part to the Yom Kippurs of their youth.
Pressed up against the white bars of the synagogue, Ella watches two solemn men slowly remove the holy scrolls of the torah from an old and lop-sided wooden cupboard. The chanting inside intensifies in volume and in depth. These scrolls are like a volume dial, she thinks, and as they move around the room the dial spins outwards, but also inwards, calling out words from the caves in men’s hearts which they have prepared for God, hoping He will enter, but that remain empty until then.
Ella searches her conscience, looking for her own prayer. It is Yom Kippur, and like all people she has much to ask forgiveness for. She searches, wanting to find the words that will bring meaning to her fast.
Etai, her husband, looks up. He sees her, he smiles, she makes a funny face, and he smiles more. She pretends she is trying to tear apart the bars with her little fists, and he laughs. The Torah passes him, and he lifts his talit from his shoulder, kisses it, and presses his kiss against the Torah. He looks at Ella again. She is proud of him. Proud of his little kiss of the Torah, of his knowledge and love of Jewish traditions, and for repeating the traditions of her grandfathers and their ancestors. He is carrying the flame in there, she thinks.
And me, she wonders. What am I doing?
Behind her the women are gathering. They come later than the men because they have no intention of praying. This synagogue is small, and there are only three rows of seats in the woman’s section, assembled in the back and separated from the men by a billowing white curtain.
The area reserved for women had been occupied hours earlier by the wives and daughters of the most religious men in the temple, who now huddle around the rabbi’s pulpit. There is a little standing room also, but how much more commitment it would be for the women outside to stand out the prayers; to watch the billowing cloth, and to read, or half-read, to feel interested, or half-interested, to experience a transformation, or only the dull sense of duty.
So the women gather outside. They have raised their families and loved their husbands. They have cooked every Pesach, Passover, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur meal for the last 30 years. They have knit their family together over bread and memories every Friday night for Shabbat (and the family has come because the food is good and the company is their blood). These women have listened to their sons’ and daughters’ stories from the military, and to their husband’s troubles at work, and the aches and pains of his body. They have tried to help their own brothers and sisters as they’ve struggle with money and the hardships of their own children. They’ve flown to New York and Australia to visit children who left home and made new ones, and they’ve fought back tears at airports as these children have promised they would come home, they would come home, they would come home soon.
And now it is Yom Kippur, and they have gathered outside the synagogue. Going inside to pray feels like too much. Maybe tomorrow night, before the blowing of the shofar. But tonight, they know exactly who they are, and the men inside are happy to know they wait for them in the courtyard.
The women gather outside. They collect into groups, and they gossip. They drag plastic chairs towards the most familiar faces, women whose children went to kindergarten with their own children, whose husbands work together, whose cousins work together. And with so much life in common, they gossip.
The children who have come with their mothers sit on the side and make fun of their parents. They youngest don’t see the fun in sitting at all, and collect into mini-gangs and chase each other around the courtyard, sometimes taunting each other, sometimes holding hands, releasing gleeful yelps and long drawn-out giggles.
These children know it is Yom Kippur, but they do not yet know the need to ask for forgiveness. They are forgiven each day for their wonderful, innocent little sins. And they are blessed also with the ability to forgive themselves.
Ella loosens her little fists, eases her grip on those white metal bars, and moves her head back into the shadows. The women have gathered behind her. The children run past her and around her feet. The men inside have stopped chanting and are praying quietly, rocking gently to and fro.
Ella turns to the women now filling the courtyard. Ruti, Etai’s mother is there. She smiles at Ella with easy kindness. She knows Ella loves her son.
Ella walks over to Ruti and takes a seat between her and a girl who passed through Ruti’s kindergarten 16-years ago. Ella’s Hebrew is improving, so here and there she can understand, here and there she can join in.
The women have gathered around her. She is one of them now. But what a long road it will be, she feels, before she has earned her sense of place among them; before she can share their peace of knowing that her family is grown and strong, that her marriage has survived because the right sacrifices were made, that the food of her kitchen was good, and that thousands of miles away her sons scold their own wives for not being enough like their mothers.
The women are gathering inside her now. Their voices all hushed like muffled heart beats, echoes against her ribs and stomach and throat, against the inside of her skin. Their fingers move inside her, like they have moved over endless bed sheets and washing lines, and dried perfect red tomatoes, and sliced cucumbers and onions, and poured vinegar over cabbage, and fried eggplant on the balcony. Their fingers move like they have moved over challa on Fridays, and though their children’s hair, and like they have moved when wiping away tears, and applying bandaids, and taking pain away by telling stories.
The women’s fingers move inside her, and turn their palms upwards with unspoken questions. Can you do what we have done? they ask. Can you make your heart so selfless as to be what we have been? Will you care for our sons as we have cared for our husbands? Will your sons love you as our sons love us?
The women have gathered inside her now. Ella’s eyes close, 30-years of moving fingers gathered in her heart. A prayer begins to form on her lips.
From the courtyard outside the synagogue in Herzilya, she turns her closed eyes to the sky, and asks forgiveness for all she knows she will never be.
1 comment:
Ilana,
Dont know if you'll read this comment as the post is old, but it deserves one:-). This is a striking short. It is so earthbound and driven higher, if that means anything. It is rooted, meaningful, feeling. Have you submitted this? Im confused by the last line though. It doesn't seem like a proper conclusion in the context of so much depth of feeling. I feel like I'm not quite getting your intention with that ending ... it's too disconcordant somehow. Anyway. Thanks for sharing this story!
Nick
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