Happy New Year

[liv]

...to everyone who's celebrating. I love seeing these posts go up all over my reading lists as the New Year arrives in various time zones.

It's just under an hour til candles, and I am running around like a headless chicken as usual. I mean, I had this wonderful plan regarding going on holiday just before the festival season. I was totally going to the slack time to do both the spiritual and liturgical / practical preparation. Of course, in reality, holidays have far less slack time than I expect. So I now have only the barest outline of sermons for today and tomorrow and there are several sections where I'm going to have to rely on familiarity rather than detailed prep. I'm doing that thing that wise sages always advise their students not to do, of focusing on the liturgy planning to the complete exclusion of any sort of contemplation or self-reflection.

This time last year I moved my precious notes about the community's unchangeable customs which I absolutely have to work round to a safer place than the case for my festival tallit. So safe that I now can't find the notes anywhere; I knew I should have transcribed everything, or failing that left the papers in the spot where I know to look for them, even if that's not a very logical place for keeping documents.

It will actually be fine, because pretty much every year I get into a last minute panic for one reason or another, and pretty much every year it is in fact fine. And my community need me to be there but they don't need me to be perfect or live up to the standards of a professional. Anyway, love to all of you, I hope the coming year brings you joy whether or not you're turning over the calendar tonight.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Happy new year!

[liv]

Thank you! Hope to see you before too much of it elapses.

[kass]

Love to you; may your services be everything that you (and your community) need them to be; l'shanah tovah to you and yours!

[liv]

Many thanks for this, it's a really wonderful blessing and it meant a lot to me to read this comment just before I went out to shul. I hope your festival season is giving you something too, as well as taking from you.

[kaberett]

Happy new year :-)

[liv]

Thank you! I love how the internet makes it easy for people to jump in with greetings like this.

[ghoti]

(here via kaberett)
Shana Tova to you and yours!

What differentiates your holiday tallit from your every day (Shabbat) tallit?

[liv]

Thank you so much! My festival tallit has a story to it: basically it's an heirloom (which is unusual in itself since people are usually buried wearing theirs). So my grandfather's great uncle had two tallitot; I believe this one was a wedding present, it's embroidered with his monogram in what used to be gold thread and is now kind of greenish. When he died he bequeathed his spare tallit to my grandfather, but my grandfather died in Australia and was cremated, so his tallit came to my family. When I was bat mitzvah, I needed to wear a tallit and that was the one available. The original plan was that I would wear it just that once and then it would be put aside for my brother. I found I couldn't really accept that; as the oldest of my grandfather's grandchildren it seemed like I ought to have the tallit, and the only reason I didn't inherit it automatically was because I was a girl. The synagogue I belonged to at the time was theoretically egalitarian which meant they couldn't really argue against my keeping the tallit permanently, even though in practice at that time few women wore tallitot other than girls at their bat mitzvah ceremonies.

So it came to me, and I love it almost literally to pieces. Utterly gorgeous and totally impractical. For one thing it's a full-sized tallit, made for a man in an era when it was standard to wear a tallit more or less as a robe, not just as a shawl. For another it's 150+ year old silk, which is extremely fragile at this point. During my teens I used to wear it all the time, but it got torn and ragged; I had it repaired once, and at that point I mostly retired it. My lovely sister bought me a practical, modern, not especially feminine but at least sized plausibly for a short-ish woman, tallit in Israel, and that's my "everyday" (every Shabbat) tallit. I wear the heirloom one on Yom Kippur to mark the specialness of the day, and because it's so huge (even since it was taken in when it needed repairing) it completely enwraps me, so it's more or less like the shroud that some people have a custom of wearing for the festival. I don't actually own a real shroud, but the symbolism works.

I don't know what my mostly secular, Victorian grandfather's great uncle would have made of me leading the festival services in a nominally Orthodox synagogue wearing his tallit, mind you. But it makes me very happy indeed to have this option open to me.

[kerrypolka]

This is a lovely story - I hope you had(/are having!) a good RH this year. :)

[liv]

Thank you! I have been enjoying reading about yours. So far, the RH service went really well, but I came home and straightaway fell asleep for 2 hours. Which makes me a little concerned about how I'll cope with YK next week, but hey. Also, icon love!

[ghoti]

That is such a lovely story.

Do you wear a kittel on Yom Kippur as well, or just the giant tallit?

My dad has three(?) tallitot, so it's not /that/ unusual, in my mind, that there is an extra one around.

Wondering if your grandfather's great-uncle is just happy that one of his descendants is making use of it...

Also, if you don't mind answering, how is a nominally Orthodox synagogue accepting of a female leading services?

[liv]

No kittel, cos I don't own one or have access to one. I think it might freak out my community a bit; they're already struggling a bit with having a woman lead their services and read from Torah and the ways that although I strictly follow the Orthodox liturgy I end up doing things in a slightly Reform-accented style.

How this came to happen, well. I arrived here in 2009, and joined the only local community which happens to be Orthodox. (My nearest Progressive communities are an hour's train ride plus getting across town from station to shul away.) Services at that time were led by our wonderful Sydney (may his memory be for a blessing), an octogenarian who had been davening every Friday night for over 60 years. His health was failing and people were starting to express concern about how they would cope without him, as nobody else in the community (certainly nobody male!) really has the confidence and skillset to lead. I mentioned that I am reasonably experienced at leading services and can also read Torah and deal with complicated non-standard liturgy eg HHDs. And the community agreed that, as a one-off, if Sydney wasn't feeling well enough to stand at the bimah for the whole service, it was better for me to cover for him than to have no services at all. And it started happening more and more often that Sydney wasn't well enough, or even wasn't well enough to come to shul at all, and it gradually became clear that he wasn't just temporarily unwell, his malignant cancer had recurred. He actually lived a year after his diagnosis and continued active in the community and doing a load of interfaith work in the city, until the last three months when he was hospitalized. By this time people were more or less used to me leading services, it was natural for the default to shift from Sydney leads unless he's really unwell, to Liv leads unless Sydney is feeling particularly strong. Also, Sydney, even right up to his death, put lots of effort into making it clear that he saw me as his successor; he really smoothed the path for me among people who might otherwise have had problems with a woman taking on the role. We're a small community, no more than two dozen members, and everybody is pretty willing to be pragmatic rather than let the nearly 200-year-old shul close down if we can't do things perfectly.

I think nowadays people have several tallitot, but they're less precious objects. Which is part of the general shift to mass-produced, off-the-peg clothing. I don't know if someone who has a different tallit to coordinate with each of their outfits would bother leaving them as heirlooms to their descendants!

(Also, sorry for over-explaining technical Jewish stuff in my previous comment; I briefly confused you with the other ghoti who isn't Jewish, I didn't mean to patronize!)

[sunflowerinrain]

Happy new year! :)

[liv]

Thank you! Yay for new year greetings from people of at least four different religious backgrounds!

[cxcvi]

The timing of this post is interesting, for me. Although it's new year for you, and those that share your faith, for me; it was the day I (along with my partner) received some incredibly life-changing news (in a really bleeping good way). So... it kinda feels like a new year is starting for me, as well.

So, may your year bring you good news, as well.

[liv]

Wow, yay for bleeping good life-changing news! I really hope the new phase of your life is full of sweetness and joy.

[evilsusan]

Happy new year!

[liv]

Thank you! The first three days of it have been good, if fairly low-key, so far. I'm just about to go out for my first run of the new year, and my first after a break for travelling, but I'm having a hard time dragging myself away from my comfy computer chair.