Tishri 5787

[liv]

On one level I don't have much to say about the Jewish festival season this year. I'm getting to the point where I'm pretty good at running even complex services without much angst. But at the same time I do want to record this experience, and this year was different again like every year is different.

I was assigned to Stevenage for the main High Holy Days. This is a small community (always my first love) who meet in temporary spaces about halfway between my two homes in Cambridge and London. Partly because they're small, they didn't want me for the whole marathon of the festival cycle. So I had some free time (!) and some time to do work with my main placement community, Wimbledon. Also, I had a nice chill summer with no work or travel, so that made everything a lot easier.

However, my partner's father died unexpectedly mid-August. This is not a case where I'm complaining about this huge loss purely because it made my professional life harder! But it was very much a typical rabbinic experience, you're dealing with your own family stuff at the same time as working for communities. For various reasons the funeral had to be delayed for several weeks, and ended up scheduled for the week between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur.

So. I was actually free the evening of the New Year, which has hardly happened this millennium. We were able to have a proper family dinner for the festival, most of which I cooked. I'm definitely a less good cook than ghoti_mhic_uait but it felt like such an exception to be able to spend a day cooking and hosting. I had a dream just before where my mother explained she couldn't make it because she had too much she needed to do, and in the dream I said, Mum, you've been dead for a year and a half, what possible obligations could you still have? Anyway, Dad and my sister were able to join my family of choice at my house. I made butternut squash soup, one of Mum's big occasion specialities, and tzimmes and apple crumble. ghoti_mhic_uait provided a vegetarian version of "chopped liver", a substitute for one of the few things I miss from my meat-eating childhood. My sister brought Honey cake. The main course was just spaghetti and veggie meatballs, following the tradition of round foods, which I didn't do a great job of but anyway. But I was proud of making a monster apple and honey challah. I made a single round loaf but I think I should have done two smaller braids, with the excuse it was Shabbat (when we traditionally have two loaves) as well as Rosh HaShanah.

In the morning my OSOs and two of their children (17 and 6) joined me for Rosh HaShanah at Stevenage, and ghoti_mhic_uait was our shofar blower. The community of about 40 people were very welcoming and enthusiastic, and followed the service with a really good potluck lunch. Then I got on the train to Stoke-on-Trent where a member of the community offered me a meal and a place to sleep, so that I could lead their Orthodox-style second day Rosh HaShanah, as I've been doing ever since I started having professional commitments on first day RH. It was somewhat bittersweet because I likely won't be able to do that again, the chances of having second day free once I'm a finalist, let alone actually working, are really slim. So it's my swansong after facilitating High Holy Days for these lovely people since 2010. Most of the congregation who showed up were people who were regulars when I was living there, and it was really great to see them. We had around a dozen, which is pretty good for such a tiny community.

We were off school between RH and YK, which was a mercy. After some back-and-forth with the rabbi, I agreed to lead shiva prayers for a bereaved family on the Tuesday. The family asked that I also attend the funeral (which the rabbi was officiating) since they (very reasonably) didn't want their prayers to be led by someone they were meeting for the first time. The deceased had died at a good old age and was remembered as a kind of bon vivant who loved golf and cheese, and there were absolutely loads of people present, all ages, all enjoying each other's company even on a sad occasion, and being really gentle with each other's grief but without being sombre about it. I'm very careful about imposing any theology on mourners but this family were all completely convinced that their dad / granddad was in heaven and that God loves them without my having to say anything. In a lot of ways it was really uplifting.

Then it was my father-out-law's Christian funeral on Thursday. I messed up the logistics by trying to be too clever about combining driving, so jack and I were only just in time for the funeral, which my Dad missed, and J&I missed the internment. The reception afterwards did what these things are meant to do, but I felt pretty useless. Shabbat Shuva I was a congregant (yay!) in my regular synagogue, and we attempted to hold a Jewish shiva for father-out-law on Saturday night, but people were not really willing to make the effort the day before Yom Kippur. I was a bit annoyed at our community especially as they had a bit of a theme about showing up running through the festival cycle. However my family came through as well as a couple of friends and there are worse things than a small shiva.

Yom Kippur back in Stevenage. cjwatson and 17yo S came with me for the evening service. We managed to find a Turkish place open for a very early pre-fast dinner in the middle of Sunday afternoon. cjwatson took the solo for the Kol Nidrei prayer, which made us very popular indeed with the community who don't have a good enough musician for that. And I got to sleep in my own bed the night of YK, which was a huge bonus! Morning service I attended on my own as cjwatson and S were committed in Cambridge. The congregation was smaller than for RH and as usual most people didn't stay for Musaf and Minchah. But I think those of us who did stick it out through the day had a meaningful service. A member of the community fed me and a couple of others a really good break-fast meal after, and then I went home to collapse.

One thing I noted was that I really struggled to write sermons this year. I very often find myself finishing sermons at the last minute, but this time I felt differently blocked. I wasn't turning them over in the back of my mind, I had absolutely nothing, not really even a topic, until I had no choice. In the end for RH1 I talked about 'the birthday of the world' and whether or not God has a plan for creation, comparing it to the human lifecycle where a baby starts out completely dependent but eventually becomes their own person and not an extension of their parents, and how both we individuals and humans in general may not be around forever so we should make the most of the time we have. RH2 I did a classic sermon about verbal harms and avoiding both individual mean talk and scapegoating propaganda. Kol Nidrei I gave a variant of the sermon I often do, about fasting, and why it's still important even though the spiritual meaning of the fast is more important. And YK day, having spoken about birth for RH I spoke about death, the anniversary of the antisemitic murders, other antisemitic attacks in the past year, the wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, a little bit on climate victims, and needing to face our own mortality. I mentioned how my father-out-law had left notes for his own eulogy and talked about how we would want to be remembered. This was made somewhat harder by the fact that the Liberal liturgy has a very cut-down version of the big set-piece poem about mortality (no Who by fire!) but most people have thought about mortality and what that means for the living anyway.

I had a day and a half of school the week after YK, when nobody was very focused. jack helped me build a lovely sukkah on Friday, using some new suspension tricks to give it a bit more stability. Actually we had unusually good weather through Sukkot this year, autumn didn't really come until after the end of the festival. Saturday I was a normal congregant again, and we spent the afternoon hanging out in hatam_soferet's sukkah, which was really delightful. Middle of Sukkot I mostly led an interfaith event in Wimbledon's sukkah, for the local CCJ group and the conversion class. At one point some of the Jewish participants tried to start a fight about the Kairos II document from Palestinian Christians; the Christian participants were mostly against it themselves but were not convinced that listening to Palestinians would lead directly to the mass murder of all the Jews in Europe and Israel. So that was weird, but my actual session went well. It was on historic examples from Ezra, Maccabees and the Mishnah of people making such a big deal of Sukkot that they sometimes celebrated it at the wrong time, and speculating on the connection to the palm branches and hosannas associated with Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. And we also sat in the Sukkah and demonstrated lulav shaking and ate cake, so all-in-all that was a successful CCJ event.

And Simchat Torah I co-led both the evening and morning services at Wimbledon. It was quite an extravaganza, with dancing and whisky and an absolute feast of cake. (Wimbledon's main catering person is very like my mother in some ways, down to using the same recipes, but also has plenty of self-confidence and doesn't apologize.) R Adrian had asked me to write a prayer to mark the anniversary of the October 7th attacks (which in the Jewish calendar occurred on Simchat Torah in 2023), and also to give a sermon about the serious threats of climate change. I knew that any words or none about the last three years would offend some people, so I wrote the prayer as carefully as I could to make sure I was saying what I actually wanted to say. But my actual script got tidied away while the dancing was happening so I had to recreate it from memory. And my climate sermon (basically, the ecological age is over, now we have to think about how we will adapt to the inevitable collapse), was good but I am still not convinced this was the right occasion for it. Wimbledon's style is to interleave solemn and celebratory modes on Simchat Torah / Shemini Atzeret, because Progressive Jews in the Diaspora have a solemn and a joyful festival which fall on the same day, whereas I think it's probably better to compartmentalize them a bit.

I was in shul for a lot of hours; turned up early to help set up on Friday night, and there was over 2 hours of service plus eating and schmoozing, and Saturday morning ran for over 3 hours. This was a bit exhausting, and I was incredibly grateful that Wimbledon bent the rules slightly and put me up in a hotel for the night in between. But it was also very good because many members of the community took the opportunity to take me aside and tell me what they, as involved lay people, think a student rabbi ought to know, so it was super instructive.

Caught a cold from some annoying guy who turned up to CCJ all, I have a really bad cold so I'll just sit far away from you... I don't wear a mask when I'm teaching or leading, which yes, is a compromise, but would work better if people hadn't reverted to the Before Times mentality of showing up anyway when they're obviously contagious. And being run down at the end of an intense month certainly didn't help. But in the end I was only ill for a couple of days so that could have been worse.

Both cjwatson and jack came to London to visit at different times so I didn't have to do quite so much travelling.

So, I've made it to Cheshvan, the blessed month of no festivals at all. College is going well, I love my teachers and my fellow students, including a truly delightful new intake. I will be quite glad of a half term break the week after next, though.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

I'm tired just reading all that! That's a lot of stuff happening.

[atreic]

Wow, that’s a lot!

(As an aside, I have known ‘Who by fire’ by Leonard Cohen for years, and had no idea about its origins until this post. Thank you!)

[wychwood]

That sounds like a lot! But also as though it mostly went pretty well. I'm glad you had a good time.

[kass]

This was a bear of a year for writing sermons, imo. The sense of systemic trashfire is so pervasive (for some of us; others I think are trying as hard as they can not to notice it.)

Anyway, yishar kochech on a job well done.