To Be a Jew
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day
If you had been a fly on the wall this morning you would have seen a middle-aged woman in an overcrowded home office, wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt as she logged onto Zoom for the Shabbat morning service. She put in her AirPods and kept her video off as she removed the prayer shawl she bought in Jerusalem, just minutes after standing at the Kotel for the first and only time in her life, from its case.
Facing east, she recited the prayer for putting on the tallit. Then she rolled out her yoga mat and placed some cushy pillows strategically under her knees, head, and neck, in some cross between a restorative yoga class and shul.
For an hour, this woman prayed before a cement-colored sky, sometimes covering her face with her palms, sometimes singing aloud, sometimes drifting off to the angelic sound of the hazzan's voice in her ears.
The words and melodies of the morning prayers filled her soul and quieted her mind as her body rested deeply, letting the weight of the world, the weight of the week, the weight of all of the unwritten words, the weight of memory, the weight of history, the weight of misinformation, the weight of distorted facts, the weight of inverted truths, the weight of misused words, the weight of revisionism, the weight of speaking up and the weight of silence, the weight of standing for and the weight of standing against, the weight of weapons and war, the weight of hatred, the weight of ignorance, the weight even of good intentions – letting all of this seep out of her body back into the earth that keeps spinning.
We, too, keep spinning, unless we intentionally stop spinning for a moment, an hour, a day, a day like today when a woman showed up for services disheveled, open-hearted, weary, craving all the quiet, remembering the dead, honoring the living, grieving with the mourners, praying with the prayers, singing with the singers, and later, walking with her sister in the muddy woods that felt more like March than January, an elegy to those who said, this will blow over, a eulogy for those who said, it won't happen here, a tribute to those who said, we just have to wait it out, an offering to those who said, where are you taking us?
To be a Jew is to remember. To be a Jew is to live according to the seasons of the land, the cycles of the moon, the pain of exile and estrangement, and the longing to return home.
To be a Jew is to welcome the stranger and to kiss the mezuzah on the doorpost coming in and going out, in the morning and in the evening. To say, who is like you, oh God, even when we don't know what or even if we believe. To disagree vehemently with respect underscoring our disagreements, because to question is more sacred than to know.
And to be a Jew, for this woman on a mild, grey Saturday, is to reach back and forwards in time, to call on those whose names vanished long before her birth, and to say: May your memories be for a blessing.
May my life bring something good to this world. May we each strive only to be more like ourselves, knowing that we are each made in God's image and thus imperfectly perfect, or perfectly imperfect.
May my children and their children and their children know they are worthy of safety, of care, of love, of protection, of ease, of peace. May we live without secrets, without shame, without so much weight. May we say thank you a thousand times a day. May we remember that to live is a gift.
May we be vessels for God's light. May we trust and believe in our goodness and not let anyone tell us who we are and who we're not. May we have the power of self-definition and self-determination, as we carry out our task of repairing what we can of this crushed and shattered and beautiful and impossible world. May we know that none of us is too small to matter.
May we say, never again. And let us say, amen.
May it be so. Thank you for this beautiful piece of writing.
I feel so fortunate to have encountered your words and prayers. The image of combining restorative yoga and services off-camera is an image I will carry with me for awhile.