Getting lost at the Da Capo

Rosh Hashanah (lit. "Head of the Year") has become one of my favorite holidays in the Jewish calendar.  It even beats out Hanukkah which, although fun, doesn't have quite the spiritual breadth and depth of Rosh Hashanah.  The Jewish New Year is celebrated as a two-day holiday which manages to encompass a wide variety of Jewish values: family, community, joy, prayer, and thanksgiving, as well as introspection, repentance, forgiveness, and humility.  And food.  Lots of food.  What kind of Jewish holiday would it be without food?

I've always enjoyed the spirit of the holiday and the symbols that are so ingrained in its celebration.  We eat apples dipped in honey to remind us that we should have a sweet new year, and we pour honey on our challah instead of dipping it in salt, for now is not a time for sadness.  The challah itself is shaped differently: Instead of being braided into a loaf, we make it into a round braid or spiral to emphasize the idea of continuity from one year to the next.  Traditionally we eat a new fruit on the holiday, and many people choose the pomegranate for this custom as it is rumored to have 613 seeds - equal to the number of commandments in the Torah.

And those are just the symbols at the dinner table!

Every year, I have celebrated Rosh Hashanah at home with my parents, my siblings, and whomever my mom invited to join us for either of the two festive meals.  Even as a college student, I always went home for the New Year.  There were some years where I debated, thinking maybe I would stay on campus instead of schlepping home, but ultimately I could never resist the comfort of spending this particular holiday with my family.  No matter where my roots were spreading, I always felt an unconscious desire, a need, to start the year at the beginning -- my beginning.

This year everything has turned topsy-turvy and my new home is some 800+ miles away, so I was faced with the opportunity to start a completely new beginning.  Yet another Da Capo moment!  But I realized about five hours too late that I wasn't prepared to "make Rosh Hashanah;" to account for the food, the timing, the traditional elements that always seemed to appear before me - like magic! - at home.  (Thanks, Mom!)  Realistically, I don't think there is any way I could have recreated any of my life's intimate experiences with this particular holiday even if I had tried.  For starters, Tomm is working a month of nights without any time off for the holidays, so big, festive meals in the evening were out of the question.  We did, however, do our best to make Wednesday night's dinner something worthy of the New Year, even if the holiday wasn't beginning until three hours later.  Pasta Primavera may not exactly be standard fare for such a meal, and unfortunately I completely forgot about the traditional pomegranate, but we blessed the grape juice, the round-ish challah, and the apples with honey, so it still counts, right?

After he left for work I went to shul for Maariv, the evening service.  I don't believe I have ever before attended the evening service before Rosh Hashanah.  Usually I was at home helping my mom prepare for guests.  I'm glad I went, though, because the small choir that supported the chazzan lent a great deal to my experience.  (For an orthodox synagogue to have anything resembling a choir is virtually unheard of to my knowledge.)  Yet despite the music - so grand and beautiful to behold and in stark contrast to my typical shul experience - it could not make up for what was lacking.  I didn't dwell on it, but in the back of my mind a thought, not fully-formed and more closely resembling a feeling, nagged at me.

The next two days I spent a great deal of time at the synagogue.  The services were about three hours longer than I would've anticipated, and the choir only sang for part of it.  But I was there, I recited the prayers, I heard the sounds of the shofar, and I sang along where I could.  Did I commune with G-d?  Not so sure.  Even less uncertain is the answer to the vexing question: Did I commune with the community?

Since moving here I've been feeling like I'm missing something in regards to the Jewish community.  I feel like more of an outsider than I really should be, and I can't help but contrast my largely uninspiring experiences here with the overwhelmingly positive experiences I grew up with.  With that in mind, I'd like to share an experience Tomm and I had on Friday night:

We had just arrived to the synagogue for the afternoon and evening prayers, quick services that would mark the end of Rosh Hashanah and the beginning of Shabbat.  It didn't seem the services had commenced so we dawdled outside the doors of the sanctuary for a minute.  An older gentleman with a long, straggly beard appeared and made some comment about the talk that was going on before the services.  Perhaps they were going longer than expected?  I asked him if they'd started the afternoon service yet and he said no, then - detecting either our accent or our uniquely Midwestern sense of kindness and civility - he asked us where we were from.  We told him about our respective hometowns and the city where we met.  "Oh! That's Twerskiville!" he announced, referencing the large Hasidic community on the West side of the city.  I attended shul there a couple times and I'm familiar with the rabbi, though I certainly wouldn't identify myself with him.  At any rate, this man had at least some idea of where I was from.

"Y'know," he said, "for people from out of town, meaning of course anywhere outside New York or Lakewood [NJ], it's different.  Jewish communities are more open, more welcoming out of town.  But in town, it's like there are too many people.  People don't notice you as much, it's not as much of a community.  When a place gets so big, it's easy for people to get--" and he reached over to point to a notice on the bulletin board.  LOST.

"But come, let's daven (pray)."  And with that he led us into the sanctuary.

Lost.  Precisely.  As this man spoke I looked at him and wondered how he had managed to so perfectly encapsulate my experiences up to this point.  He was an absolute stranger, but it was as if I was meant to cross his path so that he could give credence to the very feeling I had been trying to ignore.

The fact is, my presence in the synagogues around here has been largely ignored.  The mumbled "shana tova" (Happy New Year) or "gut shabbos" (a wish for a good Sabbath) exchanged with others are mere pleasantries said as quietly and unenthusiastically as we can.  I am not a part of this community and I am no closer to them than the black-hatted and bearded Hassids who breeze past me on the sidewalk with bristling indifference.

At both the congregations I've called home throughout my life, I went to shul to feel connected -- connected to others and by extension to G-d.  I went to shul to be counted, acknowledged, appreciated.  I went to feel part of something larger, holier than myself.  Singing out loud and saying the words that are so many hundreds of years old with my families - real or surrogate - surrounding me and singing with me was what made it a holy experience.

In music, especially when playing through a piece with an ensemble for the first time, reaching the words da capo at the end of the piece can be disabling.  Faced with the sudden change in direction, we may have to quickly turn a page or five only to reveal that the music's tempo, time signature, key signature, dynamics, and style have completely changed since the beginning.  Eventually we manage to get back on track, maybe even skipping a few measures of music between the da capo and the opening bars just to get our bearings.  But inevitably we catch our breath, return our focus to the music we make, and move forward.

This year, the da capo is certainly throwing me for a loop.  I seem to have lost the melody, and I'm looking at the conductor thinking Where the hell are you? but it's not too late to make something beautiful.  I just have to take a breath, pause for a moment, and find where I belong in the music.

L'Shana Tova u'metukah.  May you have a happy and sweet New Year.