The last trinity of Holly Days starts on the eve of New Years Eve, with Atonement, then Forgiveness and Redemption. I like to add some of the traditions of The Days of Awe, like eating apples dipped in honey, and casting bread upon the waters, which for me is usually feeding the seagulls at the beach.
Despite my rather devout atheism, I am a bit of a Judaiophile. Don’t get me wrong, I find fundamentalism in almost any stripe, be it islamic, christian, jewish or marxist to have pretty nasty potential, and I find much of the violent, obsolete doctrine in the lot of these to be downright evil. But Judaism has these wonderful concepts of midrash and mitzvah, most broadly understood as the obligation to collaborate with god to perfect the world. I think this may underlie the great success of the jews, intellectually as well as spiritually, as, after all, their mythos forms the foundation for pretty much all western religious thought. Also, these broadest ideas of mitzvah and midrash run very close to my own philosophy of the universe as a non-teleological and emergent complex phenomenon that we are inescapably collaborating to create in every instant.
The High Holy Days are the most important holiday in Judaism. Beginning with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur, these Days of Awe are meant to be a period of deep introspection, an honest evaluation of one’s flaws and assessment of one’s actions in the preceding year, coupled with an effort to atone for these sins and seek redemption.
I think this is just so f*ing cool. Most of my secular atheist jew friends tend not to be too down with this holiday, as it can get pretty dark and is too often used by parents and rabbis to beat good ol’ jewish guilt into their kids. But, redemption is kind of the whole point of the third act of all of that religiosity, and from my humanist perspective, it is the key to the healing of our psyches.
So, I start this last trinty today with Atonement. Tomorrow, New Years Eve, is Forgiveness (not a big thing in their days of awe, but kinda the essence of rebbe JC’s midrash), and then New Years Day is Redemption.
(Interestingly, as a polyglot 10+ generation New Worldian, I am probably a Jew as are many of you, maybe even Hitler. We tend to use genealogy to pin a thread between our identity and the identity of some revered celebrity, but the reality of exponential population growth is that in just the potential life span of one of our grandparents, their cohort grows to 64. In fact, recent Israeli law states that if you can prove that one of your 8 grandmothers was a Jew (64 if you are Ethiopian), you are an Israeli citizen. Even more, Jewishness is generally defined to be anybody who has any grandmother who was a jew, no matter how unrecognized, which is going to tend to include most westerners. This is because the Roman Empire had a defined policy of diasporization, meant to scatter to ashes of dissent, and they often, as with Russell Crowe’s Spaniard in Gladiator, assigned leadership roles to immigrants they placed in conquered territories, meaning the Romans scattered Jews all over Europe and placed them in positions of power.)
HOLLY DAYS 