Today is Forgiveness, yesterday was Atonement.
I have co opted the Jewish new year and melded it with the secular New Year’s holiday celebration, making it coincide with our solar calendar and its marking of the changing of the seasons. The secular New Year’s has some of the same ideas as those Jewish Days of Awe: the review of the year, the idea of new beginnings, but they are trivialized in comparison to the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I call these last three Holly Days The Days of Awesomeness.
By putting these two: Atonement and Forgiveness side by side here, I have sort of set Abraham and Jesus in a bit of a face off. Many Christians, despite the consonance of the Torah with the Old Testament, retain some antipathy for judaism (‘they killed our Lord!’), and assume that all is effortlessly forgiven in His name. Most Jews reject most Christian doctrine, and demand atonement and mitzvah to be redeemed. Both sides seem to forget that Jesus was a rabbi, deeply schooled in the torah, likely from his birth. Rather than as the foundation of a new religion, I tend to think of most of the New Testament as a part of the Talmud: The Midrash of Yeshua, in which I would imagine that the idea of gentle forgiveness should follow sincere atonement.
Despite the protestations of most theologians, I’m pretty sold that Jesus’ missing years were spent in a study of comparative religion in the far east, learning about Buddhism and Hinduism. The Jewish culture of Roman-occupied Judea was pretty fucked up. For someone who had been called, and likely aspired to be, a Messiah his whole life, I expect Jesus may have been freaked out by the crazy commodification of the temple, and the presumption that following his bar mitzvah (the age which happens to mark the beginning of his missing years) he would be expected to join the priests in the temple taking tribute for Karbonot, slaughtering and burning thousands of animals as Olah, while the poor went hungry. My guess is he hopped a caravan heading east to avoid that grisly and elitist fate. I wonder if his decision may have been made on Yom Kippur, taking stock and deciding he just couldn’t take the seat that had been prepared for him in the Second Temple.
For myself, this year, here on my little faux High Holly Days of Awesomeness, it can’t help but be about the ongoing battle between my Californiness, and New Yorkiness. I have long identified as a Pioneer Mongrel, observing the way those two threads were seminal in the cultural and ethnic etiology of my identity. I see that these were also central to the identity of California, as well as being at odds with the culture here in one of the 13 original colonies. I know there is was some sort of pioneer ethos in the immigration of the pilgrims and others who settled this area, but they are so much more distant and on the far side of the creation of the Union.
Whatever may have happened to this ethos, I feel a real resistance here to the laissez faire counter xenophobia that underlies so much of the west coast vibe. I perceive an overall desire for a purity of tribal identity, to not be mongrels but Jewish, Italian, Irish or Black that feels so much stronger here. Even among the apostates of my own family, there is almost no will to mongrelize the traditional liturgy of the holidays, only to let them sit uncomfortably next to each other. Little willingness among progressives to purge Hanukah of the bloodthirsty and racist origin story that tribal fealty says must be recited by children, even as it so conflicts with our modern ideals.
I think I can now better understand some of the deep and disturbing dissonance I felt during the Six Day War when so many of my Jewish friends, who had joined me in anti-Vietnam-war protests, showed a chilling willingness to support the bloodshed in the Sinae and the occupation of the West Bank. I see now that even the reformed, conservative and secular Jews had likely been raised with that awful story of the slaughter by the Macabeans, which, as kids, most had been forced to recite in exchange for their Hanukah trinkets.
It has been a confusing year for me. I am utterly and totally committed to my dearest Rey. She has become my everything, and yet she is absolutely a New Yorker, born on a snowy day in Brooklyn. For her sake, I have fought to shed my pioneer roots, my soul built of Chaparral and Kelp, and have tried to join this tribe of snow and snark. But as I reviewed my life for the Holly Day of Atonement, mindful of its connection to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I realized that my effort to join an alien tribe was inauthentic for such and old dog, and underlying some of the inner conflict I have felt this past year. I may never live in those lovely hills again, may never again sail across the Channel or around the Bay or explore their reefs or redwoods, but I think I know now that I will remain a Californian in my soul if not my body.
I hope my new family and neighbors can forgive me for defensively pushing back against their cherished norms as I have tried to stretch them to make them fit. I will let them be, and just wear my own ill-fitting nature, which I will share with Rey to do with as she pleases.
Tonight I will stand at at the edge of the ice-bound Hudson, next to my hibernating boat, and savor the sweetness of the pineapple upsidedown cake I have baking in the oven, some of which I will cast upon the brackish water, hoping to find a deeper peace in the coming year.
HOLLY DAYS 