After Rosh Hashanah

Now THAT was an awfully good Rosh Hashanah.

I prepared well, had a good kavanah (usually defined as intention, this kind of means the intensity of what people are doing, particularly in prayer), was not interrupted too much by people talking in shul, and when there were interruptions it was because people I like were chasing after kids I like and it was very well meant. (Last year was very hard for me primarily because of people talking in shul. A little whispered chat here and there is one thing, but when strangers come to the shul and talk audibly throughout the most important parts of the service it is a major distraction.) I did not know what to expect for kavanah in this community. This is not the kind of shul where people chat about spirituality a whole lot. But the kavanah was there, and I was willing and able to let myself open up (albeit hidden behind my machzor) on both days without feeling too self-conscious.

And on the other hand, once I had reached my spiritual peak, the davening went fast and didn’t drag on forever. Hooray for that. Sometimes singing and singing and singing just wears me out and makes me feel frustrated that I can’t stay “high” with the davening. Forcing it is counter-productive.

The meals were nice too. We had the first two out, and both were very pleasant. The third meal (second night) we had quietly at home, and then on the last we had our very first guests. It became a ridiculous point of anxiety. I ventured to mincha (afternoon prayers) on the first day and was the only woman except for someone new who seemed to need a place. So on impulse I invited her and her two kids to come to lunch the next day where we had invited just one couple who had been carefully warned that there were unpacked boxes still lying around and that we wouldn’t have anything too fancy. Only when I got home and spoke to U. about it did I realize the table wasn’t big enough and that in fact we might not have enough food. I worried obsessively about it, trying to decide if I had done the right thing. I had invited her out of a sense that I would be doing a mitzvah, but then hadn’t checked in with my husband first when it’s also a mitzvah to respect each other in that way. Had I been counting on a miracle to make there be enough food? Had I been too self-righteous in trying to invite someone.

I told myself again and again that it would work out, but I didn’t believe it.

Guess what. It did. There was plenty of food and all the guests seemed happy and grateful. Maybe I even made a difference to the newcomer.

Why do I (and others like me) carry around worry and baggage like that. It’s so useless. It’s just what I do I guess.

However long and rambly this entry is, I have one more thing I really want to share.

I really spent a lot of time preparing myself for the holiday this year and knew I should give myself some down time in between. On the morning of the first day I spent some time really meditating and preparing for the davening, but then during breakfast wanted some light reading to clear my head a little. I’m not in the middle of anything right now so I went to read some poetry. I was reaching for Williams but my hand hit Whitman instead. When I opened it up I just couldn’t believe how appropriate to the day and just how beautiful the writing was about the self and about mortality, both of which need to surrender to G-d in this season more than ever.

A couple of excerpts, all from parts of the very long poem called “Song of Myself:”

…People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself….

(Two sections later in section 6 he talks about grass. I’m so sorry for breaking this up into smaller quotes. But I want to pick the lines that caught me and the piece itself is long.)

A child said “What is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

…I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation….

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps….

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old mean and mothers, and the offspring taken out of their laps….

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.