(In which I start off with my first HHDs with awe . . . )
On the desk next to me is a yellow ticket. Its heading reads: "We invite you to celebrate the 5771 High Holy Day Season". Below my name is inscribed this passage from Isaiah: "The Gates of Return are Always Open."
This is my comp ticket to the High Holy Days 5771 at Temple Israel, BostonTemple Israel, Boston. I did not think I would get to celebrate Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur at the synagogue where I was actively converting. I had made my peace with the fact that I would need to find a more suitable venue that reflected my (at the time) current life circumstances somewhere else. For this I held no animosity; how could I? This is where I was in life - just starting two part-time jobs after a hard stretch, struggling with new rent and old bills. I might as well rally against the wind.
But then my rabbi sent me a letter regarding my conversion, which included this comp ticket. Although she might not have known what this gift meant, I certainly did. I exaggerate only slightly when I say my heart cried a little out of thanks at the sight of it. I could now share my first HHD with the people I had been going to Shabbat service and Torah study with. I could be in the place I was starting to think of as my spiritual home.
Two new friends from the temple invited me to go with them to Slichot. I accepted and proceeded to bombard them with questions. What was this? Like a midnight mass? Uh, not quite, they replied, wisely saying nothing else so that experience could fill in my blanks.
The first part of the evening was a discussion on the six questions (according to the Babylonian Talmud) you will be asked on the way to heaven. We split up according to what question called to us. I ended up in the room where we tried to discern what is meant by dealing honestly with people in our business practices. If I thought, it was going to be some tinder-dry conversation I was quickly corrected. The topic may have been "business practices" but the theme of ethics quickly spread out over many facts of everyday life. Soon everyone was adding their experiences into the mix and all I could do was sit back and smile (of course, after adding my own .02). Here was this wonderful give-and-take, two-Jews-in-a-room-with-three-opinions dialogue that I loved about Judaism. After decades of unchallenged Roman Catholic-obedience to scripture and then, later, Pagan wanderings in search of its own Book of Shadows, I had finally come home to a circle where spiritual Truth was vigorously sought after - even if no definitive answer was ever found.
After a break we ended up in the Temple’s main hall which had been transformed into a sanctuary. We were given candles and programs. "Leil Slichot," read the cover. "Beginning the Inward Journey to Forgiveness" its subtitle. I searched through my mental files for any Catholic and Pagan experiences with a similar philosophy but could find none. It was hard not to tremble in my seat. I felt as though I was standing on that razor-fine edge that separates the old and the new, the mundane from the unexplored. Whatever this was going to be tonight, for me it would be an absolutely new dawn.
The lights were lowered and the rabbis began reading from the program text. Torahs were solenly brought in, heralded by the hallowed sound of the shofar. It was a calling that stood my spine straight up. As each scroll was "clothed . . . in light"(Leil Slichot 4) the rabbis spoke of being a community before God, a family coming back to Sinai, a people following the footsteps of their ancestors back in time to a definitive moment. This stirred me in deepplaces I had long forgotten. Although I had heard the word before only briefly in song and did not know its dictionary meaning, I was beginning to feel the true resonance of the Hebrew word, Am.
Next came Havdalah. Rabbi Freedman stepped forward to mark the distinction between the end of Shabbat, the separation of the holy from the profane. "From this one Havdalah candle we light the candle of Memory . . . that helps us find a path back to you . . . " (6)
Now that we had come together, it was time to start turning, turning back, returning. "O Merciful One, I am afraid to look at all the times I have turned away . . . I am sorry, forgive me, help me begin to return to myself . . . " (10)
The words left me in a warm state of wonder. Return, return to what? Me, myself...my Self? Well, what was that, anyway? Roman Catholicism would have me believe that was an eternal sinner forever pleading on bended knee for salvation. Modern-day tenets confirmed this, painting me as abhorrent for being queer and to be shunned as handicapped for being trans. I was not to be celebrated or advocated for; I was to be pitied, kept from sight and reminded to be ashamed as often as possible.
I wish I could tell you that Paganism left me feeling more empowered but I had run into door-slamming fundamentalists there, too. One priestess dis-invited me from an all-women ritual after learning of my trans status, confessing she was doing was ‘probably wrong’ but kept the door closed all the same. (As a friend once wisely observed, "a fundie is a fundie is a fundie.")
So what was Reform Judaism saying via Selichot? I heard that night that my queer trans soul was actually worth coming back to; that I wasn’t some sort of cosmic mistake or social leper to be shunned at the door; that my presence there wasn’t embarrassing to this congregation and those leading it; that, like everyone else gathered there, I had been "drawn from the reservoir of the Holy. (Mishkan T’filah 35)
Now came "Sho.fa.rot...Awakening". More shofar blasts. "T’ki.ah! Wake Up! Sh’va.rim! Look! Tru.ah! Return! And the shofar signals my turning to You. (10)"
This night ended much as it had began, with select voices singing Shlomo Carlebach’s Return Again, uging us to "return again/to the land of your soul." I left the temple that evening thinking about that deep topography, seeing it with my gladdened heart as a true land of beauty, wonder, goodness and purity.
What a way to start my first High Holy Days
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