Yom Kippur

• Yom Kippur in Jerusalem is a bit eeirie. Noise of the industrial age stops.
• Outside I heard only the noises of people and nature, a dog's bark, birds, the breeze through leaves, people.
• Every hour or so a police car drovealong King George -- often on the left side of the street. Once an ambulance, with its siren warning the people who were walking in the street and the kids riding bikes there. A kid with a bike has few safe places to ride in Jerusalem the rest of the year. A man in an electric wheelchair rode along the street. For him, too, it was a day of safety.
• Sunday night, Michael and I went to HUC. Services were in a huge, round "events" hall on the sixth floor. Its windows look out on the City walls, a moving sight as night was falling. The Classical Reform professors M studied under in the 1960s must be rolling over in their graves. Every man wore a kipa. Many put on a talit. Classical Reformers might accept the all-Hebrew service (from Gates of Repentence and Xeroxed supplements) on the grounds that Hebrew (although not quite the Hebrew ofthe prayer book) is the local language (although 75 percent of the congregation was English-speaking), but what would they say about traditional prayers and parts of prayers that got added back in? The cantor and choir were wonderful, and did not intimidate the rest of us.
• On the way home we flowed into the streams of peoplethronging out of synagogues. Many wore white. Also on the street were young secular couples in jeans. I doubt they had been to Kol Nidrei. They were out enjoying the fact that it was Yom Kippru. Anyway with everthing closed, what else was there to do? Israel radio stations and TV went off the air, but people could have played CDs or or played piano. I heard none of that. If they did it, they kept the windows closed. I understand that Jerusalem is unusual in this quiet. It was strange and rather nice.
• Monday M went back to HUC and I went to Yeshurun-- the large curved synagogue on King George a little beyond the JNF, Jewish Agency, and UJA bldgs. There they ran a traditional Orthodox service -- also with lots of Americans. Some women came in white slacks, others properly skirted with their hair covered. No one tried to enforce anything on anyone. The cantor and choir were very good, but the congregation usually kept quiet.
• I had bought a set of prayerbooks published by the newspaper Ha'aretz and the Jewish Agency. The prayers were completely the traditional ones (according to the official "Land of Israel" format), but the books also include lots and lots of readings. Most interesting to me were the bits of reminiscences and quotes from people's diaries. These were by no means all religious. Several were from a book about Yom Kippur on Kibbutz BeitHaShita. One was about the High Holidays for a group ofsoldiers in the Jewish Brigade of the British army in WW II in Lybia. Vey moving. And one was about a youngIsraeli woman interviewed on the radio. "Are you goingto fast?" "Of course." "And will you go to services?""Oh no. I'm going to ride my bike on the empty streets." The rabbi who wrote this was upset, until, he reports, he thought, "She is doing two things special for Yom Kippur -- things that she only does on that day. Who is to say that her observance of theholiday is less acceptable than mine?"
• Monday evening after the shofars blew, people walked home a little more carefully. Cars started to move along the streets. It took a few hours for the hum of traffic to get up to its usual decibel level.
• http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/all-together-now.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html describe other holiday experiences in Jerusalem.

Copyright 2006, Jane S. Fox