So the five Pardesniks (my classmates) picked some seats in the tent of spiritual garden love, coincidentally next to the rabbi and cantor duo, both female. In the row in front of me, a nun, with a habit and a huge wooden cross, sat with her prayerbook open. Behind me, a little girl with shiny long hair knew every word to every prayer. Just after services got started with some meditative tunes that had me in a trancy but weirded-out zone, I noticed some camp ladies stroll in, a small Nativ crew. One of the Groner summer retreat center guests, Gabby, was there and I was so happy to see a familiar face. Not that I should've been so surprised - camp friends are everywhere in this country. I'm going to have to start hiding from them. Over the course of the three-hour prayer session (felt like 45 minutes though), we used a combination of a traditional prayerbook with a few inserts, including a Leonard Cohen song, some call-and-response poetry and a few extra Shabbat songs that most people wouldn't include. I think this was the happiest start to a Yom Kippur in the history of ever.
The rabbi, in her alternating Hebrew and English (always ten Hebrew words to one English one, so who knows what we really got), had us break into small groups of three. Two Pardes friends I particularly like and I crewed up to talk about our deepest desires to forgive and be forgiven. It's interesting how the rabbi was able to command more than one hundred people in an outdoor space, with an indoor voice, into deep discussions about our relationships with our closest friends and ourselves. To find out that most people my age share regrets and troubles over former flames, stressful parent ties, and growing up. In a lonely Facebook world, where you think you're sharing everything, it's refreshing to realize you aren't opening up at all, until you sit down and just spell the truth out to near strangers. This rabbi, this space, and this community enabled a garden full of people from ages 6 to 86 to do that.
The service ended with a dramatic call-and-response prayer, popcorn-style, where anyone in the tent could just stand up and proclaim the next line of the poetic proclamation from the Selichot service. Everyone would validate the caller with an emphatic 'Amen!' response. At first, it seemed somewhat silly, a little heretical and evangelical at first, like a Southern Baptist church. But I was having such a good time and I was so comfortable with my chair cushion and my sharing-is-caring forgiveness chat, that I was among the masses, shouting out Amen too. Whatever these renewal folk had mixed up and passed around, I was pretty down with drinking their ice-cold Kool-Aid. Perhaps a silly metaphor for a fast day, but I did not feel dehydrated one bit.
When we exiting the garden onto busy Emek Refaim, a trendy boulevard of shops and restaurants, we found the street flooded with all kinds of Israelis in white. Imagine worldly angels descending upon Broadway, not a car in sight, laughing and playing. Everywhere I looked, these angel-people were running into all the old friends they'd forgotten, plus finding all the great people they'd just met in the last few weeks. I was among the angel-people, gathered in a conglomerate of Pardesniks, my classmates, who had come from at least three different services and magically, unplanned, converged on that cosmic corner of Rachel Imenu.
The atmosphere was other-worldly, but so tangibly, and intangibly, real. Every particle in the space was absolutely ethereal. And I was absolutely exhausted by all of it. Whoever thinks Yom Kippur is a sad day just hasn't experienced it in Jerusalem.
The rabbi, in her alternating Hebrew and English (always ten Hebrew words to one English one, so who knows what we really got), had us break into small groups of three. Two Pardes friends I particularly like and I crewed up to talk about our deepest desires to forgive and be forgiven. It's interesting how the rabbi was able to command more than one hundred people in an outdoor space, with an indoor voice, into deep discussions about our relationships with our closest friends and ourselves. To find out that most people my age share regrets and troubles over former flames, stressful parent ties, and growing up. In a lonely Facebook world, where you think you're sharing everything, it's refreshing to realize you aren't opening up at all, until you sit down and just spell the truth out to near strangers. This rabbi, this space, and this community enabled a garden full of people from ages 6 to 86 to do that.
The service ended with a dramatic call-and-response prayer, popcorn-style, where anyone in the tent could just stand up and proclaim the next line of the poetic proclamation from the Selichot service. Everyone would validate the caller with an emphatic 'Amen!' response. At first, it seemed somewhat silly, a little heretical and evangelical at first, like a Southern Baptist church. But I was having such a good time and I was so comfortable with my chair cushion and my sharing-is-caring forgiveness chat, that I was among the masses, shouting out Amen too. Whatever these renewal folk had mixed up and passed around, I was pretty down with drinking their ice-cold Kool-Aid. Perhaps a silly metaphor for a fast day, but I did not feel dehydrated one bit.
When we exiting the garden onto busy Emek Refaim, a trendy boulevard of shops and restaurants, we found the street flooded with all kinds of Israelis in white. Imagine worldly angels descending upon Broadway, not a car in sight, laughing and playing. Everywhere I looked, these angel-people were running into all the old friends they'd forgotten, plus finding all the great people they'd just met in the last few weeks. I was among the angel-people, gathered in a conglomerate of Pardesniks, my classmates, who had come from at least three different services and magically, unplanned, converged on that cosmic corner of Rachel Imenu.
The atmosphere was other-worldly, but so tangibly, and intangibly, real. Every particle in the space was absolutely ethereal. And I was absolutely exhausted by all of it. Whoever thinks Yom Kippur is a sad day just hasn't experienced it in Jerusalem.
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