I spoke to a couple of friends yesterday, and in the course of the conversation asked that, if in the past year I have done anything to offend or antagonize them, if they could please forgive me. They, of course, consented and asked the same of me. “Forgiveness is a wonderful thing,” said one of them.

The prep work for the Yamim Nora’im is much harder than the prep work for Pesach. In six months, we clean out our houses. Right now, we are cleaning out our souls. The work of Yamim Nora’im is not to find the crouton in the back of the refrigerator, but to find the grudge in the back of your mind, to unknot it, and to forgive. To search your actions in the past year, realize what you have done to hurt anyone else, and then to go to that person, and ask them if they can find it in their hearts to forgive you. Only after you have done this work, can you then go with a truly open and humble heart before God, publically confess and ask for forgiveness of the sins of which only you and The Almighty are aware.

There is someone in particular whom I cannot forgive, and of whom I cannot ask forgiveness right now. It is someone whom I need to reconcile to, but it is not the right time. As Yamim Nora’im approach, the situation feels more and more desperate, but the whole thing will blow up in my face and become much worse if I do anything about it, and he and I will both be paying for years and years to come, maybe for the rest of our lives, and that is something that neither he nor I can afford to have happen.

And so, this is what I am doing about it. Every day in my prayers, morning and night, I say that while I understand that it is not God’s place to forgive sins between man and man, I pray that God will give us the time that we need to reconcile to each other, however long that may take, that God will help to ease the process, and that we may become whole again. I pray that we be allowed, so to speak, to put off forgiving each other without too much ill-consequence. Because this is the best that I can do right now.

This is an extreme situation. For anything less serious than this I would call this a cop-out, a way to avoid the work of Yom Kippur. But having talked to my rabbi about the situation, there are some extreme cases when you just can’t finish the work of forgiveness in one year, or even five years, or, God forbid, ten. And you have to find a way to forgive yourself and the other person for *that* fact, and move on, doing what you can.

Along similar lines to the last post, walking back from shul this morning I just remembered this train of thought which came up last Monday at Talmud class…

We have been studying Tractate Taanit, the bits about mentions of rain in tefillah, when we talk about rain and when we don’t, and we started to discuss the evolution of the Siddur and the prayer service in general. The teacher mentioned that there is a move in some circles to begin to include petitionary prayers in the Shabbat service. Normally we refrain from petitionary prayers on Shabbat with the exception of Hashkiveinu (lay us down in peace, recited after Shema) and Misheberach L’Cholim, the prayer for the sick. The rationale is that those Jews who attend Synagogue only on Shabbat and Yom Tovim should have a chance to get in their petitionary prayers while they are there.

I didn’t say anything in class, but this quite upset me. Let’s slippery slope this one just a little… by this logic, we should accomodate those Jews who only come to shul on Yom Kippur by including all of the prayers said all throughout the year so that these once-a-year Jews could get all their Jewish in one dose.

Of course, these days we are lucky to find a Conservative Jew who attends synagogue every Shabbat. Frankly, though, I don’t think that those Jews who attend only on Shabbat will stop attending on Shabbat if petitionary prayers are not included, and I also do not think that those who do not attend even on Shabbat will be made more likely to attend on account of the fact that “Ooh! Now I can get in my petitionary prayers!” Just try to imagine a non-shul-going Jew saying that.

Yesterday when I went to morning minyan, one of the men asked me if I had a Yahrzeit, the anniversary of the death of a loved one, on which it is customary for one to say Kaddish, and in order to say Kaddish one must be in the presence of a Minyan. I told him no, and he looked suprised for a moment and said “Oh… you just came. Okay.” People seek out weekday minyanim when such a need arises for a specific reason. Even just for this reason I think that it is important to preserve the way in which we conduct our prayers on Shabbat and on weekdays. If a person really wants to get in a petitionary prayer, let them come to shul. The problem, of course, is that it is already so difficult to get a weekday minyan in a Conservative community that most shuls can’t afford to be open every weekday morning to provide the venue without the foreknowledge that the minyan will be guaranteed and that there is a need for it.

What needs to happen, I think, is that Conservative communities need to form something like a minyan-makers society: a committed group of adults who agree to hold morning services every day at some agreed-upon venue. It doesn’t have to be the shul. I believe that there are people out there who would like to pray everyday but don’t have the resources, the knowledge, education or support. I believe, again, that this is an area in which we need to not give in and give up, but rather just give an opportunity, and be patient. I believe strongly that Judaism can stand on its merits and that if we give our people the tools, they will come to it.

I spent last Shabbat in South Jersey at my grandmother’s house with my sister and a couple of her friends. Grandma is in Paris at the moment and invited us to appropriate the place for bachelorette party uses (no, this does not mean strippers… this means a weekend of chick flicks, pizza and ice cream, kosher vegetrian chinese food in Philadelphia, and picnics by a fountain on Bryn Mawr campus). Seeing as how I no longer travel on Shabbat, and neither does one of my sister’s friends, we decided that the weekend would start with getting to Grandma’s in time for a nice Shabbat dinner and then spending a quiet day at home, everyone observing as they saw fit.

As it happened, this worked out very nicely. I woke up relatively early, found my grandmother’s tallis, and davened alone by the window in the den with my Ohr Chadash (Sim Shalom Shabbat and Festivals with Commentary) Siddur. It was actually the first time that I had davened alone on Shabbat.

I grew up in a neighborhood which was not walking distance to any shul which my family cared to attend. We went to shul every Shabbat, but we drove. This is how my father grew up too. I never questioned this until recently. After reading the actual Conservative teshuvah on the subject I became less and less comfortable with riding to or from shul on Shabbat and Yom Tovim. I also became increasingly aware of the fact that as a family we did not restrict our driving to the trip to and from shul as the Conservative stipulates should be done. As a result, Shabbat rarely felt like Shabbat after shul was over. After I moved, I continued to take the subway to my old shul for about a year. For the last several months of that year, I made sure that I only traveled on Shabbat to and from shul and spent the rest of the day reading or napping. Most recently, I got up the courage to walk into the shul which stands two blocks from my doorstep.

Grandma’s shul is six miles from her house… A possible, but not really a reasonable walk. I am fairly certain that there is not a single synagogue in the town in which she lives. The decision of CJLS, adopted in 1960, which allows for leniency in the prohibition against riding on Shabbat in the case of travel to synagogue for the sake of worship, saw the decision as essentially an emergency measure for the sake of allowing far-flung congregants to participate in communal Shabbat worship, the cardinal institution of Judaism which is “indispensable to the preservation of the religious life of American Jewry.” The very reasonable assesment of the situation was that if one is prevented from attending shul, one will fall away from Jewish practice. This is reasonable because Conservative Jews do not learn how to practice at home.

Following on the heels of the egalitarianism debates, it might be tempting to draw a causative (or more appropriately, causal… like with gravity) line from the one to the other: as we have abandoned the woman’s role as the maintainer of home observance, we have drifted away from home observance and have come to rely on the institution of the synagogue too heavily for our “dose of Jewish” rather than leading fully Jewish lives.

But I do not think that egalitarianism is the culprit here, nor do I think that it is a symptom of the problem. I think that the problem is one that The Conservative Movement inherited from Reform and has yet to recover from. It was, after all, the Reform Movement which sought to recreate Judaism in the image of German Protestant Christianity with the pomp and aesthetic of the church as the centerpiece of religious life. We have, in many ways, taken back the synagogue from the status of “Jewish Church” in which it was cast by the Reform Movement, returning from the vernacular to Hebrew, doing away with instrumentation on Shabbat, not abbreviating our Torah reading, etc. but we have not been successful in reclaiming home worship. Regular recitation of brachot, morning and evening tefillah, these things have remained by the wayside and it is a damn shame that we have not yet figured out how to bring them back home.

It is true. Most of us are lost without a congregation and a leader when it comes time to daven. But we didn’t create the problem. Nor, however, do I think that we should despair of solving it. I honestly do not think that Conservative practice and Conservative philosophy are incompatible with observance and piety. I do think that The Movement has fallen down in it’s duty, as the halachic and observant but reasonable movement, to teach its children the basics of home observance, the value of living a holistically Jewish life. It is late, but I do not think that it is too late. These things do, however, take time, and they take charisma, and strength and tenacity and perseverence and patience.

My coworker Aaron and I often talk about Judaism. He is, and was raised, Modern Orthodox, though he dislikes being labelled “Orthodox.” He attends primarily Chabad services, wears a kippah at all times, etc.

I am… me.

Aaron once said something to me that really stuck with me. We were talking about the path that I am pursuing, and about egalitarianism and about how my primary experience with ‘doxers has been of hearing their criticism of me and the way that I practice Judaism, or even saying that what I practice isn’t Judaism at all, or that I’m not Jewish to begin with in some instances.

Aaron said to me “That’s ridiculous. I mean, I do what I do, I’m not always perfect, I don’t say all the brachot that I should say all the time, but I know my relationship with God. Nobody but you knows what your relationship is with God, and it is in no way my place or anyone else’s place to judge you for the way that you practice.”

Another discussion has come up regarding egalitarianism. You guessed it: David again. And again, the discussion has been, so far, remarkably civil, and for the most part I am enjoying it greatly.

There’s one element that keeps bothering me, though. It is the assumptions that people make about others’ relationship to God. For some people, it is easy. God commands (commandments which are clearly set down exactly as they should be), we obey, and we praise. You don’t compromise. No one ever says you’ll always be perfect in your obedience, but you basically don’t question what it is that you are supposed to do, whether you actually do it or not.

For some of us, though, it is a little less clear, a little less cut-and-dry than that. For some of us, we look at the history of our religion, and we see a body of law that is the way it is today because, at certain points in our history, certain groups of Jewish men decided that that was the way it was going to be. This does not mean that we reject God’s hand in the process of commandment, or even in the development of halacha. But we do find sufficient reason to question the way that we do things from time to time. As I have said, God doesn’t change, but people, communities, laws, do.

There are, that I can see, two perceptions among the Orthodox of the rest of us, those of us who don’t do everything the way that they think it should be done, and don’t seem to think that we have to: One, is that we are simply lazy or ignorant, that we know that the law comes directly from God and that we are commanded to behave accordingly, but we either simply don’t want to or we don’t know how. The second is that we have decided that Torah doesn’t come from God at all and as such we can pick and choose what we do and don’t want to observe based simply and solely on convenience and what makes us feel good.

The ground that we in the Conservative movement hold, the ground that I hold, is a very difficult position in which to locate oneself. Nothing is so clear as either of these views, which in large part, I think, accounts for our waning numbers. We lose a lot of people to the clearer more cut-and-dry positions. No one wants to think so hard about why we do what we do if we don’t think that God speaks in words and letters and if we think that law is ultimately in the hand of the community. It is difficult to say that we can change but that the change can not be based on whim alone. It is difficult to say, convincingly, that halacha is binding yet dynamic, man-made yet divine, that, as Neil puts it, gays can have a place in the rabbinate but oysters are still treyf.

There is a person I know (actually, this is several people I know, but I will not speak negatively of a particular person, so I’ll make them all one hypothetical person) who believes that women have no place taking on the roles traditionally held by men in the community and in the synagogue. S/he believes that a woman should recognize that her place in the home, maintaining kashrut, the sanctity of Shabbat, and Taharat HaMishpacha is the most basic fundamental foundation of Jewish life and she should be not only satisfied but honored and overjoyed to be the one duty-bound to hold the Jewish family unit, and by extension, the entire Jewish people together in this way, that she has no need of tallis or tefillin, that she should not concern herself with being called for an aliyah or reading Torah or leading a congregation, because her defining role is so much more essential than any of these tokens, that she is already sufficiently close to God that anything more is simply superfluous and beyond the scope of what God wants of us as women.

Meanwhile, this person (these people) eats (eat) bacon.

I may daven like a man, I may not be entirely sure whether or not I want to marry or to have children of my own, I may have conflicting feelings about the place of Taharat HaMishpacha in our society (not that it concerns me as an unmarried woman), but I have never tasted bacon.

Does this make me a better Jew than this person? No. It emphatically does not. But, here’s what it does mean: it means that I struggle to understand my place. It means that I have long conversations with myself and with my rabbis and with God about what us expected of me in the grand scheme of things. It means that I am constantly working to get myself to a place where I am satisfied with my method and level of Jewish observance, and satisfied that what I am doing is what is right, not just for me and how I feel about it but what is actually right. And that is a point that I am almost certain that I will never reach because God is ultimately unknowable. What we have are breadcrumbs, and the breadcrumbs are, in some places along the road, scattered, and the path is unclear. But I do my best with that which I have been given.

You can believe all you want that you have a difinitive map to the exact path. But if you don’t even follow it, then why are you talking to me about it?

And even if you do have a map and you follow it precisely, what if I have reason to believe that the map was drawn by people also following breadcrumbs?

The metaphors are running away with me. My point is that we all come to the derech in different ways. Some of us struggle a little bit more with the da lifney mi atah omed part: “know before whom you stand.” Or, along the same lines, “Know from whence you came, to where you are going, and before Whom you are destined to give an accounting.” And really, that’s all that we can expect of ourselves and of each other.