Is it really 5767 already?

Wow, where did 5766 go?  Like a flash, it was here and now it's gone.  And I'm not even Jewish.

I am Jewish, though.  Not by birth or by training, but by identification.  It must have been something that happened to me when I was avoiding the draft at the kosher summer camp in the Catskills back in the early 70s.  Since I'm not Jewish I don't worry about my Jewishness too much.  I have it completely figured out. It's just a phase I'm going through.  Never mind that it's lasted 40 years.  I'll get over it.  It's just a matter of time.

Meanwhile, you want to know why I keep thinking I must be Jewish?  Here's what the Jews here in San Francisco were pondering on Yom Kippur.

These concepts are complicated, Kushner said. 

"He who performs repentance out of love," read one of the texts he handed out, "his premeditated sins are transformed into merits." 

That idea, that a sin could transform into an act of beauty, drew an outcry. 

One audience member called it "anti-Jewish," while another said that it amounted to "revisionist history."

But Julia Vetromile said she understood, citing the example of former gang members who use their experiences to push at-risk kids onto a productive path. They are saving lives by dissuading others from violence, Vetromile said. 

"It's not that they didn't commit the crimes," Vetromile said. "But they couldn't do what they're doing if they hadn't committed those crimes."

A few questioned the limits of forgiveness. 

"I'm one of the people who can't forgive the Germans and who can't forgive the Lithuanians, from where I came," an elderly woman in the audience said, referring to the atrocities of the Holocaust. 

"You're allowing them to continue punishing you," Kushner retorted.

"For all of us, including myself, there are some things for which there is no forgiveness," he said. "But I regard that as a sign of my own spiritual defectiveness."

I asked a rabbi once if my obligation to observe Yom Kippur was affected by whether or not I believed in God.  Absolutely not, he said.  In fact, if I didn't believe in God, so much greater was my obligation to stop on Yom Kippur and take responsibility for the way I lived my life.  Sometimes I wish I were either a little more zen or a little more Jewish, because I came up this year holding some grudges.  Damn.

As a buddhist, I believe that a grudge weighs about a gazillion pounds and you put it in a tow sack and you have to carry it around with you everywhere you go.  I have worked studiously to avoid grudges.  I know I was supposed to start thinking about all of this on Rosh Hoshannah, but I was busy then fighting with an asshole.  So here I am a day late and a dollar short with a gazillion pounds of garbage in my towsack. 

So, belatedly in regards to the actual day the year changed, l'shana tova to all. 

Comments

[jaye]

It frightens me how much your soul knows my soul.

[marallyn]

and the Dalai Lama met with a bunch of Jews to find out how they survived all those years in exile...throw the towsack into the river and start again...but keep a couple of the meanest ones to chew on...a sweet year to you too...stay safe

[Jack]

Shana tova to you as well.

[Linda]

Shana Tova! Nice post. I love Kushner. I met him in Baltimore when I lived there and attended book signings when I was single, childless and had time for those things. Great guy in person as well.