When I was little and lived in the Bronx, schools would close for the Jewish holidays. There were so many Jewish kids that the classrooms would have been empty anyway.  I went to services only at this time of year. My mother was the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, she kept kosher at home, but would eat lobster anytime she could. My father was a humanist (believed in respecting all people, in social justice, world peace, and other practical things for making a better world.) He didn’t talk much about God, he didn’t like organized religion of any persuasion,  he may have been a closet agnostic, but he taught me about ethics, integrity, character, and respect. Things I am rediscovering in the context of Jewish liturgical services.

The structure of the ten days celebrating the Jewish New Year - Rosh Hashana - is interesting to examine as a vehicle for personal growth. The first two days (Jewish holidays are sundown to sundown) sees the opening of the heavenly gates - a ram’s horn is blown in an ancient and hair-raising series of blasts that awaken ancestral memory. The next 9 days are the time to make amends - pay back debt to persons, apologize for wrong behaviors, get right with your fellow man. The tenth day is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. This day is the holiest in the calendar (besides Shabbat, which was ordained by God). Having cleansed your karma from the past year, you spend the day humbly asking to be forgiven for your sins and to be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year. The entire community confesses together to all 22 misbehaviors, which we acknowledge and accept responsibility for, whether we committed them or not, we were complicit in some way, and we accept as a community. The effort at single-minded communion with God is aided by the fact that you don’t work, you don’t eat, you don’t drink (even water) for those 24 hours. We remember aloud those who have gone before us, recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead that contains no reference to death, just a litany of praise and gratitude for life itself. At the end the bookend ram’s horn (shofar) is blown again and the Days of Awe have come to an end. Food and drink is shared, and regular life resumes.

Part of the magic is the singing of ancient melodies, sung in the same way for thousands of years. Jesus sang these same songs, and they were millennia old back then. The Hebrew language is exotic, having no relation to European languages, and dances around the page backwards (read right to left on the page, back to front in the book) in a collection of tiny black flames that are the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. You know they contain power, you can see it and hear it. “In the beginning was the Word” - sound and vibration are what the physicists tell us the universe is made of. The philosophers, Buddhists, yogis and quantum physicists tell us that behind vibration (energy) is an organizing creative principle one might call God, Universal Consciousness, the Ground of Being, or whatever your belief or tradition might call It. It is the Sea of Consciousness from whence we came. Judaism is not trying to explain all that, it is basically a framework of ethical rules for living. We live a decent life not for future reward, but for its own sake, and because this is how we please “God”.

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I call myself a Jew-gi. I find the Upanishads and the Vedas are the clearest exposition of the truth I have been seeking. I find it now too in my ancestors’ ways, and it feels like the same thing.