Jane Genova, this is a most personal posting. So, you should skip this and come back on Tuesday. I will not be posting tonight or tomorrow in respect for Yom Kippur. I am a most unorthodox Jew and I have some thinking on this holiest of days, that would not be embraced by a great many others of my heritage. I wrote about it a couple years back on ItSeemstoMe.com my now dormant personal blog
Here's what I wrote on Sept. 25, 2004:
This is the holiest day of the year in the religion of my heritage--the Day of Atonement. I’ve greeted this day with ambivalence ever since I was a kid wondering if brushing my teeth was a sinful breech of the required day-long fast. Now, I often spend the day hiking alone and reflecting on whatever dances into my mind. This year, with a schedule conflict, I’ll hike in a few days later at Pinnacles National Monument, which seems to me a more spiritual place than any manmade building.
This ambivalence stems from questions that came to me 50 years ago and remain unanswered today. This Day of Atonement, when God hauls out his big book and quill and decides who lives or dies seems to me like micro-management, not work suitable for an all-seeing and allegedly merciful Deity. And if God were so sharp, why doesn’t he modernize and scrap the book for a data center?
My key issue is that this Judgement Day perspective of predeterming life and death is horribly mean spirited. I have known perfectly wonderful people who have died young and almost always horribly. They were good people. Their passage cut spiritual gashes into the spirits of good people left behind.
Then there are the bad guys who seem to get off. Yom Kippur concludes a 10-day cooling off period that started on Rosh Hashanah, our Jewish New Year. The way I understand it, if you display sufficient remorse during this fortnight, your record gets expunged, you get a year's forgiveness in which you are perfectly free to do more harm.
If some mighty decision maker makes all this happen by checking a name on a list , then this deity is no friend of mine or the families and friends of those who have left us or will this year leave us, or become the innocent victims of those who got a stay of execution on Yom Kippur only to go out and scorch more earth in the next year, causing more humans to suffer.
I dislike and disbelieve in any concept of predetermination. As I write these words, a single cell is subdividing in someone's body into another cell and another until a cancer is formed. I hope that if there is a God, he she or it had nothing to do with putting it there.
I also question words of atonement. Saying you’re sorry in a house of worship, doesn’t seem constructive to me. People should just feel it and change their ways.
Personally, I prefer another Jewish thought found in our Talmud: We create our heavens and hells here on earth during our own lifetimes by our actions. We are responsible.
But the thought that best explains life and death best to me was probably first and best expressed by some hippie on the streets of San Francisco in the 60s: Shit happens.
