Candle lighting for the last of the fall High Holy Days, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, is less than three hours away. Once those candles are lit the holiday will officially begin and I will shut off my computer and phone in order to better immerse myself in my Jewish life and the rituals surrounding the holiday. I will eat large meals with good friends, sing and dance in my synagogue with the Torah in my arms, and nap. A lot.
I have spent a lot of days like this in the last four weeks. Starting with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in early September, each week has had one or two such holy days where work stops. How joyous! But the anticipation to these holidays, as many religious Jews will tell you, is filled with stress and a whole lot of running around, trying to get everything ready and clean and set and cooked and prepared and AAAHHHHH! before the sun begins its descent. So as I count down the minutes until candle lighting, trying very hard to remember to breathe and take a moment for myself, I am also saying a little slightly counter-intuitive prayer: "Thank you, G-d, that the holiday season is nearly over!" For each of the last six years, Rosh Hashanah and subsequent month of holidays has brought me both joy and conflict as I try to negotiate the happiness of having a beautiful community with which to celebrate alongside the disappointment when J is unable to join me for much of it. This year, I approached the season with added trepidation, having spent the last five months struggling with my personal religious practice and identity. It manifested itself in doubt, frustration, anger, and the complete inability to sit through a single Shabbat service. I was antsy and felt entirely detached from the text in my prayer book or, for that matter, the people sitting next to me, and I had no idea to whom, or what, I was praying.
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It didn't take me long to learn one of the top ten lessons for surthriving residency: to "find a tribe." Participation in a tribe, or community, though a meaningful part of any healthy lifestyle, becomes an absolute necessity when your better half is absent. The relative value of that tribe increases with every compounded variable, whether it's a cross-country move, moving to a place with few existing connections, a spouse in one of the more demanding residences (they're all demanding, but some are more arduous than others), or, you know, all of the above.
In New York, community serves a secondary function: to make the city a little smaller and more manageable. As we prepared for our move someone told me that even though New York is a huge city, it begins to shrink the moment you settle into your neighborhood and your routines. Finding your routes and your haunts, your favorite coffee shops and 99-cent stores, that bar you go to with one friend and the restaurant you go to with another, these are the things that turn The Big Apple into something more bite-sized. Even in How I Met Your Mother, the characters agreed New York City was The Best Place On Earth™ while sitting at the same booth in the same bar night after night. The truth is that Manhattan or Brooklyn or the Bronx might be where you live, but your neighborhood is your home. It should come as no surprise, then, that upon arriving in Brooklyn I had one very singular goal: to find a community. Throughout high school and college, there was this boy who had a crush on me. And he wasn't just any boy -- he was my rabbi's son. That in itself wasn't actually so alarming or awkward. I quite liked my rabbi and loved his family overall. But it just so happened that this particular son was on a path toward a more religious way of life. His family, like my own, was somewhere in the middle of the road of religious Judaism. "Conservadox," I liked to call it. For example, we kept the dietary laws in our homes but ate vegetarian food at non-Kosher restaurants, and we observed Shabbat and all the holidays but drove our cars instead of walking. But he was "becoming more frum," as we say when someone discards the leniencies of their childhood in pursuit of something more, whether it be more strict, more austere, more connected, more traditional, whatever that might be. This can be a noble pursuit, and in truth I was going through my own similar transformation, albeit in much smaller increments and with an end goal not so far from where I started. In his case, it meant ultimately wanting all the trappings of an ultra-orthodox lifestyle with its uniform of beard and black hat for himself, along with a wife who lived according to the same religious standards. This was where the trouble began, because no matter how kind he was, no matter how much I thought maybe I liked him back, no matter how sincere he seemed, I could never be that wife.
You can imagine his surprise, then, when a few years after a disastrous attempt at dating he found out where I was living. "Borough Park," I said with a smile. It was a bastion of ultra-orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn. For him it would have been a magnificent place to live! For me, it was anything but. |
AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
September 2019
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