Thursday and Friday were Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and the start of the High Holidays. Of the various names for the High Holidays, my favorite is the Yamim Nora’im, most commonly translated at the Days of Awe. A cantor friend of mine once called them “The Terrible Days,” which may be a reasonable clergy-view but is also a fairly tongue-in-cheek translation.
At a synagogue I used to attend, the English translation of nora was indeed “terrible.” I knew what the prayerbook meant when it claimed “God’s name is terrible,” but the translation didn’t exactly flow.
Nora does indeed mean terrible, but terrible in terms of “the great and terrible day that heralds the coming of the Lord,” or perhaps a sense of God judging humanity with a terrible mercy. Nora is a perfectly appropriate word in Hebrew, I think. Awe-inspiring, awesome, awe-gaping-stonishing might be appropriate translations of most of the meaning into English, but it’s incomplete without adding a little of the terror of the terrible.
My best shot at translating nora, as it applies to God, is to say that it means thunder on the mountain – where there’s a strange cast to the light, the clouds are large as cities and you can’t decide whether you’d rather stare in rapture or run for cover. (Try finding a simple translation for that.)
***
So far, I haven’t found any nora in this year’s Yamim Nora’im. I spent Rosh Hashanah at my work synagogue, where I oversee children’s services for much of the morning of the holy days.
Last year I managed to still participate in much of the service by arranging things just so. This year however, the synagogue adopted a new High Holiday prayerbook and managed to tighten up their service impressively, taking off about 40 minutes of lag-time and electing to take a sabbatical from long-winded commentaries. This meant that I participated in much less of the service than I had expected to. With all my running around and very little time in the sanctuary, there was little chance for me to find spine-tingling significance in my Rosh Hashanah practice this year.
As I think about the situation though, I am beginning to believe that Yom Kippur was crafted to address situations like mine. Rosh Hashanah is supposed to be all about fear and trembling. However, even for the non-clergy (and non-education-directors) who spend the day in the body of the sanctuary, there are a whole lot of distractions pulling one away from the call to repentance.
On the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the house where I was staying was hosting a holiday meal for what felt like half the congregation of the synagogue. I arrived after services and after the main body of the meal, when the twenty-some adults were mingling while the dozen-plus kids were all settling in to the opening scenes of Shrek. There were folks up late into the night, washing every last fancy crystal glass and putting up all the extra tables and linens that had come out for the event.
Of course, this scene isn’t unusual. Rosh Hashanah can mean big family get-togethers, and it definitely means more people at the table than usual. And then the same thing happens again, again, again. (And again and again, if—like this year—Rosh Hashanah is flush against Shabbat.)
Ten days later, we fast for Yom Kippur. There are a number of good reasons for this fasting, among them the idea that we are to only praise God on this day, and not be distracted by the intake of food. I think it’s less about the distraction of eating and more about the thousand inevitable distractions connected to the meal, from gathering all your guests to refilling glasses to doing the dishes, dishes, so many dishes!
And sure, we pack in the eating/gathering/bustling distractions as close to Yom Kippur as we can, with the typical big pre-YK feast and the traditional break fast meal, but at least for the 25 hours of the holiest, most nora day of them all, the obligations of food are not going to stand in the way of the spiritual side of things.
No comments:
Post a Comment