A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I am not terribly observant, to be honest. But I do try to observe somewhat.

The fast is the part people tend to think of first. (I only do it sort of (I drink some black coffee in the morning, or else I am sidelined for the whole day with a splitting headache, which is not conducive to doing anything else)). The other part is that it's a day to grieve for people who have died and think of people who are in trouble. And it's the Day of Atonement.

Part of that is asking forgiveness from people you have wronged or hurt. The idea is to admit that you did damage to the person you hurt, take ownership of it, and accept that forgiveness may not be granted.

But ideas have changed about asking for forgiveness. It's very fraught. Unless you're a Jew talking to another Jew on Yom Kippur itself, it's more likely that even asking is going to come across as an unwanted imposition, and create a burdensome sense that you have to accept the apology and forgive. I also have a tendency to be a bull in a china shop and barge in where I'm not wanted, and I'm aware of and working on that. So I'm not going to do individual apologies unless you are literally a Jew I'm going to see on Yom Kippur, which is zero people reading this. (Though if you would like an individual apology, feel free to contact me!)

With that in mind, I apologize to everyone reading this who I have wronged or hurt or wasn't there for in the past year. For most of you reading, "not being there for" is the big one. I've been very bad at being in touch with people, online and off, in this past year. Sometimes that's as small as reading a post (or a fic) that I know someone would really appreciate a reply to and not commenting, or as big as letting a friendship drift away by failing to keep in touch. I'm going to spend tomorrow repenting of that, and I will try my best to do better next year.

If you observe, may your fast be easy.

You can see the final plagues on my Facebook and Instagram.

We lost the Haggadahs and are reading them off our phones.

I have five plagues represented with jelly beans and gummies: blood, hail, darkness, frogs, and boils.

Behold five delicious plagues of Egypt!

Using only jellybeans, what colors should represent gnats, wild beasts, locusts, pestilence, and the death of the firstborn? Please check pic so if possible, colors are not duplicated.

It feels horribly absurd to say, "Have a sweet new year" right now, when everything is the opposite of sweet. I have a story about the last time I felt that way.

After spending two years getting sicker and sicker and losing more and more weight, while utterly failing to convince any doctors that I had a problem that was not psychosomatic, anxiety, hypochondria, or anorexia, I made a Hail Mary and flew to Bulgaria to get some tests done that doctors wouldn't do here, because they thought the problem was my head and I thought it was somewhere in my abdomen.

eglantiere had offered to put me up for a couple weeks while I got the tests done. But once I got there, things got complicated, and I ended up staying in her bedroom for three months. Possibly the single lowest point of my entire life was waking up after surgery and being informed that Leonard Cohen had died, my cat had died, Trump was now President, and the surgeon showing me an abnormal growth he'd removed, then saying, "But I don't think it could have caused all your symptoms, so clearly it's all in your head. You should see a psychiatrist."

In the middle of all this, Rosh Hashanah happened. I honestly don't think I'd have even remembered it, let alone cared, but I got sat down in the kitchen and fed apples and honey. I weighed eighty pounds - I'd lost a third of my starting body weight by then, enough to make doctors stop telling me I wasn't actually underweight and start accusing me of having an eating disorder I was refusing to cop to. I ate a slice or two thinking how utterly, horribly absurd it was to say, "L'shanah Tovah" - "Have a sweet year" when I was absolutely not going to have a sweet year, ever again.

What happened in the next year is a long, complicated story. But, more or less as a result of the data from the Bulgaria trip, mildred_of_midgard got an idea for a medication I might try, one for inflammatory bowel disease - which is what the Bulgarian scans suggested I had, even though the doctors later said that actually, they showed I had a head problem.

And it worked.

And it's still working.

The doctors still mostly believe I'm delusional and the fact that an IBD medication makes my symptoms vanish is proof of the placebo effect. I now avoid doctors as much as possible, and in my case I think that's the better of two evils.

So I did have a sweet new year after all, or at least a year with sweet parts, which was something I hadn't had for two years. And the next year was sweeter still. And I went back to Bulgaria, sixty pounds heavier and a thousand pounds of misery lighter, and stayed with eglantiere and swam and explored and ate and had a wonderful time. It was very, very sweet.

Even this year, which has been objectively horrible in every way, has had a lot of sweet parts for me personally. When your point of comparison is "the years that I was dying in agony and kept getting abused by authority figures who had the power to help me but refused to because they thought I was an obnoxious lunatic," a lot of objectively bad things look good in comparison.

I did Passover over Zoom and it was depressing. Jewish holidays shouldn't be celebrated alone. But I've formed a bubble with Halle, so I'm going to her place to eat and drink (heavily, for me anyway) and celebrate and watch the Emmys and wish each other a sweet new year.

I've been thinking of my horrible Rosh Hashanah in Bulgaria all day, because it was so bitter at the time and even imagining anything getting better felt like a cruel lie. It feels the same way today, though then the stakes were very small and personal (one life, my own) and now they're very big and communal (one nation, maybe one world).

I don't know what's going to happen, but because of those sad apples a few years ago, I now know: I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe there will be surprising sweetness to come. It's no less impossible than me surviving and being happy again.

L'Shanah Tovah! May you have a sweet New Year.

Look, I made my own!

ETA: You can follow my adventures on Instagram, I'm updating live.

I attempted to do it in 18 minutes while having a Zoom chat with friends. This was beset by a number of technical difficulties. But I emerged with both the chat and the matzah!

My neighbor left a bottle of wine for me, hidden on her doorstep between two planters. Today I am going to attempt matzah ball soup (with the homemade broth she also left for me), charoset (I crushed pistachio nuts yesterday with a rolling pin while watching Mr. Robot), and crisp-braised duck legs with all the root vegetables that have been sadly lurking in my fridge or cabinets for much too long.

This pandemic combined with my chest freezer has made me WAY better at not wasting food. Previously I didn't have room to freeze much, and also had a lot more distractions. All the same, I selected the duck recipe specifically to use up beets, etc, which are otherwise going to go bad.

The turnips are a lost cause - everyone says they become very bitter once they start sprouting, and they look like a forest. I think I'm going to plant them instead, and get turnip greens.

Chag sameach!

I have made fried honey-and-red wine sauce chikcen and drunk two glasses of Reisling. Did not have time to have lunch. Can't wait for four glasses of wine on an empty stomach (not counting bits of crispy chicke skin I snarfed from the pan.) We have more food lurking in the fridge, and am also making leg of lamb with rosemary and curry powder and thyme. I'm sure it will be delicious. (The cook says, "And garlic." I am typing on a laptop in the kitchen.

We are having a very traditional conversation on original names before Ellis Island changed them. I am the only one who doesn't know mine. My grandfather couldn't remember, and my Dad said he couldn't even when my Dad was a child. Woes. Halle thinks maybe the Mormon temple has records anyway?

I know it's required on Purim (okay, at least recommedned) to get so drunk that you can't tell the diffference between Mordecai and Whatsisface, but in my experience, Passiover has a very strong "drink on an empty stomach" factor.

Meanwhile, in today's developmental psych class, the professor went on an anti-juice tirade. My notes read, "Juice is the devil." Let it be a warning to all of you! Absolutely no juice for kids between ages 2 and 6 (And I guess before 6 too.) I think it has too much sugar? Eeven if fesh-squeezed?

We are now putting out pistachios. For noshing. Halle is salting the pistachios.

I will try to post again between plagues or something.

ETA: I forgot to mention - damn, I forget what I thought I needed to mention.

ETA 2: What I meant to mention was that I have only had 2 hours of sleep.

Also, I am wearing Halle's Harjuku Madness shirt. Mine got splattered by chicken oil and is in the wash. It is very clingy and my breasts look humongous,

ETA 3: Halle opened a bottle of seltzer water to make the matzoh balls fluffy and it exploded everywhere. We all screamed.

Here, have a totally inappropriate icon.

This morning the cable guy arrived to turn on my internet (long story), saying, "This will take 20 minutes!"

It took him two and a half hours. Including crawling around in my basement AND my closet. Poor guy.

I now have to buy charoset ingredients. Anyone have a favorite recipe? (Ashkenazi tradition, probably - I don't like raisins, figs, or dates.)

Yesterday I observed Yom Kippur for the first time, with a (slightly fudged via a little black coffee) fast and six hours in the temple.

Both my parents were born Jewish, but neither of their families was observant. Then I was raised in… given that it was just Yom Kippur I will refrain from my usual sarcastic phrasing and describe it as its adherents do, as a non-Jewish spiritual path which believes that their spiritual master, Meher Baba, was God.

As you all know, I had a miserable time being raised on the ashram, secretly disbelieved in the divinity of Baba, and disagreed and still disagree with many of his teachings. (I can’t say I disagree with all of them as some were stuff like “do unto others.”) In particular, I had to recite prayers to Baba on a regular basis, composed by Baba to praise Baba or to repent to Baba to my sins. I could still recite every one of those damn prayers from memory.

It’s a toss-up which I loathed more, the prayer of praise to a God I disbelieved in or the prayer of repentance for sins which I mostly either hadn’t committed or didn’t believe were wrong. I don’t believe that thoughts can be morally wrong, so I hated having to repent for them. I wasn’t yet old enough to commit lustful actions, but I was old enough to believe that lust, by itself, was not a sin. There was also a lot of pressure to forgive everyone everything regardless of whether you felt genuinely forgiving, of what the wrong was, or of whether the person who did it had repented.

I could go on (and on! And on!), but suffice it to say that it took me till the age of nearly thirty-six (one more month!) to convince myself that I could get behind any conception of repentance, sin, forgiveness, and atonement. Actually, what mostly convinced me was that I had attended Rosh Hashanah services at the same temple last year right before the evil gay marriage ban was passed, and the rabbi gave an impassioned talk on “Is gay marriage kosher?” His conclusion was that, at least as far as his interpretation was concerned, it was both lawful and holy. I figured that any service he ran would be unlikely to morally repulse me.

I should explain that I do realize that the Jewish take on just about everything is completely different from the Baba take. However, 1) I don’t believe in God in the sense of a self-willed supernatural intelligence, 2) I swore after I left the ashram that I would never voluntarily make any prayer that I did not absolutely believe in.

I decided that whenever the liturgy said any name of God, I would take “God” to mean “all that exists and is good, including all that is good in humanity and all that is good in myself.” When I thought of it that way, I found that I actually did believe in virtually the entire service.

As for the extremely long list of sins to be repented of, the rabbi explained that they are to be repented collectively rather than individually regardless of what you actually committed, so that if there is even one person present who is the only person who committed a particular sin, no one will ever have to know who that is, and they won’t be held up to shame. That, I can get behind.

At a lull in the service, an acquaintance sitting beside me leaned over and said, “Rachel, could you speak to my son about why you come to temple on High Holy Days?”

Her son is 11. Thinking she thought maybe I seemed young and cool (hi, faulty self-image! I am closer to 40 than 30!) I whispered back, “I would, but I’m not sure I’m the best person to do it. You see, I guess you’re not aware, but—“

“Oh, Rachel, I’m completely aware,” she replied. “N— is an atheist too. That’s why I want you to talk to him!”

I didn’t actually get a chance to talk to him that day, but since I thought I was going to, I spent some time thinking about why I did come. Like many non-practicing and atheist Jews, I question my own authenticity as a Jew.

The night before, I had accidentally gone to the wrong location (the usual location of the synagogue, actually, but I’ll get to that) and stared in confusion at an entirely white-clad group separated by gender. One of them came and explained that I was welcome to join them, but I was probably looking for the other group that shared the space.

“I think they’re actually in a church tonight,” I said.

“A CHUUUUURCH?” the Orthodox guy exclaimed, rather like Lady Bracknell’s “A haaaaaandbag?!”

“Er, yes,” I said, recalling my own boggled reaction the first time I encountered that. “It’s just because it’s a much bigger space, and a lot of people show up on High Holy Days.”

The guy said, “Well, there’s a couple churches nearby they might be in, but I don’t know how you’ll figure out which one it is.”

“I imagine it’ll be easily recognizable by the large number of Jews outside,” I said.

The guy looked at me like I was the opposite of funny. I slunk away, feeling like I had just personally disgraced the entire concept of Reform Judaism.

So it was serendipitous when the rabbi in the… well… church building spoke on Reform Judaism, specifically on the feeling some Reform Jews have that they’re not “real Jews,” especially compared to Orthodox Jews. Unsurprisingly, he disagreed.

It was even more apt because I had been thinking about what it means to me to be a Jew. Yes, it’s about a community and an ethnic and cultural heritage. I’ve always known that. But I’m also interested in ways of being a moral and ethical person, and of how life should be lived, and of how to live up to one’s ideals. I think that Judaism has a lot to say about those matters that’s relevant to anyone regardless of belief in God, but specifically, relevant to me.

The church, incidentally, had a flier for the actual Christian congregation that read in part, “Are you seeking? We can give you answers.” I thought, “If that was a Jewish flier, it would say, “Are you seeking? We can give you more questions.””

As for Yom Kippur, I hadn’t actually intended to spend the day in the temple. I attended the morning service, dashed home to make a repair appointment, went ballistic over the phone with a “customer service” person after the “repairman” made it worse, then decided that I had just invalidated all my repentance for yelling at hapless cogs in the machine, and went back to repent some more, in the hope of making it stick this time.

I wore a coat that had belonged to a relative who had died, and spoke his name and others during the service.

When it was time to say the names of those suffering from illness or injury, I said some of your names.

My own name, Rachel, is part of the liturgy. My parents didn’t give me that name, which I chose partly to have a Jewish name and partly for the X-Men character. But yesterday, that choice seemed particularly right.