Listen to the Rain

Well, it happens every year.

The liturgy is the same every year, so it's hard to come up with new things to say (probably the same problem some rabbis having during the drash), but there's comfort in that. It's like Passover, like Sukkot, like all the holidays we have done for thousands of years. In good times and bad, in times of persecution and times of leniency, when those who hate us are strong and when they are weak, here and in Israel, it's the same. Even in Jerusalem, they still say לשנה הבאה בירושלים ( l'shana haba'ah b'Yerushalayim, "next year in Jerusalem"). It's nice to submerge yourself into the ritual, when you always know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen: to listen to "Kol Nidre" and then to be sent out to "B'Shem Hashem" on Erev Yom Kippur, to hear "Avinu Malkeinu" and the "Unatanah Tokef" and end with my favorite song, "El Nora Alilah." It's not a Neilah without hundreds of people (would be thousands but there aren't that many left behind at the end of the day) singing along as the gates are closing.

At Break Fast afterwards, I sat with a couple and their teenage daughter, who had a moment of fangirling when she learned I knew worldbshiny. She had seen the Spongebob Squarepants musical that sashagee and I also saw--and which I didn't write anything on here about, searching through my archives--and when I told the daughter that worldbshiny had won a Jeff for her Foley and that I knew here, she was incredibly excited. She actually squealed "That's my first choice!" when I said that worldbshiny sometimes gave guest lectures at Northwestern, because it turned out she was going to college for musical theatre. All of which is to say, the kids are alright. At least the ones willing to stick out YK through Neilah.

The interesting part is the part that's different every year, and that's the classes that happen during the afternoon. There's a gap between the end of Yizkor and the beginning of Neilah, and Mishkan fills it with various seminars and events you an attend. I went to one about "stillness," which was basically a guided meditation session. We all lay on the floor with our knees up and just concentrated on our breathing, in for four, hold for four, out for eight, for about five minutes, and it was one of the only times I've actually been able to achieve 無心 (mushin, "No-mind") while meditating. Then we did facial self-massage, rubbing our temples and squeezing our eyebrows for a few minutes, which felt nice but didn't get me to sink into the activity the way that the first part did. Between each session we talked with a person next to us about our experiences, how we found it and how it made us feel, and what we got out of it, and it was a really nice way to just be for an hour before I went off to the second class.

It's traditional to read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur, because of the themes of judgement and repentence--in Hebrew תשובה teshuvah, literally "returning." Like so much of Tanakh when you look at it, Jonah is a bit odd. G-d tells Jonah to go to Ninevah and Jonah immediately runs away, tells the sailors to throw him overboard as soon as they ask what's going on, and when he goes to Ninevah and the people there listen and change their ways, asks G-d to kill him because he's so annoyed about the outcome! So why is this in Tanakh and what message are we supposed to draw from it? Jonah tells us in Chapter 4 that he ran away because he didn't want Ninevah to be delivered from judgement, perhaps because Ninevah was an enemy of the Children of Israel. The sages also give two other reasons: the first is that he thought he would be a laughingstock because if he proclaimed that the city would be destroyed and nothing happened, everyone would think he was just some ranting weirdo on a streetcorner rather than a righteous prophet of G-d; and the second is that if Ninevah did repent, it would look really bad for the Children of Israel, who were told to repent by many prophets and yet consistently refused to do so. But why is Jonah's immediate response the modern millennial humor "Things are bad, death is the only escape"? We spent an hour talking about that as a whole group, because the room was set up as a classroom so the usual practice of breaking up into ḥevrutah wouldn't have worked, but I enjoyed the discussion even though it kept moving on before I could contribute anything.

The next day was the Chicago Marathon, and my sister wanderluster_kp was in town running with nytesenvy as support. wanderluster_kp asked if she could sleep at our place since the marathon check-in was around 6:30 a.m. By the time we woke up she was already gone, but we got ready and headed out in time to see her round the bend at the northern part of the race, around Addison. And it turned out that uriany was there too! He and friends were waiting right near our location and saw wanderluster_kp at the same point. They invited us to go further south to catch her later, but my parents were bringing Laila home so we needed to be there to meet them. After lunch and nap time, my parents and I left again to go down to Chinatown to catch them on the southern leg of the race. It took a while--apparently nytesenvy was having some trouble and had slowed down--and they weren't visible on the tracker any more, but we did see them go back a bit after the end-of-race 15 mph car went by, and then we left again to go toward the finish line. They finished with a time of around 6 hours and 52 minutes, and then we picked up wanderluster_kp and took her back to my house to clean up.

It was a very Chicago day for a marathon, though--bright and sunny in the morning, and gale-force cold winds in the afternoon. Classic.