First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Judgement’s Counterpart

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What is a new beginning?

I found it last year. I chose my own city and snuck out of shul to drink bourbon for breakfast (along with the rabbi). I moved into an Airbnb at 2 in the morning and wondered, for the first time, if eye contact was enough to save the life of the person who lived there. (I believe that it was, at least in that moment.) I signed my first lease on a stranger’s front doorstep, and started clean.

It’s the dichotomy. Making space for things that feel like they can never fit together. The still, small voice of the shofar that follows a blast profound enough to frighten the angels - and yet that small voice means more, and perhaps holds the most. G-d as our beloved, as we stand before Him in judgement that holds both fear of what we stand to lose and awe of the potential for what we can build together. A communal new beginning, as it was for centuries, that we embark upon from the depths of solitude.

This time last year? We were dancing barefoot on somebody’s rooftop, spinning so fast the neighbors were dizzy enough to come up there and join us. We were running to the river, holding tashlich by the pier, settling in makeshift sukkas through the city and asking strangers for pastries to make brachas over. We were playing soccer outside our shul, in fancy shoes and chiffon.

That was our beginning. That was our everything.

We are granted a clean slate, inscribed with the potential to live or to die.

As we were when the world fell apart at our fingertips. I didn’t eat for months. I begged things of G-d I’ll not admit to anyone. What is a new beginning?

It’s when the rain breaks your heart.

When you’re crying on the kitchen floor in your fancy dress, the one with the lace, the one you had intended to not wear again until the day we could all come together. But the hurricane hit hard, more headstrong than even you are, and you never actually made it past Broad Street.

When you’re surrounded by the shards of everything that was and finally, deliberately, decide what you will forge from them – and with which pieces.

Is this judgement? 

“He who inscribes and seals,

Remembering all that is forgotten.

You open the book of remembrance

Which proclaims itself,

And the seal of each person is there.”

---Unetaneh Tokef

I have been so many people these past months. The girl who wandered the world on a whim and then lost it. The defiant fool who ran barefoot into thunderstorms, because that was how she prayed. The woman who, at the end of it all, found herself teaching children that tears are tefillah, just as laughter is sometimes the purest way to fight. 

Which one stands in arbitration when the scales are weighed? 

Since the creation of the world, this has been a judgement day. With our actions tallied out like tokens, and are fates inscribed. 

And this time - when we stand alone and most afraid? With our deeds undone, our hearts exposed, the wishes we barely revealed to ourselves counted as testimony? This is also the time when G-d stands closest to us, most receptive to our prayers. This is when the gates of heaven are as open as our hearts.

Can I hand you the keys to the structure you forged, to tilt the scales in your favor? Can you hold tight to the stories I’ve told, to outweigh my own? I am certain songs must weigh more than sins do; can we stack the scales with all the songs we sang together, and sing them as we’re being judged? 

Can we ask G-d to sing them with us?                                                                                        

There are limitations this year, which have forced us finetune the things that mean the most. Every day we’re judges; just look at what we chose when the world was washed away and we could have chosen anything. Look at what we fought for.

What if you knew it would all be accepted? Forgiven through your fears, held more deeply for your darkest secrets? Knew, at the end, once you’d exposed everything, you could only be loved? 

Again, the dichotomy. This is judgement also.

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