Yom Kippur: G'mar Chatimah Tova
by Jonathan Quince
Friday, September 24, 2004 18:52:00
G'mar Chatimah Tova to all of my Jewish friends.
On this, the holiest day of the Hebrew calendar, I shall be fasting from sundown to sundown as a symbol of my solidarity with the Jews and my support for Israel. It is just a gesture, a token that seems powerless in the practical face of world events; yet particularly now, it is fitting for me to place my spiritual signature on the side of what is good and right.
Work, food, water, sex, and leather shoes.
I am familiar with the Halakhic prohibitions meant not for sacrificial suffering, but rather to bring the faithful away from their bodies and closer to God for a day. Suspend all connection to the physical world, as far as you can without injuring yourself, and spend a day immersed in the purely spiritual. I don't know that I shall be observing all of rules — I choose ad hoc from year to year; and since I am a Gentile, I doubt that anybody will argue with me — but I always keep the fast.
Yet today, my mind is preoccupied with more important issues than those of ancient ritual.
I live my life in a fairly easy and well-to-do world. I want not for food or for a roof over my head or for warmth in the chill of winter. Peace and quiet surround me; I fear not for my safety when engaged in such simple activities as a walk down the street or a trip to the store.
Yes, I do have my own private sufferings. Yet as a child of educated middle-class America, ensconced in a cocoon of safety and security from the day I was born, there are certain dangers of which I am simply unaccustomed to worrying.
Say, to pick a very recent example, the danger of having a mortar shell suddenly crash through the roof of my home, causing the structure to collapse on my head.
There are lots of things I don't worry about. Whether going to the mall, boarding a bus, or simply strolling near my house, I don't worry that the person next to me is a walking human bomb who is about to self-detonate. When my family members go to a pizzeria or a discotheque, I don't worry that they are going to come home in burnt and mangled pieces. The school buses I see on the roads near my home aren't armor-plated — because nobody is worried that they will be suddenly driving into a hail of gunfire.
When I go to the top of a famous skyscraper, I don't worry that somebody is about to crash into it using a 767 fully loaded with premium-grade jet fuel as a missile.
Ah, the lovely sheltered life we here in America do did lead. It is was such a luxury.
I read Israeli newspapers. One of the most dreaded parts of my morning is the prospect of facing yet another list of names. Sometimes, for weeks on end, it is a daily ritual: Innocent victims of terrorism popping up in droves on my computers screen. I read each name carefully, giving it a little salute, before I continue with my day.
Names are important; but it is also useful to remember that each name has a real human being attached. So every now and then, I go to look at their faces. (When I first found that memorial site in 2001, there were eleven pages of faces; at present, there are 45.) Page after page, face after face… on, and on, and on. Each of those was a real person, living and breathing and warm, with a life and hopes and dreams. Each of them was cut short; and all are now resting beneath the soil before their time for no good reason at all. (Unless you want to call them “sacrifices for peace” — ugh, just like the “sacrifices” of 9/11, right?)
Yet the violence is worse than senseless: It is cold and calculating, hotly acclaimed, a sickening mixture of religious zeal and pure, undiluted hate.
(To be continued at a later date.)