My mom posted an essay on her blog that was written by my little sister for a school assignment.  In the vein of NPR’s “This I Believe” segment, it is titled “I Believe in Pumpkin Soup.” My sister uses lovely language to describe the olfactory effects of pumpkin and cinnamon on her memory.  The essay is charming; my sister reveals herself to be much more interested in family traditions than I would have guessed, as she describes the family gathering from the four corners of the earth around the table at Sukkot, to break bread together and scoop up the thick, savory pumpkin soup we all love.  She reminisces about her first trip to Israel when she was seven and how the same scent of warm melon was there to reassure her and enforce her association with it of family and special occasions. 

These are all beautiful memories, except for the fact that they are wrong. 

Now that my older sister Liora and I live on the East Coast, we can’t afford to fly home for Sukkot, which is in the middle of the fall semester.  Arielle’s vision of us scurrying home just in time for my father to place steaming hot bowls on the table in front of us draws a lot more from Campbell’s commercials than Danan family history.  My mom points out that our relatives in Israel definitely did not serve pumpkin soup when Arielle (at the age of five, not seven) and the rest of us visited them in the middle of the summer. 

It’s a lovely little device to suggest that though the world is uncertain, pumpkin soup is the same across time and space.  And it’s just the kind of thing that I would’ve written for my non-Jewish high school teachers, who, let’s face it, eat this Jewish identity stuff up.  So I’m not criticizing Arielle’s writing. 

What her essay does is reflect our tendency to muddle over the inconvenient realities of home and family—and for that matter, of religion. 

I realized how often I do this myself when writing columns for the Chico Enterprise-Record, that venerable publication.  I wrote my own little essay about pumpkin soup—generalized a charming story of seasonal foods that my dad cooks, and the warm gooey feeling they give us.  But I’m not sure that every time we gathered in the sukkah, we felt “truly comforted” and appreciated being surrounded by people we loved.  I think most of the time we were just like, there are way too many mosquitoes out here and I hate you for eating all the challah. 

I similarly make up charming stories in my mind about many elements of Jewish experience: family traditions, Shabbat services, and—lately—the High Holidays.  I neglect to remember the planning, the infighting, the hassle of travel.  I rarely recall the irritating sermons, the congregation’s annoying insistence on singing the shema in the regular tune even though the cantor has just sung it in the High Holiday tune (and omigoodness it makes me want to scream when they do that).  Most notably, I forget year to year how horribly uncomforting and uninspiring the words of many of the prayers are.  Every year, new portions of the prayerbook appeal to me.  But equally, new sections puzzle and horrify me.  I am forced to ignore them in my quest to keep the High Holidays appetizing. 

This year, the passage that really got to me was U’Netanah Tokef.  The prayer asks: who will live and who will die in the coming year?  How will they die?  By fire or by water?  By sword or by beast?  By famine or by thirst? By being hit repeatedly over the head with a pool cue or by being forced to watch reruns of “Reba”?

But don’t worry—the prayer goes on—even though we have no answers to these questions, we can rest assured that prayer and charity and repentance can maybe reverse our untimely fate if we do them a lot.  For the coming year, anyway. 

I think this section stuck out to me this year because a friend of mine did, literally, die by water—of accidental drowning—about six months ago.  His death was a horrible shock—one of those so-clearly-meaningless happenings that it takes months just to convince yourself it really happened in a world you supposed to have meaning.

Now, I don’t think my dear friend lived his life in a less prayerful or less repentant or less charitable way than anyone else I know.  If anything, he was a rarity—devoted to his family, a kind and generous friend, aspiring to help strangers as a pre-med student.  When I traveled with him to the Balkans, he was one of the only men on the trip who wasn’t afraid to open up emotionally in our dialogue group.  He befriended every person he met, whether Jewish, Palestinian, American, Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian, or Croat. 

And I don’t think that my particular progressive liberal hippie brand of post-denominational renewal Judaism requires that I think otherwise, asks me to find in my friend’s life some instance to explain away his accidental death. 

So how do I say the words of this prayer? 

I wished my mother was there to give me a lovely, figurative explanation, like that what it really means is the death of the soul through drowning in self-absorption, or something.  But she was thousands of miles away and I was alone with the page in front of me.

How do I say the words of this prayer?

It’s a question that comes up again and again.  When we ask for peace for the children of Israel but not for all the people of the world, or when we say the names of the patriarchs and not the matriarchs, or ask for the messiah to come, for God to raise the dead, for the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem.

How do I say the words of these prayers when I believe in egalitarianism, universalism, rationalism, pluralism?

In most of the synagogues I frequent, an egalitarian approach to the liturgy has been applied.  We say that God is the God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, too.  Al-kol yoshvei tevel—for all who dwell on this planet—is a handy phrase for adding in after al-kol yisrael—for all the people of Israel—at the end of the Kaddish. At Beth Am, we said “mehayeh kol chai”—God sustains all life instead of “mehayeh meitim”—God raises the dead.  When I go to services that don’t change these phrases, I usually say the change to myself, under my breath, like “You and I both know what I’m saying here, right God?” 

I used to think that altering the words of the prayers was wrong, because it let you off the hook from struggling with the ancient texts.  But how can I pray earnestly if I’m saying something I don’t really believe?  I have no way to defend the traditional language to the multitude of Jews my age who are disinterested or the non-Jews who are disenfranchised by them, so I feel there is no choice but to let the words be changed by time and circumstance.  Why should liturgy be untouchable when progressive Judaism insists that other aspects of Jewish life can change over generations? 

But I had no quick fix for U’Netanah Tokef, and I found myself sitting there like I sometimes find myself sitting in the middle of the seder or a night in the sukkah—cranky, because this isn’t what I remembered the holiday to be like. 

How do I say the words of this prayer?

I kept my mouth shut.  I didn’t say the words.  But I didn’t protest them either.  I just tucked them away to talk about later with like-minded people.