Holiday Reflections

The High Holidays have always been at once some of my favorite holidays of the year and some of my most dreaded. Dreaded for obvious reasons, those long services, getting really dressed up, no eating, you know, the works. Those are all minor discomforts though, and I've borne them happily for years because I know that the holidays mean so much more than just wearing a suit and sitting for hours. It took me years to actually listen to what was going on in services, and in actuality that isn't really enough since its in Hebrew and I don't speak the language. So I started to read that translations and actually pay attention to the sermon. I like the spirit of the holidays and although I don't buy 100% of all the g-d stuff, I agree in spirit. That has been my feeling for years and it still is my feeling.

Spending the Holidays in El Salvador has given me a refreshing look at my take on the Holidays. I still feel much the same way, that I agree with the spiriet of the Holidays and I find that they have a powerful message. What could be more important than celebrating the fact that you have survived another year, hoping for it to be a sweet year and taking all due precaution to make a fresh start and make up for whatever may have gone wrong the year before. That has all that much more meaning when you find yourself in a new country, with a semi-new language and very few people that you know or can rely on. While trying to make out as much of the sermon as I could because it was in Spanish, I got to thinking about jewish values in general and how i was making as good a start to a year as I think I have ever made.

First and foremost, as jews we grow up in a particularly odd state of being taught to read and write hebrew, but not to understand it. That translates directly to prayer, we can read and write it, but not understand what is coming from our mouths, or furthermore the pages. We are left to either carry out the motions or dig and ask for meanings. Our understanding of the actual prayers hinges on our language skills outside of hebrew, and I always thought that in part we continues using hebrew in order to make prayer semi-universal. We are not taught the torah as we should be, but rather prayers for our bar/bat mitzvahs, and so we are left with a void of knowledge in terms of what the stories actually mean. We are taught concepts of jewish life, but not where they come from or how we should expect to look for them in everyday life. One such concept is Tikun Olam, we all know it means "heal the world", but really we learn to associate it with donating some food or clothes to a communal box or putting some change in a box.

I sat in the temple in San Salvador thinking about that concept. Tikun Olam took on the basic meaning that I described before when I was a child. When I was in high school and going to jewish camp every summer it had a slightly larger importance when i actually endeavored to do some community service through school and camp, but rarely more than was required, and only more than was required when it was with friends and really fun. In college Tikun Olam and Community Service started to play a more active role in my life because Community Service was one of the values of my (jewish) fraternity. As such I had to actually plan and encourage others to go about doing doing Community Service for the first time in my life. Didn't seem like much then, and in truth it wasn't much, because we really didn't succeed in any large projects, but we tried. Up until that poing Tikun Olam and Community Service were one and the same. That is to say, they were sometime activities to be planned and executed, but not a value I was living every day of my life. Because after all, aren't values something you live with? Shouldn't you be practicing your values?

So it finally dawned on me that though I live in a country now where the Star of David and the Menorah are taken as Evangelical signs and the people here haven't the slightest clue what a Jew is, I am actually living closer to at least one of my Jewish values than I ever have in my life and learning first-hand what it actually means to heal the world. Afterall, the world is a big place, much larger than the US or Israel, which is where most mone and goods that jews generally give through the temple go. And more than that, I am discovering that I am learning more about my values than just Tikun Olam, humility, sharing and perseverance come to play daily.

Sometimes you find out about the things you learned and are told to practice when you are farthest from the places where that is most easily done. After all, what is more important to me, the fact that I didn't go to temple on Yom Kippur (but still fasted) or that I thought about things and discovered I am doing ok?