Rosh Hashanah

Dome of Wilshire Blvd. Temple, L.A.

 I am celebrating Rosh Hashanah for the first time in years. Cahtolicism and even Hidnusim and Buddhism have made their way into Young Traditon, but I have had a difficult dance with Judaism. I was always close to the religion and practiced it for around two years, attending first a Reform synagogue and then a Conservative one. Me and my friend Miriam had an amazing time traveling between the Conservative synagogue and our visits to the Orhtodox community on the South End. We met a lot of wonderful people. We super paid our dues, more than most people who convert to or deal with another religion. For both of us, it went deep down, and for both of it us it did not go deep enough to stay. We would always be accepted as visitors, and as visitors it was easy to see a lot of foolisnness that could also be seen in any institution. For me who was fleeing the problems of patriarchal monotheism it was more of the same but without the charms I had grown up in. It was my experience at the synagogue that was largely responsible for why I became a solitary, and stopped looking at other religions and houses to join, and chose to look within and build this Craft.

Around the same time I was dealing with my deep discontent, but still coming to to the synagogue, my friend came to me one day in excitement and nervousness, and told me that she missed being a Hindui and it was calling to her and she had barely gotten the words out of her mouth before I said let's go to the Hingu Temple. Five minutes after making this decision, the Rabbi's wife invited us to Passover lunch at her house, and there followed the experience of us eating matzoh and knowing we were going to pray to Kali. 

In the middle of lunch at the Rabbi's Miriam suddenly said, "We need to just pray. We really need to talk to the Lord. Have a relationship with him." The Rabbi was alarmed and smiled nervously. We ate lunch and the enxt week were in the Hindu Temple. Miriam eventually ended up in India, and I ended up a few places that led to to where I am now as a through practicing occultist, but the beginning was there.

It takes a while to own what was yours, to bring something with you in a different form. It took a long time to bring Catholicism int othe mix of Young Tradition, but it was necessary, the form of it answered something crucial, and it had been the same with Judaism. For some things only these rites will do. I took a long time to learn them, for them  to sit in my but they are stranger to use because they are not native, because I was not excepted, because, in the end, though I still think of myself as a Catholic and I can never really think of myself as a Jew. The Buddhist parts of me respond to it being an open system, a world religion, to being warmly accepted and welcomed by Buddhist., but this was neveer really the case in Judaism, and whenever I use its rituals I remember this.  I remember that Judaism was a system broken in deep ways the way I feel about Catholcisim, and that what I am working for in the rituals is wholeness I never experienced an probably isn't there, but must be worked for all the same. When I do the Torah readings and recite the prayers from the Siddur, I am remember good times and rather painful times, but I am still making a needful orfering.

So this year, for the first time in at least seven years, I am remember how to sing these prayers again, I am drawing the tassels of this tallit together breathing life into something I left dead on the floor years before. It is vivid, and it is real. Because it is mine.

I thought I would have some answers, some explanation of what this day means and why I have kept it. After all, it has meant so much to me. But the truth is Rosh Hashanah is just the beginning of a long and holy time, and its really to early to reflect on it much.

My New Year is wrapping up. It is already Sunday when I am writing this, and I am feeling the effects of good celebration. But like most celebrations, I am not entirely sure of what has just happened, what was just done. There was much singing, much remembering, a lot of stumbling  over Hebrew and a surprise at things I still remembered. I wrote my old friend who moved to India and realized I might never hear from her again. As the night came on and the Maariv prayer became the prelude to the usual more Christian services I remembered that the first time I had gone to shul on Rosh Hashanah I had gone, not to convert or to become, but to know. A Jewish witch blogger wrote of the experience of trying to unite her Judaism with the so called paganism of the past and called it the desire to reunite the flower with the bee. This is what I went to do, and eventually I got lost in it, It was part of the path, but I thought it was the entire path. I thought it would be a short work, but it became a work that lasted years and that took years to recover from, and if someone would ask me what I am doing these high holy days or what I am learning, what all this means, and what I am feeling, then I would say, "I am uniting the flower and bee. But I never knew it would take quite so long."