Made-Up Traditional Jewish Stories

5  Traditional Tales from Boro Park 

Rosh ha-Shana

At the head of the year, sometime around the latter part of September, the High Holidays begin, and my father buys tickets for the big shul around the corner, so we can go and hear the shofar blow. We don’t go the rest of the year, except on Yom Kippur which is coming up soon. But for this new year’s celebration we go. Well, not the whole family; buying four tickets would be too expensive; but two, that’s fine. My father and I can go together. He sits there almost the whole time. He has to let the neighbours see, and his religious patients, and a few really old friends he meets there during this sacred season. He takes me along with him to introduce me to some of these important people, to let me have the experience and to make the memory of what it means to be a Jew. I also go because when I go to cheder (Hebrew school) after school the moreh (teacher) asks us if we have been to synagogue for the High Holidays and I can raise my hand. My mother doesn’t go because she stays home to cook for the evening meal and meet anyone who comes to make a holiday visit. My sister doesn’t go because she is too little, still a baby. At this time I am really too young to ask any questions about women and girls don’t go, or if they do, why they have to sit upstairs and look down on the men. Nor do I see anything unnatural about why women cook and have children, and men go to work and sometimes pray. The world is as it is, and on Rosh haShannah it renews itself. Not quite the same year again, but the same kind of a year that is new. You never get two years running simultaneously or weaving in and out of each other, or do you? That is a puzzle for someone who gets old enough to cross streets by himself and is allowed to put away the good dishes after washing.

Now I don’t sit inside the synagogue all the time. Let me explain.  On Erev Rosh ha-Shanah my father and I go together so we can be there for the opening prayers, and then it’s time to walk home for dinner. The next day I go early with my father, sit for a while, then go outside and play with my friends on the stoop or take little walks with the gang to visit nearby shuls to meet other friends from public school or cheder. Once in a while I go back inside and sit next to my father, and he shows me the place in the prayer book where we are up to, and I sort of follow. A half hour or so later, well, I am bored again or have to go to the bathroom, so I go out again and do things with my friends. Nobody notices or complains. That is what children do.

If I were bar mitzvahed I would have to spend a lot more time at the services because I would be expected to be more grown up, have patience and be interested in what was going on there. Now, at this stage in my life, some things are interesting, like the time when you stand up and the rabbi opens the ark to show everybody the Torah, sometimes to carry the Torah to the desk, open it up, and ask important old men to read from the scroll of the Law. Most need to be prompted and the rabbi whispers in their ear what to say, and points to the text and holds a real printed book over the passage, so the important old man can fulfil his religious duties properly. A few of these big shots know their stuff and do it all on their own, but most not; they must have been like me when they were young.  That is sort of encouraging. Someday I will find out.

I like it too when the cantor sings some of the Hebrew chants, though he uses the melodies from Italian operas, and I can recognize some of those arias because, when I go to the cobbler for my mother to get shoes fixed—a heel gets broken, a sole needs replacement—the Italian shoe-repairer is always listening to the opera on his radio and I listen while I sit in the little stall where customers wait, and I enjoy the smell of fresh leather and warm glue that is cut and trimmed to repair the shoes. For me, the ancient chants and the Italian operas are connected always in my memory, and the smell of fresh-cut leather and warm glue are pleasant to think about. By the way, the Italian cobbler is not Jewish; he is Italian. They are two separate religions, but they like each other.

Upstairs in the synagogue is the women’s section, for old ladies, grandmothers, mothers, and girls. They look down on the ceremony and we can, if we want, turn our heads and look up. This I like to do because it is sort of a history lesson. The old ladies, who wear sheytels (wigs) also dress in old-fashioned dresses like they used to before the war and some in the Old Country, and also hats with things on them like feathers or flowers, but usually dark colours, such as black and brown. This is what the world was like before I was born. Then the mothers—who are also people’s aunts, cousins and friends—wear clothes like my mother, aunts and friends, and they are brighter colours, and their heads are smaller and usually without feathers or flowers. They smile a lot more than do the old ladies. They also move about and also leave to go home to prepare meals for the whole family. So this is what the world is now. The girls, some older than me, some younger, and some my own age, sit for a while, look down and wave at their fathers and brothers, and come downstairs often to stand in the street, talk to each other, point at boys and giggle, and then go back upstairs. This is a very mysterious world to me. Girls are not the same as boys. They look different and they change as they grow older in ways that boys do not. They change so they can become mothers. I am always the same, even though some people, the ones who pinch my cheeks and go “Oy, oy, oy,” say I am growing to be such a big boy and already I look just like so and so or someone else they cry when they remember, mostly relatives I never knew. In other words, something happens to the world, and there is a change from one year to the next, but most of the people are the same, except some get really old and sick and die and others wear different kinds of dresses and hats, or, if they are men, they have wrinkles, grow beards and smell bad.

Some people think it is inappropriate for the rabbi or the cantor to report on the scores during the World Series which often coincides with the Rosh ha-Shana Yom Kippur period. Other members of the congregation are insulted by the idea that such an important baseball event should not be considered sacred, and a few have been known to try to give an allegorical interpretation to the games, especially when they involve the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Discussions during the year have attempted to reach a compromise. Several options have been proposed, but none of them, it seems, is ever taken up.

1.     If other teams than the Yankees and Dodgers are playing each other during the World Series, new should be passed around informally through whispers; but if the two main teams are contesting the title, then the announcement may be made of the seventh inning temporary score and the ninth inning conclusion (or any extra innings to reach a final decision; and as everyone knows, some years games have lasted more than fifteen innings and even ended in a draw), yet only a a natural resting point between sections of the ceremony, such as before or after the opening the Ark of the Covenant or the singing of major operatic renditions of the psalms.

2.     A small radio may be left playing at a moderate level throughout the entire holy day and night in an alcove off the hall of the toilets, so that those people interested may quietly remove themselves, as though for a call of nature or to coincide with this physiological need, to check in with the latest information.

3.     Young boys below the age of responsibility for ceremonial duties (like myself) may run home several times during the day, listen to the radio in the kitchen, and then race back to tell their fathers and elder brothers what’s what, and the news can then be shared sotto voce throughout the congregation.

I am sorry if I upset people who have different memories or hold strict beliefs about the customs I have described. All this happened a long time ago and on the other side of the world. So many things have occurred, many of them shocking and unbelievable, that I find it hard to believe that I am the person that lived through some of these things that happened and that I once used to think and speak the way the people in such a story do.