12 Traditional Make-Believe Tales from Boro Park

Yom Kippur:

A Kid’s Point of View plus Commentary

On Yom Kippur if you are old enough and healthy you fast: you eat nothing and drink nothing from sundown on one day to sundown on the next. You don’t have a bite to eat or even a tiny little sip of water. If your stomach rumbles, it is a good sign of how religious you are. If you feel a little weak, then even more so.  But if you feel sick and it hurts, then you can eat a little and taste a sip of water or maybe a spoon of chicken soup. The Law was made for man and not man for the Law. Here man means also a little kid, female or male. Grown-ups, as a general rule, are strong enough to withstand the pangs of hunger and the gasps of thirst. Boys who have just been bar mitzvahed within the last two or three years can be excused a momentary weakness. At heart, they are still children.

So in comes a big theological question: Why do people fast on Yom Kippur? They want to purify themselves and let God know that they are sorry for any bad things they may have done during the year. They chant this in special songs, sometimes with a cantor who wears a very big black hat, not like a yarmulke. This is what grown-ups (that is, my parents) tell me. I am not sure I understand what this means.

When I ask why, my father pats me on the head and tells me, “It is a custom, a tradition.”

I look puzzled and he says, “It is the Law.”

My mother says: “Do what your father says. No questions.”

“But we don’t do everything in the Law and all year we don’t bother with God or religion or with being Jews.”

I don’t really say this but only something like this that nobody understands or at least feels is worthy of an answer, because I am too little to know big words—or big ideas. Maybe many years later, not at this time that is in the narrative I making up for your behalf.

“Well, once a year we do, one of my parents says or maybe both; who can remember?—and that is why we need to fast as long as we can, so He knows.”

You have to guess which grown-up said that, including myself many years later when I became a parent. It is, after all, a traditional thing to say.

But in my story I am telling you, this must be important because my father is putting on his special voice which he uses when he wants to be like a teacher or a rabbi and explain everything. Usually he tells me jokes, or, as he calls them, “amusing anecdotes”.

Later, when my mother puts me to bed, I ask her if she fasts on Yom Kippur.

“I try as much as I can,” she answers, “but I am not well so I only do a little, a symbolic show.”

I have no idea what she means. What are symbols, parables and signs? What do they show?

“Is that because you fall down in the street?” I ask, for I think that I am very wise.

Wise Commentary Number 1: If you take away the k then what you know happens now. Moreover k is silent though you see it and think maybe it is important: maybe it points to kinship and reminds you that what you know is not yours alone but belongs to and comes from your ancestors. And if you take away the n it becomes ow! There is, then, always a pain that strikes you when know who you are and where you come from. And still hurts inside me. O! The o is pronounced oy!’

What happened.

She cries and says, “Oy, you shouldn’t know my troubles.”

Inner Thoughts.  Nobody should know I know, but her troubles got worse and worse as she grew older. If I think about it now—but I can’t. It was too much then, more so now. But from the distance of fifty years since she died, I still cannot imagine how much she suffered and raged inwardly—but not always quietly—against what her life had become. The rest of us went on living, as best we could, because we could not stop our lives and make hers better. Too many decisions had been taken, moves made from one end of the world to the other, children born whom we had to look after.

So back to the Yom Kippur story.

No, not quite yet.

Wise Commentary No. 2. The Day of Atonement, penitence and prayer. The acknowledgement of sin and the confession of guilt. When we stand together, kneel together, and wait to learn our fate. We are not alone in the moment, but together in the flow of history. Will the good deeds of our ancestors outweigh the forgetfulness and indifference of the present? I stand in awe next to my father and do not understand.

I go home from the synagogue and speak to my mother.

Wise Commentary No. 3. Would it have been better if she fasted, tried to live a religious life, believed in things that she never could? How can you believe in something when so many times the impossible happens and each time the impossible is not pleasant or comforting, like a miracle that you get better from an illness, from having a stroke when you are so young, when nobody really cares what you are feeling deep inside yourself? If you are written down in the Book of Life, that doesn’t mean your years will make you reconcile yourself to wars that make brothers disappear, families over there you will never hear from again and so are probably murdered. How can whole families be murdered, communities be destroyed—and nobody in the whole universe cares?

Inner Thoughts. You cannot listen to music any more—not when your fingers have stopped working and most of your body has become twisted. Listen to the shofar and your sins will be drowned out as an evil spirit from the Other Side wants to turn you in: but nobody listens and the world simply spins madly on, crushes you like the Juggernaut under the Wheels of Fate. You try to tell stories or jokes and the words don’t come out and people try not to laugh at you when they can’t laugh with you.

Almost the end of the story many years later.

“Don’t come to my operation,” she said on the telephone.  “Wait until I wake up.”

But she never spoke again.

“They send people to the moon now,” she tried to laugh; “me, too,” she said, “I am going to the moon.”

She never woke again.

Her silence is beyond pain now.

Wise Commentary No. 3. It is now my job to tell the stories and the jokes, to make up the believes that sound like they might be true, because deep down inside there is always something true that you can never say aloud in the words, feelings, images and tones that are there. You have to make believe, create masks out of words and jokes. You might as well say that the sound of the shofar is unreal, that the long, short and mixed tootles blown in synagogue by the rabbi are just empty symbols, and nothing drowns out the names that shouldn’t be noted down for bad things in the new year.

Inner Thoughts. As for music, no one can listen any more. Not because it would make you cry, but because it would remind us of you. The whole idea of becoming a musician, a trumpet player in a grown-up orchestra, with a proper conductor who isn’t just a teacher dressed up, that is thrown into the wind, into the air.  Melodies and rhythms are painful, and tones creep into the inner places of hurt and guilt.

The End of the Story.

The baby grand piano in the living-room was shrouded in a heavy green mantle that hung down to the floor. The large folio piano music books, with all the classical composers of the nineteenth century, they are put into the attic, hidden under all the other memories that no one could face again. Everything is gone now. Silent. Empty. Invisible.

Wise Commentary No. 4. They say that on the moon, amid all the craters and rocks, there are hidden places where the voices of people who cry out in pain, frustration and rage lie buried for thousands of years. If anyone went to the moon and put an ear to the lunar surface and heard the wailing and the shrieking and the yelling, I think they would go crazy.

Wise Commentary No. 5. They also say that the dust on the surface of the moon is made of shadows that have broken apart after the ghostly voices have fallen into the centre of the lunar craters millions of miles down. The dust muffles the horrible sounds.

Inner Thoughts. No one should ever walk on the moon or they will die of shame.

Commentary No. 6. Better that it were all a hoax.