Reset

Yom Kippur was October 4th. I’m firmly on Team Passover when it comes to the Jewish holidays, it’s got narrative and matzoh ball soup, but when I was a kid, the high holidays (Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur) were the big ones. Observant Jews fast, pray, and attend services on Yom Kippur. The goal, as I understand it — and I could be wrong, I’m no rabbi — is to clear your conscience for the coming year by acknowledging the ways you have failed God. There are always a bunch of interpretations for anything remotely Jewish (Two Jews, three opinions), but this is the one that made the most sense to me.

I spend exactly zero minutes considering what God might think of me. There are those who choose to use Yom Kippur to ask for forgiveness for the way they’ve wronged other humans: voting Republican, refusing to vax, driving an SUV, or maybe you were a jerk to your friend that one time. That’s probably a conversation you should have with your friend, not God, and you don’t need a designated day to do it, but maybe it’s not terrible to set aside a day to consider what wrongs you need to right.

My parents were fairly serious about Yom Kippur when we were little. I remember being listless and hungry and somewhat bored by the services, though you’d have to be completely dead inside to not respond to the call of the shofar, the antler-horn the rabbi blows at the end of the holiday. I dropped out of Hebrew school at 12, pre bat mitzvah, because it didn’t mean anything to me; I guess I’ve always had Atheist tendencies. I stopped observing everything but Passover. Sure, it’s got mythology too, but it’s a liberation story and we need those. Look at the women of Iran or Afghanistan and tell me liberation stories don’t matter. They do.

The American calendar — hell, much of the global West’s calendar — is driven by Christianity. This annoys me. I don’t resent the Christian holidays so much as I resent the papering over of everyone else’s, including my own. (This piece on Hey Alma is great.) It’s never occurred to me to question a Christian’s beliefs before wishing them Merry Christmas or Happy Easter, and it’s never been a question that — if they’re not performing surgery or staffing the retail frontlines — they’d take those days off. But the Jewish holidays (and Muslim and Hindu and and and anything not Christian) aren’t acknowledged by default in any place I’ve ever worked.

As an Athiest Jew, I’m a complicated bundle of contradictions, though not an uncommon one, there’s nothing special about this point of view. Jews exist, in spite of centuries of attempts to eradicate us, and my acknowledgment of the holidays is grounded in that notion as much as anything. Late in the afternoon the day before the holiday, I told my team I’d be out for Yom Kippur. I’m an extremely on top of it worker, but even if I hadn’t been, there should be no need to justify this choice. I am here. hineni, goddammit, I am taking the day off. (Since writing this, I have had הִנֵּֽנִי tattooed on the other arm.)

I took two traditions into my day. I didn’t give up eating, but I went on a digital fast, I did not boot a computer until sundown at the end of the holiday. I cracked the Jewish cookbook and made an Alsatian onion pie for dinner at sundown. It’s a French Jewish recipe — I wanted a nice meal with which to end my day. I cleaned my art studio and did laundry and walked my dog and filled the yard waste bin and listened to music and took a nap. I have, since, left the house twice without my phone so it feels like I loosened the grip technology has on my sanity just a little bit.

I am toying with the idea of the digital Sabbath; it certainly can’t hurt the mental health of a person who is Very Online. Almost everyone I know is trying to break their digital addictions, quitting Facebook, quitting Twitter, taking apps off their phones, trying to reclaim the hours spent staring into the blueish glow of the screen. Every time I swim laps I’m aware of what it feels like to be alone with my thoughts. I need that kind of focus more often.

It’s not like I spent the day in service to anyone but myself, but I also think the struggles of the last few years mean I haven’t been as generous with myself as I should be. So I brushed the cobwebs from the rafters in my workshop, I baked onion pie. The Yom Kippur prayers — again, your interpretation may vary — ask God to release you from your obligations of the previous year, to let you go forward into what’s next. It’s a good idea to turn the page, to reboot, to hit the reset button. I don’t suppose it matters so much how you get there or if you’re righting wrongs you’ve done against yourself.

Put your phone down, let that shit go, and start over. It’s not easy but it’s very worthwhile.