What It’s Like To Be Me On Yom Kippur (Part 2)

(ICYMI: Part 1)

Usually, I give myself an hour between waking up and needing to be out the door. I guess the nice thing about waking up on Yom Kippur is how much you don’t need to do.

On Yom Kippur, you don’t have to make breakfast. You don’t have to brush your teeth or wash your face. You don’t have to check your email or look at your to-do list. You just go to the bathroom, get dressed, and go.

Depending on how wisely you chose the night before, you probably aren’t even hungry yet. On weekends, sometimes you don’t brunch (OK, lunch) until noon or later. So making it to a 9-10am synagogue service is a piece of cake.

Um, bad metaphor. Piece of…holiness?

Anyway, although only slightly fewer people will eventually attend the morning than attended Kol Nidrei, most won’t get there until long after it starts. Kids don’t have to fast; you’ve got to feed them and get them all in the uncomfortable clothes they hate. At 9am, you get the regular liturgy. Around 10am is the Torah reading, when someone chants the portions of the Torah and the prophets selected for this holiday. The special Yom Kippur and general holiday portions make the service last until an hour or two after noon.

You aim for the Torah reading, because that’s when more people start to arrive but also before you really have to struggle to find a free seat. When there are only a handful of congregants, it’s easy to spot friends and sit beside them. You recognize the haftarah; at synagogues that choose not to have a dedicated cantor to chant the service, congregants often volunteer to chant these weekly portions of the books of the prophets. In the years after your bar or bat mitzvah, you’ve volunteered via your parents for each of the High Holiday portions.

All through the service, you flip to end of the section and back. Only twenty more pages until the end of the Torah service.

Only ten more.

You flip to the special remembrance section and read the poems memorializing Jewish martyrs and Holocaust.

This is a solemn day with heavy ethical responsibilities. You have done many wrong things in the past year. You should feel serious — ashamed — pensive — something.

Instead, you flip to see how many pages until the end of the extra musaf service.

Think about all the ways you have not been the friend, teacher, sister, citizen, daughter, girlfriend that you wanted to be this year. Usually, those words are meaningful, but right now, they’re just words. It’s all museum-meaning: behind glass where you can’t touch or do anything but glance nicely and walk on to the next exhibit.

Only a dozen more pages, so as long as the announcements don’t take forever, you’re almost done.

Getting home is the hard part: at least at shul there’s something to do to eat away the time. At home, not only is your non-Jewish boyfriend carefully hiding his lunch from you, but all the things you normally use to fill empty hours are not permitted:

No working.

No playing video games.

No listening to music.

No touching for pleasure.

No washing for pleasure.

No re-organizing your office.

No watching TV and movies.

No surfing the Internet.

No using computers.

Even though your stomach starts to growl, these are the things you really hunger for. When you were younger, it was simpler: your family friends from shul would come over, and you’d play outside or cart out the board games. Being hungry, you think, isn’t so bad when there’s something to distract you.

Which, you guess, is entirely the point.

The one thing you are allowed to do is read, but it’s tough to grapple with complicated concepts, and you feel guilty if you read something that takes you away from the import of the day. Are there right books for Yom Kippur? Wrong ones?

Oh, this is silly. You don’t even believe in God. What does it matter what books you read as long as they have meaning for you?

But you do believe in the spirit of the holiday. Checking off more great YA fantasy from your to-read list isn’t exactly soul-searching.

The words are still behind glass.

The illuminated and annotated Pirkei Avos on the shelf is too high and too heavy. What about that children’s book about the adventures of the anthropomorphized letters of the Hebrew alphabet? Maybe not exactly on-task, but still on-theme…?

If none of it is going to be any use anyhow, why not just read that book that’s due at the library this week?

You are not supposed to be counting down the minutes, but you are, and when the clock finally blinks the time you need to leave for shul again, you still aren’t that hungry. But you know you will be, so you pack some crackers, some cheese, into the bag with your tallis. There is always kiddush, a spread of snacks and drinks, after services, but maybe you and your friends won’t want to wait and mingle. Besides, the kids who don’t have to fast are also young enough not to have to attend the entire service; they’ll be hovering around the food like you did when you were little, and no matter how long you’ve been fasting and how delicious the slices of bread look, it’s not polite to elbow small children out of the way.

You’re worried you might need a seat on the subway, but it turns out you’re OK to stand after all.

Neilah, the final service of Yom Kippur, has some of the most beautiful liturgy, but there are fewer people in the seats than there were this morning. People who are too faint from fasting or who need to prepare the food for the break-fast or who need to watch the kids who can’t sit through another service or who want to be poised by the fridge, watching the clock — they all stay home.

Everyone’s breath is bad as they whisper greetings to each other. No one is willing to smile when the rabbi or cantor announces an extra festive verse of a prayer or interrupts to explain a particular passage. We are all hangry.

I am. Even though I still don’t feel hungry, I catch myself getting annoyed with my friends and family for shuffling a certain way or breathing too loud. I am sour as the taste in my mouth.

I must be a pretty bad person, uninclined toward repentance, if even all this apparatus set up to make me question my behaviour just makes me worse.

Around six o’clock, suddenly it becomes clear what “the pit of your stomach” means. There is a pit of quicksand at the bottom of my abdomen, furiously sucking at the emptiness inside.

My lips are so chapped.

I don’t want to stand for the standing-up-prayers. The rabbi says if you’re not feeling strong enough to stand, you don’t have to. But I am, and even though I want to get away with sitting, that would be lying. So I stand.

Together, we beg our God, our Father to forgive us, … even though we have no good deeds.

I turn ten pages in the time it takes the congregation to finish one, and then I turn back again, leafing back and forth between where we are and where I want to be.

Finally, finally, finally, the holiday service is over, and the mood switches from sombre to joyous as the congregation joins in the havdalah songs and prayers celebrating the change from holy day to everyday.

I whisper to my sister: “I am not staying for the ‘lai lai lai lai…’.”

Women and men who are less hangry than me hug their families and chosen families, each arm over someone’s shoulders as they sway and chant, filling in the gaps with the nonsense syllables. The rest of us stream out the back, folding our prayer shawls and skullcaps, returning them to their velvety bags, logjamming at the coat rack. Food.

After several years of Yom Kippurs, you know what your body needs. For me: drink first, then eat carbs, then eat whatever my stomach says. At our family synagogue in Ottawa, we’d have lox, bagel, and cream cheese with family friends. In Toronto, we planned to have pasta, but a pizza place on the way back to my sister’s calls us and our friend, so we eat there instead.

Some of us eat vegetarian slices. I choose one with ground beef and mozzarella: mixing meat and milk already.

Yom Kippur is over, and still I have no good deeds.