My Weirdest High Holidays (The Jewish Kind)
Intro to High Holidays
For those who don't know, the Jewish High Holidays are a cluster of holidays that arrive one after another in the fall: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and, finally, Simchat Torah. Yom Kippur is arguably the most serious one, the Day of Atonement. There are prayers, fasting and reflection, along with some traditions that are questionable by today's standards [that Ari Shaffir has covered them in comedy and I've referenced before.]
I'm not religious. Still, I like the concept of having a day set aside for reflection. I don’t believe G-d is taking attendance.
I'm not Catholic, but hearing about Lent can still make me think about what I consume, what I might give up, and our limited existence of self-awareness. If somebody tells you, "This is a serious day of reflection," and you're an empathetic person, I think you become at least slightly more conscious about things.
I also fast on Yom Kippur. I'm not trying to overplay this because it's a healthy thing. Plus, most years I drink water, and I've done intermittent fasting on and off throughout my adult life. Everyone should fast... occasionally. Skipping food for a day here and there is particularly useful for regulating hunger. Judaism just gives me an ancient excuse for fasting.
Like other “journal posts,” these stories don't offer much reflection. I want to write them down because they're just a few of my "Forrest Gump-like" stories. They tell a lot about me despite not containing any particularly profound moral lesson.
1. Rosh Hashanah: That Time I Sort of Saw Someone Get Shot and Used It as an Excuse to Not Go to Synagogue for Five Years
When I was thirteen, living in Florida, my older sister came to visit from Israel. The Jewish holidays arrive conveniently bundled together, so it's common to use this period for longer vacations, where a few days don't count against your vacation days because everyone is off anyway.
The High Holidays are a period when my family reliably went to synagogue. We went random Friday nights too, but our attendance would wax and wane. This is the case for many in the tribe, like it is in any religion.
That year, my siblings and I especially didn't want to go. We negotiated like good Jews: my parents would go first, and we'd come later for exactly five minutes. We'd even put a timer on vibrate, very much against the synagogue rules.
There was a flaw in the plan. Men and women sat separately. But that detail is irrelevant because after about three minutes, chaos ensued.
I heard people screaming. A man came through the door and collapsed near me and my father, blood covering his back. I hadn't heard a gunshot, but it was pretty obvious what had happened. He'd been shot and, unfortunately for him, decided that my father and his thirteen-year-old son looked like the people best equipped to provide emergency medical care.
I ran.
My dad stayed and tried to help. He took off his tefillin and used them to dress the wound. I don't know much about emergency medicine, but I'm reasonably certain that wrapping a fresh bullet wound in an extremely dirty piece of religious leather, sweated on and stored in a little velvet bag, is not considered best practice. My father was trying to help.
Eventually my family regrouped outside, traumatized. My sister has always regarded processed sugar as heaven on earth, so she proposed the obvious next step after witnessing a synagogue shooting: Dunkin' Donuts!
So we went to Dunkin' Donuts and had some Munchkins.
My family then did what so many Jews do to handle serious trauma: we made jokes about it. We'd been forced [/j] to go to synagogue for five minutes, and G-d apparently hated the idea so much that we left with trauma in three.
Sure, “Clearly, G-d did not want us going to services.” is not the right message. But it was a story to tell others who invited me somewhere I didn’t want to go. They never offered a different interpretation. Did you know you can get out of anything by just saying you had a traumatic experience?
What happened was tragic. I am not joking about that part. I’m joking about how the worst trauma can happen right next to you, and you still have to live your life. Everyone on Earth has gone somewhere, while “the optics” make it look inappropriate.
Coverage of the shooting fills in the tragic part. An older man had become obsessed with a younger woman. Jonathan Samuels, her employer according to the internet archives, had been helping her get away from the man and obtain a restraining order. The old man confronted Samuels at temple, because, again, that’s the day we all go. He ultimately shot him twice in the back.
I don't know every detail of their relationship and don't particularly want to reconstruct that psychology. This was back before everyone was on social media sleuthing for answers. The story I remember involved a marriage and a child my age being caught in the mess of all of this. The news can’t cover every person affected by trauma.
I also remember that my rabbi, Rabbi Bukiet, who is a particularly short man (like me!), bravely disarmed the gunman. Yes, a rabbi stopped services, walked firmly towards the danger, straight toward an armed man and grabbed the gun from his hand. He then screamed at the man not to leave until the police arrived.
And the man complied. I don't think he really had a plan beyond shooting somebody.
Nine months later, Samuels died from complications. I felt bad for his family, whom I didn't know, but imagined were probably like anyone else's.
Maybe it’s also a story about connection and disconnection from religious services. I’m always fascinated in when a standup comedian stopped going to church, so why not tell my own villain story?
It wasn't until I was eighteen and living in London that I really felt any connection to services again. I had remained Jewish throughout the years I didn't attend services. But it was nice to have a few months of connection to a synogugue in my life, even if it never happened again. Being Jewish and believing in a Jewish community aren't exactly the same thing. I guess everybody knows that with the rants about how there are a very small, fringe minority of anti-Israel Jews, possibly singing to an electric guitar every week or stuck in an extremely backwards, community.
There are plenty of Jewish kids at university who feel a little uncomfortable when the fraternity's favorite rabbi is doing shots with the “Greek life” while barely noticing the dorkuses whose families are less likely to become major donors. But I can say it’s nice to find a place of worship where you feel you can honestly discuss your wildest theological thoughts and questions.
To be honest, my childhood rabbi hadn't resonated much with me as a child. Years later I saw him again at a friend's funeral and developed a greater appreciation for him. Another decade passed, and I needed him to verify that I was Jewish so I could get married in Israel. So maybe, if there is a moral (there isn’t), it’s that your perception of people and places change.
Boring.
Note: I alluded to this incident in my SWAT story, but somehow never actually wrote this story down. Or the next one. Which goes with the theme I’ve mentioned before of “I swore I thought I blogged about this before.”
2. Yom Kippur: My Weirdest High Holiday…
The synagogue shooting wasn't my strangest High Holiday memory. Definitely… top 5.
Nearly two decades later, in 2024, life had become infinitely stranger. Or maybe it hadn't. Maybe all of this is more normal and status quo for Earth than I'll understand until the smoke clears.
I was (and arguably am) living through a war. The bombs going back and forth through our neighbors' yards were loud enough that we could hear them, even if we didn't always know where they came from. Think:
Boom."Was that Hezbollah?""Maybe. Or maybe Hamas. Or Iran. Or Houthis.""Could be something happening in Syria."“Guess we will find out after we respond, so the news finally decides to mention it."
A few weeks before this Yom Kippur, I'd written about a drone exploding three blocks from my apartment at 3:30 AM, knocking pictures off the wall, and me simply going back to sleep because I had work the next day. People went to work, went to school, dated, cried, laughed and complained about normal things with infrequent, audible explosions hundreds of kilometers away.
The High Holidays made it all feel especially strange, the ending to a full year of war. Oct 7 had happened on Simchat Torah (and Putin’s birthday). We were almost a year out of hell, trying to mourn, continuing our ordinary lives because we had to.
I remember thinking thoughts about a G-d who could let October 7 happen, and thinking about all the people who had similar thoughts over worse trauma. I didn’t make plans to go to synagogue. As discussed, being Jewish isn't rooted in maintaining a perfect synagogue attendance record, and I’ve missed a handful of years.
In Israel, High Holiday services usually mean meeting in a hotel or other temporary space with other secular-leaning Jews. It was more honest than those ‘mainstream’ synogugues I felt less welcomed in.
So I spent the beginning of Yom Kippur walking around with my dog off leash. She loves Yom Kippur, the one day she gets to frollick on the streets without threat of cars.
Yom Kippur in Israel is unlike anything I'd seen elsewhere. Nobody drives. The streets become packed with pedestrians and bicycles. Children can ride down highways. And, yes, well-trained dogs, including mine, get to wander around off leash and discover what civilization could have looked like if it weren’t for that damned AAA.
Yom Kippur in Israel is like two holidays, each beautiful, but one carefree and the other focused on thoughts.
People walk enormous distances and constantly run into friends. Some are coming back from services. Others are on bicycle adventures reminiscent of The Goonies. There’s the secular enjoying snacks, the religious judging the day-walkers, and, my people, the Israeli category of "Yeah, I'm fasting, but I'm also doing hoodrat stuff with my friends."
Walking on the streets was carefree, especially considering the context of war. But every once in a while, I’d see someone off. A Russian guy looked like he wanted to pick a fight. A few were particularly drunk. I got a sense that on top of the usual day of atonement, and day of bicycling around, there was a third holiday, “Anarchy Day.” I even started calling it “Anarchy Day.”
I ran into my friend Ben. He was going to services and asked if I wanted to come. So despite having specifically decided I wasn't going to synagogue this year, I went home, changed into nicer clothes and joined him, because, he’s a friend and why not? It was not a big time commitment.
The services were short. The trip home was not.
On our walk back, I ran into my good friend Yonathan. He wanted a beer. I couldn't drink because I was fasting, but we decided to hang out anyway. We separated from Ben and started walking toward my apartment, no more than 500 meters away.
Along the way, we passed a giant group of kids, probably somewhere between ten and fifteen years old. We walked around them and continued, but they kept going in the same direction. Eventually it became apparent they weren't simply a group of children hanging out. They were basically a young mob, like a darker Children of the Corn, on bikes and electric scooters, and they were bullying three girls who looked about fourteen.
Yonathan and I did not want to get involved. We'd both seen situations where kids were either playfully or very seriously fighting, only for the adult who intervened to be mocked by both sides while everybody insisted they could handle themselves. There are dynamics between children that adults should turn away from.
Then one of the older boys slapped one of the girls.
That settled it. Time to intervene. Yonathan used his bicycle to help create a barrier, and I moved alongside him. We basically surrounded the three girls and demanded that the mob leaves. They instead circled like vultures who had too much caffeine.
We didn't want to bring strangers, especially minors, into my building, so we looked for a place to seperate the mob from rule. We walked with the girls maybe half a block up the street, looking for a haven, but the mob was becoming more unruly. One of the kids tried to kick Yonathan. So we headed back toward my building, ready to call the police, knowing it would not help.
We told the girls to go inside the entrance and wait until the police came. Then one of the older boys, maybe fifteen or sixteen acting like the pack's quasi-leader, started talking to us. He told us he was Turkish and Arab and adopted a bizarre "just give us the girls and we can be friends" attitude. And we responded with the “Hey, buddy, that’s not gonna happen.” attitude.
One of the younger kids became convinced I'd recorded what happened. He started telling his quasi-leader that he needs to make me delete the video. I genuinely can't remember whether I had recorded anything, only that I have a better view from my neighbors upstairs. But I was not about to hand a group of random teens my phone.
"No, I didn't record your friends. Go away.” “No, you're not looking at my phone. Go away."
Eventually the leader decided to emphasize his negotiating position by pulling a small switchblade and pepper spray out of his jacket. We had a decision to make.
Yonathan and I were both aware that if anything happened, we were going to end up on television under a headline like TWO LUNATIC ADULTS ATTACK INNOCENT MINORS ON YOM KIPPUR. We had to play it cool, even if, deep down, an excuse to fight a bunch of children is kind of appreciated. [/Joking. Or am I?]
We kept our cool, smiling and laughing, telling the leader the same: "This can all end right now. Just go and leave these girls alone." And we waited as the kids deliberated if they should fight two adults, if I had a video, if harassing some girls was really worth it, and probably what else they could do to stay entertained on Anarchy Day.
Eventually an older mother came outside and demanded to know what was going on. She barely let Yonathan and me explain before grabbing the girls and pointing them to go inside the synagogue next door. Apparently, a 40 or 50-something year old lady is more frightening than two adult men, or they presumed police were finally going to come.
As much as I wanted to defend Yonathan and myself as Good Samaritans rather than two adult men who had decided to become deeply involved in the affairs of a bunch of children, I was just happy the mob was finally leaving.
On the way, they hit fences to make as much noise as possible and littered whatever garbage they had. We could hear them for another five minutes as they disappeared into the distance. The police never came and who knows if they were called. We continued our Anarchy Day adventure with a neighbor friend.
About an hour later, Yonathan, neighbor and I met another friend, Leriya, and walked toward an area where lots of people congregate on Yom Kippur, again stopping every 10 seconds to say hi to someone, or admire the atypical vibe. We met a group and played cards for a while, before Leriya and I decided to wander around some more.
At around two in the morning, we noticed a girl who looked distressed. She asked if we could walk her home.
I yelled something like, "OH MY G-D! We haven't seen you in YEARS!"
Leriya understood immediately. We went up to her like she was an old friend, turned around and started walking in the opposite direction of our home.
Our “new friend” had been walking home alone and had become creeped out by a man in a kippa who kept asking where she lived. Apparently even on Yom Kippur there are men whose interpretation of a day devoted to contemplating their sins is "maybe this conservatively dressed girl on the street wants to fuck me. I got the kippa on."
So we made a giant circle and walked her home.
I finally went to bed at around four in the morning after more than 20,000 steps, hungry, confused, wondering if a video other than my neighbors would popup on social media two days later. I slept easy, enjoying the absurdity of it all.
When I woke up around eleven, I wanted to clear my head, so I went to the beach to meet some girlfriends. They had beers and snacks. I was fasting and attempting not to die of dehydration, while also enjoying the sun.
We talked about the strange overlap between trauma and our peculiarly normal lives. Someone might mention a friend of a friend who had died, or a friend of a friend in combat, and five minutes later the girls would be discussing some guy. Both conversations were real. Both mattered. The casual interweving was normal.
At one point, I went into the water and floated. I remember hearing boom after boom somewhere in the distance. Occasionally a fighter jet crossed overhead. I lay there in the Mediterranean and thought, Is this really my life?
It was so much more blissful than you can imagine. Really. I felt comfort in accepting our lack of control.
There was a war going on. I certainly couldn't stop it. Whatever was happening beyond the horizon was going to happen regardless of whether I spent the afternoon staring gravely into the distance or floating in the water.
I remember one of the girls, an olah from Austin, had recently undergone an ideological transformation complicated enough to deserve its own story. She went from a New York liberal feminist, to a good ol' Texas conservative, but still feminist. This meant she flipped her views on abortion, birth-control and, freezing-eggs, gaining 10,000+ followers in the process. She would wax poetic about modern feminism and how she’s learned so much about how the crazy libs have it wrong.
Then she got drunk and went off with some boys.
I went home, laughed about the weirdness of the previous twenty-four hours and waited for sunset so I could finally eat.
I skipped the closing services that day, and I'm okay with it. I didn’t take another five year gap.
Final Thoughts
I don't know what lesson I'm supposed to extract from any of these stories, and I don't particularly want to invent one. Hopefully they made you remember some strange story of your own, or a time when life seemed to be moving too quickly for you to understand what was happening until years later. Or maybe you just found some of it funny. That's cool.
I still fast. I still think about G-d. I still sometimes go to synagogue, especially if Ben asks me to.
Traditions can ground you in strange times. Sometimes they just make the strange times even stranger.
