The Choosing: A Rabbi's Journey from Silent Nights to High Holy Days

2. The Secular New Year

2 The Secular New Year Happy New Year On the first of Nisan is the New Year for kings and feasts. —Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:1 Make the old new, and the new holy. —Rav Avraham Yitzchak Ha-Cohen Kook, First Chief Rabbi of Israel I Left My Heart on Long Island It happened at midnight. Piercing lights, clanging metal, the acrid smell of gunpowder, and deafening screams woke me out of a sound sleep. Having just returned to America after two turbulent years in Israel, I quickly concluded that it was a bombing. A sickening synesthesia overwhelmed me, like the moment in which the senses of sound and sight were combined in the revelation at Mount Sinai. I saw the noise and heard the flashes of light. A burning sensation coiled around my left arm and burst through my chest like an electric shock. There was only one other time in my life I had been so shocked by a sound. When I was fifteen years old, my parents took me and my brother on a cruise to Bermuda. I had a horrific period, and a friend had given me my first tampon so that I would be able to swim. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the directions. Reader, I flushed it. Leave it to Tampax 13 14 The Secular New Year to create a weapon so devious that it induced frenzy among the temporary residents of the Homeric worthy of The Poseidon Adventure. As the force of the ship bore down on the tiny plastic cylinder, a deafening sonic boom issued forth from the tea-cup-size bathroom. In addition to having that not-so-fresh feeling, I had discovered a portal to hell—and a way to get the attention of everyone on deck. For the rest of the cruise, I could not make eye contact with anyone. When I entered the dining room that evening, a hush fell over the room. My brother was still shaken from an orgy he witnessed on the top deck earlier that day, involving two women, a man, and a diving board: he was angry that I had upstaged him. Our vacations were nothing if not educational. But this time, back in America, there was no wayward tampon on a cruise ship to explain the deafening sound. I tried to orient myself. Exhausted, I had walked miles to synagogue and back that evening for Rosh Hashanah, and needed a good night’s rest before making the same trek in the morning . After four years at Brandeis and two years in Jerusalem, I had moved back home, penniless, to work my way through rabbinical school. My parents lived in one of the few parts of Long Island miles away from anything remotely Jewish, which made sense, given that they were not Jewish themselves . And so, on my first Rosh Hashanah back in the United States, instead of being surrounded by the festivity of the holiday in Jerusalem, I had walked alone to a suburban synagogue, sat through an endlessly long service, then walked home late at night in the dark. Now here I was, experiencing a classic Jewish nightmare come to life: being attacked in one’s own home in the midst of a holiday, in the middle of the night. The next moment, though, I realized: why would an antiSemite attack a house with only one Jew? Perhaps this was another kind of assault. I worried about my family, my par- Happy New Year 15 ents and younger brother in nearby bedrooms and my elderly grandmother who lived upstairs, and who was surely too frail to survive such an onslaught. Maybe this was a simple robbery gone wrong. In the years of my absence, my mother had accumulated an extensive and expensive Beanie Baby collection . Was this the thieves’ true target? All these possibilities were eliminated in one moment of clarity. The tallest of my assailants was wearing a purple sequined hat, as gaudy as one could imagine. No one would wear a hat like that but my father. The shortest of the invaders was hunched over, in no shape for breaking and entering. I recognized my grandmother’s diminutive form. And with these realizations, the shouting became discernible: it was the voice of my family members, yelling “Happy New Year!” The metallic noise was the clanging of pots and pans, and the smoky smell emanated from small...