Saturday, September 14, 2002
Services last week were at
Services last week were at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, because my guys didn’ t have room for everybody at their own place. I wore white - an man’s shirt from india that drapes to my knees, with glossy embroidering around my pectoral region, white chinese mourner’s shoes (the only time in the year these are not too dorky to wear, even at home), and a bright red cap with rhinestones and mirrors embroidered all over it. And it wasn’t like I really stood out from the crowd. The facility was a very cleanly designed traditional protestant church with minimal ornamentation and nice stained glass windows that de-emphasized the “he died for your sins” angle. The enormous cross was hidden behinde draped silks, and sensual oriental carpets covered the pulpit. A band of musicians set up keyboards, electric and acoustic bass and guitars, mandolins, dobros, little skinny balilaika-sounding things, clarinets, drums from three continents, a wall of holy sound. Plus meditation chimes and a whole rack of shofars. When it came time to sound the shofar, a crowd of people stepped forward and a bunch more just pulled the twisted horns from their knapsacks and the sound was everywhere - it really got under my skin, it echoed for days, an ancient sound itself an echo of battle cries and stone-age wanderings. When so many shofars are blown at once, the air becomes rich with a marrowy smell, musty and biological, human breath and animal bone filling my nostrils. It was a powerful compliment to the blasting of the horns.
During the service Avram had a “redeemed” torah, brought back and rededicated from Nazi stockpiles of captured degenerate cultural artifacts, passed around from hand to hand throughout the congregation. It felt indescribably old, thousands of years old, older than anything. It felt like an ancient baby, full of promise, but incapable of even dressing itself. We were instructed to take a moment and “shnuggle” it, smell it, feel it’s weight in our arms. I helped an older guy in a wheelchair receive it, and took it back from him when it was my turn. Our eyes met, both moist with tears. During this time, Avram mentioned that, in the camps, when there was no torah, blessings for the reading of torah were said, instead, over the head of a young child. That really got to me.
A little later, I noticed a card in the box on the back of the pew in front of me, with the history of the church where we were davening. It had been built in 1882, reconstructed in 1922, bla bla bla - but I was struck by a note that, in 1942, that lovely and holy space had been used as an interim holding location for japanese-americans on their way to internment camps. I looked around, at walls that I suddenly realized had been prison walls, at lovely stained glass that must have been cruelly ironic for those who could not walk the cozy streets they could see, spectacularly miscolored, outside. There seemed to be no lingering taint of bigotry and hatred in that space that morning. It was what we were doing with that space that created the spirituality. I’m working now on making the spaces I occupy less of a temporary internment center and more wholesome. Unfortunately, that requires me to reconstruct things from inside myself. We’ll see how Yom Kippur pans out.