Yom Kippur blog

For Yom Kippur the dishwasher stopped working. Very observant of it. It’s plugged up, apparently. Larry and I kept partly scooping out the water left in the bottom of it and then running the dishwasher over again in hopes of flushing it out.

Larry did more than that too. But I don’t want to talk about it.

The dishwasher kept not working. It would stop part way through its cycle; some internal sensors sensing too much water collected in its bottom, saving us the disaster of dishwasher flooding.

I cleaned out the foyer. I emptied the closet of hockey sticks, gym bags, tennis rackets, roller blades. I found this kid’s microscope Larry bought for Jacob when he was like four that didn’t work, that we never returned. I scrubbed the floor and the wall trimming with Pine sol.

Classically Jewish people go to synagogue on Yom Kippur. They dress up. They don’t wear leather. For some reason I can’t think of now it’s not religious to be wearing dead animal skins. The public phones are turned off at the synagogue. This is another example of observing the “don’t work” principle of Yom Kippur.

But really everyone observes Yom Kippur their own way. And they have cell phones.

I was reading some yoga magazines lately that were talking all about how in the yogic tradition it’s through service and work that you get in touch with your spiritual side. That’s the approach I was employing by cleaning up the foyer. Honestly. Besides when else would I allow myself to do such a thorough cleaning job without feeling guilty about it? I really do have other things to do that I usually consider much more important. Like manifesting a writing career.

My mother in law called part way through the day. She was sick. She’d never been sick in her life before on Yom Kippur she told me. The sickness came on her the night before, first as a chill, when she was at synagogue for Kol Nidre, when we weren’t there with her.

Larry was out when she called. He had to pick up his MasterCard that he accidently left behind when he was at an art fair he went to on Monday and was buying a subscription to the Canadian art magazine cmagazine. Leaving the card behind was working out for him though because it was giving him the opportunity to go back and talk some more to the nice woman he bought the subscription from who is nice and savvy about today’s Toronto art scene.

I kept trying to get him not to go because it didn’t fit in with my idea of how to approach Yom Kippur. For one thing it’s not practical driving downtown when you’re fasting. It expends unnecessary energy.

The day before, when Larry’s mom was calling Larry working at home then me during my break at work, trying to get us to go to synagogue with her for Kol Nidre, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Neither was it what Larry wanted to do. I wanted to do some cooking during the evening to get stuff ready for breaking the fast the next day even if technically I should have already done that before sunset.

Jewish New Year’s is all about the symbolism. How things go, the decisions you make, is you symbolically setting up how you want your year to go. Do you really want another year of your mother in law guilting and dominating your life because you keep letting her perceptions of how pathetic a Jew you are win the day?

When Larry got home and I told him about his mother being sick, he immediately felt guilty, that it was his actions of not going to Kol Nidre with her that had somehow caused his mother’s illness. Funny, I said to him, it’s the first thing I thought of too.