IF YOU GIVE ME ROOT VEGETABLES

--By Karen Dukess

When I picked up my latest farm share of fruits and vegetables at the PJC, I realized that this is the time of year when I go into my own version of the children’s book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” In the book, the cookie leads to the mouse wanting a glass of milk, which leads to him wanting a straw and so on and so on until the boy tending to the mouse’s every whim ends up right back where he started because the mouse wants a cookie.

For me, it began with turnips. Because if you give me root vegetables, I will want to roast a chicken. The sizzling aroma of the chicken will make me think of Shabbat. Thoughts of Shabbat will remind me how long it’s been since I’ve been to services, which will make me feel guilty. The wave of guilt will make me think about Yom Kippur, which will bring me to the none-too-welcome realization that my meandering journey towards Judaism has taken me only this far – I have evolved from being a completely unaffiliated Jew into little more than a Seasonal Jew.

The season started a bit early for me this year because we were asked to sponsor a late-summer Kiddush. And to keep with the cause and effect theme here, if I agree to sponsor the Kiddush, I will want to go to services…

It was, as usual, nice to be there. Rabbi Schuck spoke about the difficulty of fitting oneself into the rather black-and-white scenario of either being worthy of the Book of Life or not, which reminded me of one of his favorite themes (maybe a favorite of all Rabbis), which is that Yom Kippur doesn’t really “work” if you treat it as just one day.

Being seasonally Jewish, I know all too well what it means to start my “season” with the High Holidays. It’s a foolproof recipe for alienation. I end up feeling plenty of guilt, but mostly about feeling like I don’t really belong there, that I’m just going through the motions. My “atonement” remains pretty shallow and self-centered. I’m physically where I should be, but my presence mostly gives me a chance to wonder why it is so difficult to connect with the ritual and to imagine that the people around me are either way more spiritually literate than I am or better fakers.

This summer, something tragic happened that inadvertently got me primed for this month of reflection. A close friend died suddenly and unexpectedly while traveling in Thailand with his fiancé. Because of the unusual circumstances of his death, there had to be an autopsy and it took some time to get his body back home to New York. Waiting for the funeral was excruciating – we were miserable, but not yet mourning. I could feel the grief filling me up, but it had nowhere to go, no form to take and no language with which it could be shared. When the funeral finally came, the pain and grief were scorching, but necessary and, at least briefly, cathartic.

At the funeral and at the gathering afterwards, among the many things that one hears repeated, was this: “You know, the Jewish rituals of mourning, of having the funeral right away, aren’t just tradition, they really make sense.” These people, nearly all Jewish and nearly all completely non-observant, had felt off-kilter without the ritual that they had never realized made such sense.

This is how I am going to try to approach Yom Kippur – by trusting that it makes sense.

If I can trust that it is right that I am there, and that the ritual makes sense, maybe I won’t be distracted by a shallow kind of guilt and a pointless kind of frustration. Maybe being free of this distraction will allow me to find a new connection, which may get me on the way to being more than seasonally Jewish.

There may even come a day when I will want root vegetables, because I want to roast a chicken, because it is Shabbat, and lighting candles just makes sense.

--Karen Dukess is a member of the Pelham Jewish Center