Pesach All Over Again

Wednesday marked Pesach Sheni or Second Passover. It was established by G-d for those who were not able to bring the Passover offering at the proper time due to ritual impurity. One month after Pesach there was a second chance for those who missed it the first time. From this origin story the day has become known by some as a day of second chances. That's what I decided to use it for this year.

I tried on Tuesday evening to get to shul in time for the evening minyan but the joy of rush hour Hampton Roads traffic made a 20 minute trip take 45 minutes and I missed it. I decided I would be there for the next morning's minyan.

It had been a long time since I had sat in morning minyan. You may remember from my previous post that I had not been to shul since the Sunday after parsha va'eira 2009. If my calculations are correct, that would have been January 25, 2009. The twins would have been almost five and my college freshman daughter would have been ten. Losing all of that time hit me hard when I made the realization of how long it had been. So many lost chances to share my faith with them as they grew up. So many lost chances to get them involved in synagogue life. To make the idea of not going to shul every week as alien to them as going at all is to them now. I wept. Every realization like this leaves me feeling horrible about myself. It piles on top of the growing mound of feeling that I've done yet one more thing to screw up my kids' lives.

Oddly enough, I was like a kid trying to go to bed on Christmas Eve. I tossed and turned all night, my anxiety levels were through the roof and it didn't help that I had missed my stomach medication for the past two days so the acid reflux was in full effect. Finally I got up at 4:30 AM and started reading. I reviewed a few videos on wrapping tefillin, because even though I've been wrapping every morning since my new pair arrived, and I have already spent several evenings and Sundays reading blogs and books and watching videos on the right way to wrap, I was still anxious about doing it in public and possibly getting it wrong.

I showered early and left with more than ample time to spare. When I walked in I recognized a few of the regulars from the old days. Still sitting in their same seats. I went to my regular seat in the back row to put on my tallit and tefillin and felt sad to see the empty row. The back row is where I'd sit with the old Russians and assorted אַלטער קאַקער and we would grump and grouch about politics, the weather, and the young wasting their youth. Now the row was empty. I had read about each of them passing away over the years. I had gone to several of their funerals and stood unnoticed in the background. I had visited their graves and left pebbles on their gravestones.

I finished and took a new seat on the second row. One of the regulars recognized me and we caught up a little. I had to bring him up to speed on the marriage ending, the kids growing up and all that had happened in the last decade or so. There were a few re-introductions to the new gang of אַלטער קאַקער on the side seats. I knew a few but I always try to be polite when someone meets me again for the first time. Plus I can respect an introduction that begins, "Listen, kid, you gotta tells us your name or it will bug us all morning and then we'll bug you all morning." Once my name was out, due to its Scots-Irish origin, many of them remembered me.

Minyan began and we davened. It felt good. I was anxious about making a mistake, but for the most part it was muscle memory. We finally got new siddurim in the minyan room. It's nice that we have the Siddur Sim Shalom for Weekdays now to replace the aging Birnbaums. Aging? I guess I should say ancient. In either case, it was a nice upgrade and made davening a little easier due to my rusty Hebrew.

After the service I said my goodbyes and went to work. After lunch I sent the rabbi a text message asking for some time to speak with him at his convenience. He called back a few minutes later and we caught up on times passed and discussed how I was to go about restoring my membership at the shul and attending services regularly. The rabbi, my Rabbi, is one of the few people on Earth whose opinion of me I worry about with any seriousness. I have always regarded him to be a wise man, an intelligent man, and a man of honor. I have caught myself on numerous occasions feeling completely overwhelmed by his mind, and this is a rare feeling for someone as arrogant as myself. I am rarely jealous of other's intelligence but it was almost routine when I was around him. I remember once seeing one of those funny door signs that said, "If you're the smartest person in the room, maybe you're in the wrong room." I wanted to get back to the right room. The rabbi and I had a pleasant telephone conversation and I said I would see him at a future service and we could talk more at that time.

When I walked into the minyan room Wednesday morning I had a feeling I haven't felt in years. I had the feeling I was home.

Wrap It Up

This year has been a year of renewal for me. I have taken on the challenge of becoming more observant in my Judaism this year, but that wasn't necessarily my going in option in January. In my last post I discussed how I decided to start wearing my kippah every day. I know years ago when I was first attempting to be more observant one of the things that kept coming up was that kippot were not Biblically mandated but tzitzit and tefillin were and that it was better to take up the obligation of tefillin than just a kippah. It had been a long time since I had laid tefillin regularly.

My tallit bag holding my tallit and tefillin had been on the bookshelf in the bedroom for a couple of years. It would get moved occasionally when we needed space for something. Each time I moved it I would feel the pang of guilt that I should be going to synagogue each week or, at the minimum, I should be using my tallit and tefillin every morning and praying.

As we approached Pesach the urge to lay tefillin was growing stronger with each morning. It was almost as if they were calling to me. Finally, the Sunday morning before Pesach, I took my tallit bag and siddur downstairs to daven shacharit. Unfortunately it had been almost 8 years since I had taken my tefillin out of the bag. As I unrolled them I could hear the black paint cracking and peeling off the retzuot and batim. I thought I had kept them safe over the years but apparently the humid summers here combined with being tightly wound and stored away was too much for them.

It was a shame see them in such shape. I remember how hard it was to save up the money for such a basic set back in February 2001. They were the cheapest set available from the "Source for Everything Jewish" catalog but they were like gold to me when I got them. I remember struggling to get the shel rosh knot adjusted to fit my head, and having to adjust the shel yad knot to accommodate my being left-handed. I remember feeling so self-conscious the first few times I wore them to morning minyan at shul. I was terrified that someone would point out I was doing something wrong. And I remember the horror I felt the first morning someone told me I was wrapping the wrong arm (I wasn't, he just didn't know I was a leftie).

For eight years I was consistent with laying tefillin each morning. Some mornings were more difficult than others, especially when I was still in the Navy. I have laid tefillin around the world and in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I remember having to get really good calculating zemanim to adjust for my location. Thankfully the U.S. Navy was very keen on keeping up with sunrise and sunset.

It felt like a punch to the gut to see them like this and to think that I had let them get to this state. I immediately went online and started researching a new set. I finally settled on a pair that were within my budget but also very nice. I ordered two new tefillin bags, one for the new set and one for the old set. They had always be stored in one of my tallit bags but now I felt everyone should have their own. I decided that I wouldn't get rid of the old pair but instead I would set them aside and someday have them repaired. Perhaps when the tefillin set is repaired and once again certified kosher, I will pass them down to a child or grandchild.

The new set of tefillin arrived on the second evening of Pesach and the first day I could use them would be the first day of Chol HaMoed. I spent the evening looking up the rules of tefillin and making sure I was okay to daven with them on Chol HaMoed. I also spent a good amount of time looking up how to wrap tefillin. It had been so long since my last wrap I had forgotten how. Thankfully Internet is much more fleshed out in 2017 than it was in 2001, and I was able to find instructional videos for many, many wrapping styles. Granted, finding the finger wrap for me was a bit difficult and I recall finding out how to do that was tough the first time as well.

So now I have a new set of tefillin. The retzuot are still stiff and dig into my arm each morning. Some mornings I forget to put them on, some mornings I rush out the door and feel guilty that I didn't wear them. Most mornings I feel like I'm doing "Jewish" wrong and I'm skipping a prayer I should be saying or saying a prayer I should be skipping. But I'm spending time online learning more about tefillin than I've ever known before. I may even dedicate a post or two and share some of what I've learned.

The next big step is returning to shul. Remember when I took out my tallit and tefillin that Sunday before Pesach? There was something else in the bag. It was a program from Shabbat services. The week's parsha was va'eira and the year was 2009. The following Sunday morning when I went back to daven and pick up my tallit bag is the last confirmed time I was in the shul. So I need to make some phone calls and re-establish some lines of communication. But I guess that will be another blog post.

I Got It Covered

One of the things I've tried to do this year is become more observant. Due to a lot of issues with basically my entire life falling apart and being rebuilt, a lot of my day-to-day Judaism fell through the cracks. You can go back and see the beginnings of it in some of the older blog posts here. It was the same old story of unemployment, dissolved marriage, foreclosure, move on, meet someone new, start getting better, new job, new life. Regardless of the details of how it happened, it happened. Over the course of the past two years or so, something kept gnawing at me. I was putting my life back together, I was getting to a good place again but I was leaving something out.

I had to sit and examine my new life. The answer was obvious. As I went through the process of rebuilding my life I was subconsciously leaving out Judaism. If asked I would readily identify as a Jew but I had not attended a service in well over 5 years. My youngest children hadn't been to synagogue more than a handful of times since their upsherin when they were three years old. I had transitioned from someone who loved going to synagogue and worrying about having Jewish grandchildren to someone who occasionally felt a pang of guilt on Saturday afternoons if he saw a Jewish reference on television. This was not who I wanted to be and more and more the guilt and the emptiness grew in me.

After recognizing the problem not much changed for me. I went through every day pretty much the same. Along the way I started paying more attention to what I ate. It slowly evolved from ordering the bacon double cheeseburger to no bacon, to no cheese, to ordering the tuna sandwich or getting a salad. Slowly I started trying to schedule less on Saturdays. But I still felt that something was missing.

One of the first things I had to address in my own life was to stop being the resident "Uncle Tom" Jew for my goyishe boss. I had allowed an environment to grow around me where I would offer mild protest or chidding over borderline racist or anti-semitic remarks but never rock the boat too much. I was fast becoming a self-hating Jew on the road to assimilation and I had to bring it to a stop as soon as possible. But once you let a situation like this get established it is very difficult to fix it or stop it. The attitude of "why is it a problem now but it was fine last week?" or the inference that you are the problem for being a hypocrite.

As we all struggled through the ordeal of the 2016 Presidential Election here in the United States, I was becoming more aware of the news. Racial incidents seemed to be on the rise, anti-muslim opinions were openly voiced on social media, and the foul smell of anti-semitism started to waft in from the political fringes. I know all of this has been here for a while and, for the most part, has always been a part of our lives, but lately it felt as if people were being more bold with their statements.

Post-election Thanksgiving dinner with the extended family went about as well as could be expected when you're a liberal Jew who supported Bernie and then Hillary, and the extended family are nominally Christian Trump supporting conservatives. The hours of conversation about how Trump was already fixing America a full two months before being sworn into office was more than enough to make the trip a bucket of fun for all involved.

I felt something inside of me pushing back and demanding to be heard. I was not the person I wanted to be, or needed to be. I had allowed one person and one set of bad choices lead me down a road that took away something in my life that gave me peace. I had to get it back.

Sometime in mid-December, as the holiday season approached, I wore my kippah to work. I didn't do it the next day and a fellow manager asked me why not. I explained that I used to wear it all of the time years ago but due to work and trying to get back on track with my career I hadn't felt comfortable wearing one. That was only part of the truth. The other part was that I had let my life falling apart let me become a bad Jew and I didn't have the strength of character to represent the tribe anymore. We all know the old trope that if someone is rude in public, he's just rude; but if someone wearing a kippah is rude in public, then it is proof that all Jews are rude.

Part of why I chose to take off my kippah the first time was my own shame at not being a good Jew. Part of the reason I couldn't put it back on was my own cowardice and the fear of being pushed down again. But now I was a manager. Now I could make sure that no one was pushed down.

So I started wearing my kippah, on and off in mid-December but over the holiday vacation season and starting everyday during Hanukkah, I wore my kippah and I haven't taken it off since. Early on there were a few glances, hushed comments, and awkward questions but that wore off as we all moved into January and the new year.

What changed because of my kippah? Internally I felt way more guilt or shame when I walked into a non-kosher restaurant. Early on I made a point to keep a baseball cap handy to hide my shame. Luckily Chicago won the World Series, so I had an excuse to always have my Cubs cap handy. Externally, at work at least, I started noticing that certain people were talking to me more. I was a new manager, but I was also openly Jewish. Now I seemed to be father confessor to some, therapist to others, and champion to the downtrodden. If you work at my office and are a minority, live an alternative lifestyle, or belong to any other "non-Old White Man" group then we have most likely met and had a conversation or two.

I know there are more important things I should be doing to increase and improve my observance level but this was just the first step. Or perhaps, better put, this was the first rung on my ladder of increased observance. There's more to the story and more rungs on the ladder have been climbed, but we'll talk about those in upcoming posts.

New Decade, Who Dis?

So it's been 7 years, 11 months, and 18 days since my last post here. Glad I got in before the 8 year mark, that would have been embarrassing. While I'm at it, I just also noticed that it has been 10 years, 2 months, 26 days since I started this blog. In either event, so much about my life has changed in that decade but we'll get to that in time.

For the time being the thing that is bringing me back to this blog is my Judaism. If the majority of my early posts here are any indication, I generally used this as a place to discuss my ongoing journey into Judaism. I've recently started back on the path of observance and needed a place to journal about it. As usual, I'd rather keep names and specific locations out of the mix to protect the innocent but the topics here don't quite fit the other blogs I maintain.

That all said, I don't know how much I'll be writing here but it will be a work in process.