Judgement Day
The womens section was stuffy and hot. The colours predominant in it were white, beige and yellow. White sat lightly on the womens clothes, their kerchiefs, the packets of crumpled tissues held in their hands; beige lay gently on the marble floors and caressed the pillars, climbing on to the walls and the ceiling. Yellow drifted in the air, saturating the light and the womens dry, shallow breath, touched and held onto the pages of blotted paper. The place smelled of sweat, tears and thirst.
The men up front had a fan blowing cool air in their sweating faces, but back here, where the women congregated, the heavy curtain blocked the small shreds of wind, tangled it in the folds of its cloth, until nothing remained but a slight breath of movement, stealing underneath the fabric and onto the womens variously-clad feet.
She fingered the curtain, drawing it slightly back to expose a slit, and eyed the backs of the male crowd, seeking among the blacks and whites the distinctive sight of her husbands head.
There it finally was, the red, distinctive hair rising theatrically and tally over the folds of black and white talit. The long ponytail bobbed rhythmically to the chanting, for the moment mostly detached from a pair of probably aching legs and a distant notion of hunger.
If there was a congregation that the Rabinovches belonged to, beyond the loose network of associations and connections the Jewish world presented as a default, it was this small, somewhat decrepit, Orthodox one. The synagogue that the community owned was remodeled from two stories of apartments, in a rather daring move amidst the carefully zoned and urbanized Founders Falls. And populated by the remnants of Paragons traditional families, a couple of working Israeli scientists whose education in the world of the American choice had not yet pointed them towards the vast expanses of the Reform temple and two stray Russian Jews with a quirky outlook.
They always showed up quietly and left almost as stealthily, nodding their greetings in the convivial atmosphere. They carried their own books a feat which bewildered and confused the inhabitants considerably, unable as they were to reconcile two people who would carry their books with them yet be able to read them without aid. They never joined or paid dues or claimed membership where they obviously did not belong. Yet, she mused, swallowing to clear her ragged throat, in the few times they came to services at all, they invariably came here.
Each holiday, when the cantor reached this particular passage, she peered out front, to the mens packed and crammed section, in a private, unchanging ritual all her own.
"Who will be created and who will be destroyed who will live and who will die who in his own end and who no tin his own end "
It always made her frown. The somber threat of death, or torment, sickness or poverty, and the opposite mocking promise of health. Not so much a promise, even, as a possibility meant to lure the naïve. The passage did not lend itself to kind interpretations. It was not the omen of a good, gentle future, but the harbinger of disasters yet to be revealed. A man died to set it to writing.
It made her wonder every time anew.
"Who by fire and who by water... who by the sword... who by the noise and who by a plague... who will have peace and who will have torment..."
Their lives were tenuous enough, and their fates unknown enough, that the notion of the futures uncertainty, thrown in her face with brazen regularity twice a year, every year, rendered her hold on reality somehow shaky. She wished, sometimes, that she could see the future, and then prayed fervently that she would not. Despite that, every Yom Kippur anew, she stared down at the back of her husbands head and tried to guess by some fraction of an aura or figment of clairvoyance whether or not he would be there, to sprout out of his talit like some sort of too-saturated orchid at the next Yom Kippur.
She wasnt seeing good auras this day, only a disorienting kaleidoscope of uncertains.
And we kneel and bow and thank the cantor continued, and the congregation went down in a flurry of moving chairs, creaking tables and spreading towels, detaching her from the window. She went down in a graceless puddle of skirts, as always, and as always the hair escaped imprudently from her unaccustomed scarf. The private ritual was finished, merged into the river of communal supplication and half-crazed defiance.
And, perhaps not quite as always, when they left, padding along the street in inadequate plastic flip-flops, there was no relief to be had. Only confusion.
The womens section was stuffy and hot. The colours predominant in it were white, beige and yellow. White sat lightly on the womens clothes, their kerchiefs, the packets of crumpled tissues held in their hands; beige lay gently on the marble floors and caressed the pillars, climbing on to the walls and the ceiling. Yellow drifted in the air, saturating the light and the womens dry, shallow breath, touched and held onto the pages of blotted paper. The place smelled of sweat, tears and thirst.
The men up front had a fan blowing cool air in their sweating faces, but back here, where the women congregated, the heavy curtain blocked the small shreds of wind, tangled it in the folds of its cloth, until nothing remained but a slight breath of movement, stealing underneath the fabric and onto the womens variously-clad feet.
She fingered the curtain, drawing it slightly back to expose a slit, and eyed the backs of the male crowd, seeking among the blacks and whites the distinctive sight of her husbands head.
There it finally was, the red, distinctive hair rising theatrically and tally over the folds of black and white talit. The long ponytail bobbed rhythmically to the chanting, for the moment mostly detached from a pair of probably aching legs and a distant notion of hunger.
If there was a congregation that the Rabinovches belonged to, beyond the loose network of associations and connections the Jewish world presented as a default, it was this small, somewhat decrepit, Orthodox one. The synagogue that the community owned was remodeled from two stories of apartments, in a rather daring move amidst the carefully zoned and urbanized Founders Falls. And populated by the remnants of Paragons traditional families, a couple of working Israeli scientists whose education in the world of the American choice had not yet pointed them towards the vast expanses of the Reform temple and two stray Russian Jews with a quirky outlook.
They always showed up quietly and left almost as stealthily, nodding their greetings in the convivial atmosphere. They carried their own books a feat which bewildered and confused the inhabitants considerably, unable as they were to reconcile two people who would carry their books with them yet be able to read them without aid. They never joined or paid dues or claimed membership where they obviously did not belong. Yet, she mused, swallowing to clear her ragged throat, in the few times they came to services at all, they invariably came here.
Each holiday, when the cantor reached this particular passage, she peered out front, to the mens packed and crammed section, in a private, unchanging ritual all her own.
"Who will be created and who will be destroyed who will live and who will die who in his own end and who no tin his own end "
It always made her frown. The somber threat of death, or torment, sickness or poverty, and the opposite mocking promise of health. Not so much a promise, even, as a possibility meant to lure the naïve. The passage did not lend itself to kind interpretations. It was not the omen of a good, gentle future, but the harbinger of disasters yet to be revealed. A man died to set it to writing.
It made her wonder every time anew.
"Who by fire and who by water... who by the sword... who by the noise and who by a plague... who will have peace and who will have torment..."
Their lives were tenuous enough, and their fates unknown enough, that the notion of the futures uncertainty, thrown in her face with brazen regularity twice a year, every year, rendered her hold on reality somehow shaky. She wished, sometimes, that she could see the future, and then prayed fervently that she would not. Despite that, every Yom Kippur anew, she stared down at the back of her husbands head and tried to guess by some fraction of an aura or figment of clairvoyance whether or not he would be there, to sprout out of his talit like some sort of too-saturated orchid at the next Yom Kippur.
She wasnt seeing good auras this day, only a disorienting kaleidoscope of uncertains.
And we kneel and bow and thank the cantor continued, and the congregation went down in a flurry of moving chairs, creaking tables and spreading towels, detaching her from the window. She went down in a graceless puddle of skirts, as always, and as always the hair escaped imprudently from her unaccustomed scarf. The private ritual was finished, merged into the river of communal supplication and half-crazed defiance.
And, perhaps not quite as always, when they left, padding along the street in inadequate plastic flip-flops, there was no relief to be had. Only confusion.
Cynics of the world, unite!
Taking Care of the Multiverse