Slichot

Just because life is frazzled and hectic with preparing for the high holidays and trying to get course work done is really no excuse for having gone so long without posting. That being said, it's nearing 1am, and really time for me to get some sleep, but before I do, some reflections on slichot...

I remember with such clarity my very first slichot service. Perhaps I had been before in my youth at my parents' synagogue, but I can't recall. What I do recall vividly was my first slichot at Brandeis. It was my first year, and I think that even the concept of slichot was new to me then. Friends from my freshman hall were going to walk across Massell Quad at ten minutes to midnight for the service in the Berlin Chapel. I remember the night being dark, dew already formed on the grass, the chill of the New England fall air accentuating the sense of urgency of our prayers. We walked in and stood at the back of a full room, split by a mehitzah. I had no clue what it was that I was supposed to be doing, except that this night was supposed to mark the beginning of the most serious steps towards teshuvah and heshbon hanefesh, a kind of culmination of Elul in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. The night was short, and intensely moving, even if I participated more through observation that through my own words and actions. It was if I stepped back in time, into a shtetl of Eastern Europe, but a shtetl that felt not remote and far off, but familiar, warm and comforting.

Looking back, I long for the ability to once again step in and out of this shtetl life. Five years later, much better versed in the art of davvening and the structure of liturgy, I yearn for a prayer space that is just that - a space for us to come together as Jews and pray. A place that lacks choreography, that lacks decorum and pretense, but is filled with hearts, minds, and bodies overflowing with prayer and longing to experience the Divine. I know this shtetl that I long for never really existed, it is my own strange, utopian fantasy world of dvekut. But I can't help too but feeling I was never closer to that ideal than during my time at Brandeis, and I let it go all too quickly. Now, in a synagogue service in a cavernous hall, paid for by donors whose names loom large over head on plaque filled walls, I close my eyes, I see my shtetl, it looks and feels like the Berlin Chapel, chilly and damp, paint peeling, voices pleading, crying out for God...I wonder if this world ever existed, I know only that it is there for me in my minds eye as I search for God and yearn for forgiveness.