June 11, 2008
Allegra Goodman in The New Yorker
Novelist Allegra Goodman (pictured right) wrote an essay for the most recent issue of The New Yorker that had me thinking about all the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services I suffered through as a child.
In her essay, Goodman said she used to keep tabs on the number of pages left to go in the service:
I was a daydreamer and a page counter. On Yom Kippur, I kept my finger on the last page of the evening service. Only seventy pages to go. Fifty! Maybe now I could get up and make a trip to the water fountain. I was expert at every diversion.
I used to take it one step further. I’d count the pages and I’d do a test to see how many pages we could finish in five minutes. With that number in mind, I’d try to estimate how much time it would take us to complete whatever number of pages we had left in the machzor.
Of course, it never worked out the way I’d figured. The rabbi would add a prayer here or there that I hadn’t reckoned on. Also, there were the inevitable announcements from the synagogue president. What can I say? My system wasn’t perfect.
The takeaway from Goodman’s essay is poignant. She daydreamed through synagogue services but she grew to appreciate Judaism:
I sat through Shabbat services making up my own stories about Laura Ingalls Wilder to add to the adventures in her books. And yet, inexorably, some of my own religion rubbed off on me. Might that be the way belief works for some people? Not a sudden epiphany but a long, slow accumulation of Sabbaths. No road-to-Damascus conversion but a kind of coin rubbing, in which ritual and repetition begin to reveal the credo underneath. As I grew older, I was drawn to poetry, and I began to study the haftarah—the weekly selection from the prophets. As I grew busier, I began to appreciate time away from the world. Services became a refuge. I did not need to rest when I was a child, because I did not work. I did not want to come inside, because the outside world was still entirely beautiful to me.
Allegra Goodman’s most recent novel is “Intuition.” Her new book, “The Other Side of the Island,” will be published by Razorbill in September (right in time for high holiday services!).
Hat tip to Rick Richman over at Jewish Current Issues.
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