Vidui

(The Yom Kippur stuff will probably come in dribs and drabs this year. Lots of stuff is still swirling around in my head.)

From the morning service:

For transgressions against God, the Day of Atonement atones; but for transgressions of one human being against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until they have made peace with one another.

I hereby forgive all who have hurt me, all who have wronged me, whether deliberately or inadvertently, whether by word or by deed. May no one be punished on my account.

As I forgive and pardon those who have wronged me, may those whom I have wronged forgive and pardon me, whether whether I acted deliberately or inadvertently, whether by word or by deed.

The first time I was faced with those words I argued with them. Write a blank check? Are you kidding? It wasn't that I had a particular grievance in mind; it's just that it felt wrong somehow. After all, we're told that we have to ask forgiveness and make amends; just feeling sorry doesn't cut it.

The next time I reasoned that there was a quid pro quo involved, and I wanted to say "I forgive and pardon anyone else who is making this declaration today". I don't now remember if that's what I actually said. I know that for a while I've been mentally inserting "those Jews" rather than just anyone, because while not all Jews keep Yom Kippur, it seemed a reasonable compromise.

This year I was able to say it as written. I was able to realize that yeah, there are people who've wronged me who will never apologize (perhaps because they don't even realize it), and I've surely done such things to other people, and it's just not important enough to hang onto. For wrongs that are known and more serious, well, there's a difference between forgiveness and forgetfulness -- I might not rely on certain people in the future, but I don't have to carry the weight of their misdeeds around on a mental scorecard either. I can inform my future behavior without holding out on forgiveness.

This would be much harder, perhaps impossible, if there were a major outstanding wrong against me. I am blessed to not have suffered the kinds of wrongdoing (abuse, major betrayal, etc) that some people have. The small stuff just isn't worth getting worked up about.

As I said, it wasn't so much that I had specific grievances I wanted to hold onto; it was more that I had trouble making the blanket statement. I don't know what's changed, but I don't seem to have that trouble now. I'm happy about this.

I'm glad I'm a Jew -- the annual introspection and sanity check is helpful. And, quite demonstrably, when it wasn't required of me I didn't do it. (Maybe others are more dilligent in such things.) In all seriousness, I would recommend something like the high holy days to my thoughtful gentile friends.

fasting while sick

Wednesday I caught the beginnings of the crud that's been going around and started taking Sudafed aggressively to kill it before Yom Kippur, because fasting with a cold would suck. That didn't work, alas. Thursday night/Friday morning I noticed the first of two second-order effects: near as I can tell, the Sudafed -- whose job, after all, is to "make the emissions less bad" -- was having a dehydrating effect. So I stopped that before it could do more damage. The other effect was that the cold was sapping my appetite, when I should have had a large lunch and good-sized dinner on Friday.

It actually wasn't as bad as I had feared. I did make one concession: on Friday I bought a bottle of "throat spray" to deal with the soreness (or at least numb it away), and I took that to shul with me. I reasoned that while this might technically be in the same category as applying lotions, it's not food or drink and it's medicinal, so it was ok. (You spit it out after gargling with it. I would have taken pills if I'd had anything that I knew to work and be non-dehydrating. I wasn't going to experiment.) Beyond that, I took tissues, tried for aisle seats in case I had to run out, and did my best to minimize contact with other people.

Friday at Kol Nidre I was sweating like mad. I know that our HVAC has unintended climate zones and I was sitting on a supplementary chair in a place in the sanctuary not normally used for seating, so I figured I was just in a bad place. It happened again this morning (in a regular sanctuary seat not known to be bad for heat), and only then did it occur to me that perhaps I had a fever. Well, either the fever broke or the AC kicked in at the beginning of the torah service, and I was fine after that. The sniffling was not bad for the rest of the day and my voice is getting less froggy-sounding. Let's hope I've seen the worst of this.

As for the fast, I found that by about hour 19 I had stopped caring. I expected to be desperate for water by then because of the cold (and wouldn't have been too surprised if my rabbi had ordered me to the drinking fountain). But it wasn't an issue. Yay.

Canbridge (MA): XKCD meetup Sunday

Hey, Cambridge people:

Reference: this XKCD strip.

I'm told that the coordinates correspond to a park in your neighborhood, and that some folks are planning to be there. (I won't be, as I don't live anywhere near there, but I have readers who might want to know about this.)