Today you die. No one pronounces that horrible sentence on Yom Kippur, but it is true. Yom Kippur reenacts death. We wear white, like the shrouds we will one day be buried in. We do not eat, wash, procreate; we are as corpses. We recite the \”Unetaneh Tokef,\” filled with graphic, even gruesome images about our death.
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins at sundown on Sunday, Oct. 8, during which time a strict fast is observed.
Every fall, hundreds of Jews who don\’t belong to synagogues fan out across greater Los Angeles for a once-a-year dip into Jewish worship, buying tickets or wangling free seats at services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Some are motivated by parents, others tag along with friends; some have babies or preschoolers and are thinking about where they might want to affiliate when the kids are a little bigger, while others are beginning to feel the first stirrings of a spiritual search.
About 1,000 people crammed into Jerusalem\’s Kol Haneshama Reform synagogue for Yom Kippur services, while another 500 or so listened in the courtyard outside.
In the waning hours of Yom Kippur, the last rays of sun cast long shadows through the stained-glass windows. It is time for \”Ne\’ila,\” the final prayer in a day filled with prayer, when the gates on high, opened especially wide for this day, begin their final closing.
An expert at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center hasinvaluable advice for your Yom Kippur fast.
Gloria Hernandez Trujillo, 51, grew up in what she thought was a traditional Catholic home in Monterey Park. Her mother sent the children to mass and catechism classes at Our Lady of Solitude church in East Los Angeles. Trujillo made her first communion at the age of 8, wearing the requisite white frilly dress. At 12, she was confirmed, like many of the Latino children in her Eastside neighborhood.
Each Yom Kippur, a vestigial loneliness creeps over me. I achingly feel that my parents and family are back East; that my cousins live in Japan; that some of my dearest are dead. On this day, dispersion and alienation seeps in, and I cling to my community like fog to the shore. And this is the way it should be.
Your rabbi is a banana. Your cantor thinks she\’sJohn Lennon. And the entire congregation is singing Beatlestunes.
A nightmare? A parallel universe?
No, it\’s just Purim at Sha\’arei Am: The SantaMonica Synagogue, and Rabbi Jeff Marx\’s megillah reading is just oneof many bizarre scenes that will play out as rabbi and congregantsrid themselves of cumbersome inhibitions for one silly day.
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