Rosh Hashanah (written yesterday)

It hasn’t been the easiest start to the new Jewish year. For me, possibly the hardest, actually…certainly the hardest. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have great meaning for me. No matter how removed I feel from my tradition, my people, and my faith going into them, I’m always a connected and believing Jew again when I come out. But this year, I went in testing my theory that it is possible to be Jewish and Wiccan both at once. Guess what. It doesn’t work quite as well as I had hoped.
 
Things are all right until you get to passages having to do with many gods, other gods, false gods, heathens, retribution, or sins. And – guess what? – that’s most of the liturgy. I had never read it that way before, I had never been paying attention to those elements before. They had never been relevant. Of course I was Jewish, and therefore not anything else, so all those prohibitions really didn’t matter. That whole monotheism thing was a given.
 
I am, actually, still a monotheist. In fact, Wiccans only believe in one god, they just treat that god like more than one (generally two, sometimes more). Judaism does this too, just more subtly – we talk about Adonai (god of mercy), Elohim (god of justice), and the Shechina (feminine side of god), for example. What Wiccans do is really no different, or at least very, very similar. They just separate the Deity into the God and the Goddess in a way that Jews don’t. But ultimately, God and Goddess are just different sides of the same Being. Therefore, it ought to all be quite compatible.
 
I think, at heart, it is compatible. After all, G-d didn’t compose the High Holy Day services – people did. A very long time ago. So I can still believe in the Jewish G-d, participate in Jewish life, and be a Jew, without believing everything in the Rosh Hashanah liturgy. But after grounding myself and defining myself by the liturgy of Jewish prayer for so long, it’s very, very hard to try to discard or even modify any of it. There was some passage we were reading in English, and I tried, just to see how it would feel, substituting “They” for “He”, to encompass the Wiccan view. And suddenly it all felt so right. Until we got to some passage that just didn’t work that way, something about false gods I think – in the Wiccan tradition, there are no false gods, all gods are just different representations or aspects of the one Deity in Its two forms – and the whole thing just fell apart. In retrospect, I should have known this would not be so easy.
 
Friday night was brutal. I felt despairing and tangled in internal knots, wanting nothing but to talk to somebody who would understand – preferably Adam J, he’s been my advisor in all this. Saturday wasn’t quite as bad. I began to see ways to integrate, to make it all work. There’s this little voice in my head that says, come on, you can’t have it both ways. But I must have it both ways. I need both these things. So I will make it work. The whole Rosh Hashanah idea of judgment doesn’t seem to make so much sense anymore…I realized to my horror that I would probably actually do better in the reform service, a form of worship I have shunned my whole life. Not looked down on exactly, but certainly dismissed as not right for me, never to be right for me. Ah, this is not easy.
 
Saturday afternoon, at Tashlich (Yes, I went to Tashlich…I went to all the services. I’m not sure what exactly I was trying to accomplish.), I met two new, wonderful people. Their names are Rachel and Max, and they are (alas) a couple. After services Saturday night (yes, I went to those, too), I went back to Shaw with them to hang out for a bit, and it was so good. New people! Jews! I met some Jews! New Hillel friends! Oh wait, I’m only sort of Jewish, now…I remember. I feel like I’m living a lie. Two lies. I also met a guy called Ben, from France, who’s studying here for the year. It becomes more and more clear that I probably can’t stay with Eric, but that’s another topic to be discussed later. Anyway, I hung out with Rachel and Max for a bit, then went to see Eric for a couple of hours, and then went to the party at Riddler’s Corner (Brendan’s house). I was exhausted and didn’t really want to go out, but I really wanted to talk to Adam, and I knew he would be there. Sure enough, when I arrived, he met me at the door with a big smile and said “Stephanie! What are you doing here? I would have thought you’d be in bed!” I said that I should be, but there were some people I wanted to say hello to. Someone passed through and asked what I’d done that day, and I said I’d been in services all day long. When they had gone, Adam asked me not-quite-casually if I’d been doing any reading – meaning, have I read the book he loaned me on Wicca. I said, yes, and actually one of the reasons I’d come was in the hopes of talking to him about it. So we tried to find a private space to talk, but it was a lost cause – we had about two minutes before Peter came in and joined us, and the conversation ground to a halt. I told him that I was having a hard time and would really love to meet a woman he had told me about, his mentor in this for the last three years, and he said he would introduce me. That’s about as far as we got. I still intend to talk to him, we’ll just have to find the time…
 
And today, what did I do? Went back to services, of course. I sat with Rachel and Max, and had lunch with them and another old Hillel friend afterwards. And guess what. Max plays Celtic music and is trying to assemble an ensemble of some sort, and they need singers. Oooh oooh ooh! Pick me, pick me!! He said he’d be in touch about it, so hopefully that will pan out well.
 
I have such a yearning inside me…to be whole, not to be fractured any longer. It will require work, and learning, and courage, and a willingness to change. To give things up. I’m just beginning to broach the topic with my mother…I was talking to her yesterday, and I got onto the subject through talking about someone I know who is converting to Judaism. I started to ask her what she would do if she came across a religion that she felt, in order to be honest and whole, she had to join, and I said that if it ever happened to be I would find a way to be both it and Jewish. She seemed untroubled by the idea, but she also seemed quite convinced that there was little to no risk of it ever happening to me. So we’ll see. I’ll have to talk to her quite soon, I think. I don’t like keeping such secrets.
 
As for Eric…if I am honest, here is the truth. There are reasons to stay with Eric, and they are these: I love his company. I like his friends, and I don’t want them angry at me. I enjoy the fact that people know we’re together, and link us in their minds. He’s very special. He has never done a single, slightest thing wrong with me. He’s very smart, and we have good conversations. I won’t come across another like him in a hurry. I like to be held. He’s very dear to me and I don’t want to lose him. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want the hassle of explaining to the rest of the world what happened. I don’t want him to hate me, or think me cruel. I don’t want to be alone. These are my reasons for staying with Eric.
 
These are my reasons for not staying with Eric: I want things back the way they were before, where we had a special relationship but it was simple and clear and I knew where we stood. I am not in love with him. I don’t want to do anything below-the-belt with him. I hate the idea of what I’m doing from his perspective – I’m staying with him even though I don’t really want to. He’s not Jewish (well…hmm). I’m meeting new, interesting people, and while I may very well not date any of them, I could fall for them. There are other people I am just as interested in as I am in Eric, or more. I don’t want to lie to him. I hate when people talk about him to me as though we’re serious. He cares about me more than I care about him. And, the biggest and most important reason, it just doesn’t feel right.
 
When I look at it spelled out, it’s fairly clear what I have to do. But oh, I don’t want to. I really don’t want to hurt him. Better, far better, if we had never started. As I always knew it would be.
 
Well, too late for that.
 
So, and so. What I may do is sit him down and say, we want different things. You want a relationship, and I just don’t. I’m happy enough to see you once or twice a week for an evening, but I don’t want to be your girlfriend, and that is what you want me to be. You’re waiting for me to decide that I want this. It is far more likely that I will end up deciding that I don’t. What do you want to do? But of course then there’s always the risk that he’ll say, let’s keep on as we have been. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing…I just don’t know. I don’t really know anything right now.
 
I find myself in two situations where I simply do not know what to do.
 
–Stephanie