Selichot season
Leon Kraiem
Note: This email is not about the war, or Israel, or even my own life in particular — it is, mostly, a series of meandering thoughts about our current location on the Jewish calendar; I use a lot of terminology that I don’t expect all the people on this list to understand — I haven’t explained most of it, but I’ve added some links here and there, which might make it a little more intelligible; regardless, you’re under no obligation to read my emails; I’m sufficiently honored that you give them a place in your inbox.
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Hello friends,
Chodesh tov. A good month.
I have a custom, as some of you know, of attending selichot services, the hour-or-so of special penitential prayers recited (in the Sephardic tradition) beginning on the second night of the month of Elul, all the way through Yom Kippur.
Last night — having confused my calendars — I made my way to the little hole-in-the-wall synagogue I go to every year, whose old-country I can’t quite figure out, and whose congregants, according to my working theory, are one extended family. They know me now — it's been a few years — and I always get a warm, though anonymous, reception, as if to say: "Ah, here he is again. We knew you’d show."
No one's ever asked my name, and I've never asked theirs, and in a way this is fitting. Our relationship is like a friendship you make while traveling. We're on a journey together; if we knew who we "were," it might spoil things.
And anyway, you can't not be included in a little service like this; Sephardic selichot are participatory: the poems that make up the liturgy — written in elegant, but refreshingly simple, Medieval Hebrew, with melodies that are in your head all year, you just have to muffle them for 10 and a half months of it — are mostly read line by line, in a round robin, each taking a verse, crooning in his best microtonal maqamat, which for some is divine, and for others, joyously off key in that way that only old men singing to the Lord can be.
A friend asked me earlier today to tell her about these services, and why I like them so much, what my actual practice is; I decided, it's worth putting down in writing.
One thing I love about selichot is that — in the Sephardic tradition, at least — they are joyful. A few years ago, I sent my roommate at the time a medley I particularly liked, and he responded that it was too happy; it wasn't appropriate for the content. This is what we call being Ashkenazi. I've attended the Occidentals’ version of selichot a few times, in college. The liturgy is dense, the Hebrew's a mouthful, and — if you'll forgive the slightly impious expression — you get a little bit of melody here and there, but not one single banger. Back in the Orient, it's been bangers all the way through for at least 1,500 years.
Here’s what I told my roommate: Sephardic selichot are joyful, not despite their penitential content, but because of it. God will forgive us — no need to pretend we don't know that — and here we are, serving him with joy, doing the work to deserve it. These guys I join each year on Yehuda Street, in their skinny jeans and their Jew-for-a-day kippot (I remember last year, there was a guy who used to sit next to me, whose every-night-the-same-sweatshirt had a big ol' F-bomb on it, in upside down bold letters; he was praying his heart out, that guy, every night, in that thing) — these guys take pleasure in, as the kids say, ‘doing the work.’
And why not? Growing as a person, making amends, setting aspirations even though you know you won't reach them all — that's one of the great privileges of being alive. A little healthy guilt is like the pilot light you use to get cooking. But don't spoil the whole thing with shame, that's just adding insult to spiritual injury. God gives you a life, gives you free will, helps you back up when you fall, and you're not even happy to be here, in his house?
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Here's my favorite metaphor for this time of year: On Shavuot, at the start of the summer, it is often said that we, Israel, have gotten married to God.
People sometimes extend this allegory backwards, to Pesach, as the grand romantic gesture. It would serve us well, perhaps, to dwell more on our period of engagement to the Holy Blessed One: circuitous, ambivalent, characterized by trust issues and almost-immediate infidelity. But actually, I think we could start even earlier: teenage Israel in her parents’ home on Chanukah, warming up after staying up later than she’s allowed to; sitting in that healthy, burgeoning loneliness of adolescence, her life recently big enough to want another person in it, but her identity still such a swirling, vertiginous work-in-progress that she can’t but be self-centered, and can only try to be self-centered in the right way; her blooming on Tu b’Shvat, leaving the nest and starting to set down a few skinny roots of her own; on Purim, Israel's 'ho phase,' drinking and sleeping around, always playing a part, and never sure who around her is real and who’s using her, occasionally transgressing her own values without realizing it, but leaving the whole period with a quiet gratitude for having somehow been guided safe to the other side of all her bad decisions; then, after Pesach, Sefirat HaOmer: a series of pre-marriage consultations with a Chasidically inflected rabbi who packages his unimpeachable advice in esoteric, mostly unnecessary Kabbalah; and, finally, the chuppah.
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I’m more interested, right now, though, in what happens after we’ve gotten married to God. We sort of drop the metaphor after Shavuot, but we shouldn’t. It seems to me, we have a honeymoon phase — who doesn’t love the month of June? — but it quickly starts to lose its color, little by little and then all at once. By July, we’re already depressed; we’re not shaving, our clothes stink, we don’t even enjoy music anymore. In the long, hot summer, our interactions with our Husband are sharp, harsh, they don’t come out the way we want them to — and neither, it seems, do His — while we both, in our silent dread, brace ourselves for the catastrophe we know is coming. Finally, on Tisha b’Av, the knock-down, drag-out fight. I think we’ve done things we shouldn’t have done, and I think we say something we shouldn’t have said; I don’t think God gets so much angrier than we do, but we’re fragile, and he’s so, so strong, and it only takes one, momentary lapse of self-control for him to hurt us, almost the way he’s hurt people(s) he’s been involved with in the past.
We obviously can’t be under the same roof after that. Israel moves out; so does God.
And then comes a period that I think is underrated, which is those weeks of “consolation” — which I would rather translate, here, as “regret,” the way that root is used for the first time in Tanakh, when God regrets the Flood. (I think I first read about this in David Bashevkin’s book, ‘Sinagogue,’ which I highly recommend.) Read not, “נחמו נחמו עַמִּ֑י”; rather: “נחמו נחמו עִמי”; Regret, regret, with me. Or maybe: Change your mind, change your mind, my people” — i.e., take me back, please.
During Covid, in the absence of synagogue or a physical place to study Torah, I found a new devotional practice: playlists. For each holiday, I carefully put together an hour or so, drawing from different genres, and musical periods, weaving together as many pertinent themes, evocative turns-of-phrase, and so on, as I could, and paying special attention to the transitions, the narrative arc of the thing. I am not an expert on Eastern Orthodoxy, so forgive me if I’m butchering an idea that made its way to me through regular late-night binges of documentaries about Mount Athos, but if I understand icons correctly, the playlists were like icons. Their creation was, itself, a sort of prayer, of which the resulting artwork — itself a vessel for communion with the Divine — is, in a sense, a byproduct of that prayer, as much as it is the intended product of it.
Anyway, my best of these playlists by far, I think (though it’s possible I say that about whichever one is most timely), is my ‘Nechamot’ playlist, for these weeks of regret and reconciliation. A bit of biography: I put it together days after my first psilocybin experience in the summer of 2021, a day-long solo trip that opened a lot of gates for me, to a love life and to making aliyah and to going to bed at a reasonable hour. About a year later, I listened to the playlist on psilocybin; I don’t know that I’ve ever felt God’s love quite so embodied.
That love is essential, I think, for getting started with the high holiday period. The unconditional acceptance comes before the self-transformation. Not in place of it — we can’t stay together, we and God, if we don’t have what it takes to make the marriage work. But what’s the point of making the marriage work if we aren’t fundamentally still together; if we don’t love each other so much that each of us owes it to the other to do the work, and yet to do it for herself, because ultimately can you really even make the distinction.
And then finally, you get to selichot. These are, I think, phone calls between Israel and God, after the big fight and the fallout, made between different houses, neither of which is a home, with the recognition that they destroyed their home, and will have to build a new one, and also the recognition that unless they build themselves anew first, the next home will blow up just like the last one — as, need it be said?, already happened one time before all this.
That’s the joy of selichot. The desparate love between Israel and God — despairing over what once was, and then despairing of it — that is, letting it go — along with all the gunk that allowed it to happen.
One could go on here, about Rosh Hashanah — the presentation of divorce papers, and the decision whether to sign them; the Ten Days of Teshuva, when God moves back in with Israel, in the little one bedroom she rented after everything went to shit, God sleeping on the couch, His boxes still unpacked; the great reunion on Yom Kippur; the new, shared life in that rental apartment throughout Sukkot; and the return to a healthier, more mature day-to-day in Cheshvan. But then we’d get far afield. It’s only the 2nd of Elul, after all.
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One might take issue with the above metaphorizing, my having apparently compared the Master of the Universe to a man who beat his wife, and my having lauded Israel — the battered wife — for returning to the Husband who beat her.
That is, I think, the most generous application of the traditional story, that God was behind the physical, as well as the metaphysical, horror that was the sacking of Jerusalem — ‘Because of our sins, we’ve been exiled from our land…’). The notion, furthermore, that God does the big bad thing to us, then tells us, ‘Be comforted, it’ll all be okay’ reminds me of Christopher Hitchens’ refrain that religion teaches you to love the one you fear — “the essence of sadomasochism.” Especially when you consider God’s statement, through Isaiah, that Israel has paid twice over for all her sins. (From the “regret” vantage point, on the other hand, this is perfectly healthy: “I overreacted.”)
On some level, that very late-2010s question — can there be a healthy intimate relationship between imperfect partners who have a chasm of a power differential between them? — is one of the basic ones that Abrahamic theology is tasked with answering, at the man-and-God scale.
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A story: Last summer, I made the acquaintance, at a neighborhood function, of someone I’d run in the same circles with for many years — since I first came to Israel in 2017-2018, if I recalled correctly — but who I’d never properly met; we hit it off, and became friendly.
About a month later, in the early days of Elul, we ran into each other again at another event, and had a great conversation which spilled over into the street, as we walked together in the direction of both of our homes. It came out that she’d once lived right in the center of town — sort of a funny neighborhood to live in, insofar as it’s not really a neighborhood; it’s like living in Midtown. I told her that I, too, once lived in the City Center! Whereabouts?
Really, right there on that central thoroughfare? Just down the street from the… wait a minute, which number? Really?! Which apartment?!”
“You really don’t remember, do you?” She asked.
“Remember what?” I responded, genuinely not conscious of the answer.
“I subletted that apartment from you!” she exclaimed. “When you went back to the States!”
Friends, I could feel the ground opening up below me to swallow me up. My jaw dropped, my eyes widened, and all I could muster was a deluge of apologies.
“I’m so sorry. Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I’m so ashamed right now. Really? That? Oh my god, I don’t even remember, but I know —“
You see, friends, I was not doing so hot that year. I was probably what the Gen Z-ers call “clinically depressed, with severe, untreated ADHD” but — straddling as I do that precious borderline between generations, one leg swung over the millennial fence — I would never indulge in that sort of armchair psychoanalysis, which is usually just clout-conscious excuse-making.
Standing there in 2024, I still didn’t remember this woman in front of me being part of the story of that apartment; but I was overcome, in that moment, by a visceral 2018 memory of trying my best to clean the place up before I left the country; as a modern psalmist once sang: “I did my best — it wasn’t much.”
“Leon,” said this woman — let’s call her Sally: “I swore a neder” — a Biblically binding oath, whose trangression technically makes you liable for the death penalty — “that if I ever saw you again, I would punch you in the face.”
I stammered back: “I- I’m so— I’m so— What can I—“
“There were dishes. With food on them. In the closet,” she said.
I promised her that the next time she had to move, I would clean her apartment for her, apologized one more time, and then one more, and then abruptly ended the conversation and took a turn that I would obviously have had to take several turns ago, if I’d actually needed to make it.
It was only upon getting home that it occurred to me what a kindness it had been for her not to bring this up earlier. Not at the party we’d been at — when, to her and several other people, I’d made a self-deprecating joke about my apartment being messy — nor even to me privately, until I’d had time to demonstrate, for my own sake, that I am a decent and in many cases capable person. I wrote her a long message, thanking her for this, then went off to selichot, for that same experience: to be repentant with your whole self, and even with joy, because the forgiver is so gracious in accepting your contrition: Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for His compassion is great.
When I returned home, I saw she'd responded: It’s really okay, it was a long time ago, and you’re clearly sorry; all is forgiven. And where do you go for selichot? Maybe I’ll join you next time.
Every night for that season, and at every service on each of the holidays, I’d think to myself, as I gathered myself to pray: If Sally Goldfarb can have seen that room, and still respect me; if she can have received that room from me, and forgive me; then surely, God can accept me, and forgive all my sins.
And you know what? It really helped.
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Thanks for reading, especially if you’re not somebody for whom this was particularly comprehensible — you get a special reward in Heaven, I’m sure, for listening to your friend’s jargony gobbledygook.
As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.
I will continue to keep you updated,
Leon