A moment for Yom Kippur

Long time, no see…

Today was Yom Kippur and I feel like I have failed myself in some way. Yom Kippur is meant to be a day of atonement, a day to wipe your slate clean, let the sins wash away. A day where you remember the breadcrumbs you’ve thrown into the river and watch them float away, a day where you let go of what is holding you back. Maybe it’s holding you back from the book of life, maybe its holding you back from enlightenment, maybe it is just holding you back from yourself.

I have been sick with a cold this past weekend and this only supported that I should not fast this year, for my health. Deep down, I knew that there were many reasons why I should not fast. I wasn’t going to be surrounded by community. I would have been working throughout the day. I would have been doing it dishonestly. Right now, I don’t know what it would look like to have my slate wiped clean. I walk around with a identity that feels most comfortable with a few cracks and a few stains. I have come a long way from being a person who thought they were only meant to exist as a broken pile of selves, but it doesn’t seem right to fast and try to prove that these scratches and chips don’t exist. Because they do. I am a flawed person, as everyone is. That’s the whole reason Yom Kippur exists in my opinion. You are bound to make mistakes, fuck up left and right, but once a year you can get a redo, if you want to take it. I don’t think I am ready to take it yet. I am still learning. I am still figuring out where all the moments are engrained into me. I’m not ready to plaster over them yet. I want to feel them. I want to know they are there. I want them to know that I see them.

There are moments where I feel every part of me that seems broken. Not in a bad way, not like frigid air seeping through the cracks. No, these moments are times when I feel like the sun is hitting each piece of me, like honey is dripping across uneven tree bark. These moments exist in between breaths. These moments are serendipitous. These moments are ones of joy.

This whole trip has stuck with me in ways that I was unprepared for. I feel it in the second before I start the ignition before embark on my commute to my student teaching. I feel it in the sunrise that envelopes the entirety of I-70 and I-25 and all of the hurried business people, leaving before their children wake. I feel it in the sound of my roommates coming home, excited to tell me about their day. I feel it in the sound of the crickets when I take an evening walk. I feel it in the smiles of physics class friends, who I will remember, but might not ever see again come May. I feel it in the small talk I make with professors and middle schoolers alike. I feel it in the moments I begin to rustle before my alarm goes off and Tikvah decides that I will be getting up early. I feel this trip in every part of me that seems broken, in the most beautiful way.

I don’t want a clean slate right now. I want to feel this feeling a little while longer, letting the yellow fields and endless blue sky fill in the cracks and chips. I want the sound of being completely alone and still being okay to blanket the stains and scratches. I want to acknowledge and appreciate all that I am before I start to move on.

P.S. This may be the antithesis of what Yom Kippur is meant to achieve, but I grew up in a ultra-reform congregation that had no stable rabbi and a mother who let me believe in the power of a Jewish community more than a Jewish God.