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Some years ago, I attended a dinner gathering at the home of a dear family friend. Upon approach, the house exuded the polished warmth and heady fragrance that comes from days of preparation. The windows from which tumbling children could be spotted at a distance gleamed; the wood was burnished from polishing and the linens were iron-crisped.
The air was heavy with the sweet perfume of hearth-fired breads and meats.
And so dense was the happy chatter in every room of the house that any new arrival was instantly swept into either a stirring remembrance (“But he always wore the fedora!”) or as passionate a debate (“Tell me why a Senate hearing would be necessary?”).
It was sometimes hard to distinguish which was which.
It was the high holiday of Rosh Hashanah, and I knew enough to know how little I knew.
Growing up, the day for me was marked on chain supermarket calendars, but little more.
We were not a Jewish family, and so we did not spend hours in these days plotting the family potluck, and making sure Aunt Rose would bring her kugel. Nor did we plan for the recitation of prayers, and who would speak last or first.
We didn’t mark it at school – for which we still rose early, sleepily shoving limbs into stockings and sweaters, our parochial school ties askew as we raced into class, same as every other weekday morning.
There was little Yiddish spoken by industrial washing machines in the basement of our apartment building, where the women of all nations gathered to wash and fold.
I knew only a small Jewish woman who lived upstairs could be seen during the holiday with candles in her shopping bags – Dario, our building’s super and cultural anthropologist, took this to mean that “luz” [light] was a part of “su día de fiesta” [her holiday].
New York City is its own dense, sprawling school, a living institution in which we’re all enrolled. We sit side by side like good pupils on subways and buses, line up as if in the first grade at the bank, at the deli, in Mass or at service. We eavesdrop and interrupt; we insert ourselves into conversation. We are teachers and students at once. Our urban existence requires us to decipher codes, write algorithms, conjugate verbs – daily, and quickly. There are no textbooks, and little air-conditioning, but in this place, this city, in which we live vertically and horizontally atop each other, one man’s high holiday is another’s overtime shift; your chicken soup is my sancocho. It’s how we like it.
Here, we are an urban Montessori: we learn in being, and doing.
And I knew enough by the time I slid into my seat at dinner to know that Rosh Hashanah was no small repast, no minor moment.
And in that evening’s soft flush of candelight, I knew, yet again, the high privilege of the invitation that had been extended me.
There were elders’ sonorous voices folding into the soft chimes of earnest children in recitation. There was a profound solemnity as we held hands and listened carefully to longing and love spoken in the music of Hebrew, as eloquent a language as ever has been composed.
And there were peals of laughter in recalling the many blessings of the past year.
There was a family joined in remembrance, knit together in thoughtful prayer and contemplation, and great, great cheer.
Que fiesta.
To all our Jewish neighbors, friends, and family, to the Millmans, Shanah Tovah.
May we all be inscribed, together, for another good year.
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