We hold it lawful to pray with sinners
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Hello, here is my would-be ancestor, Rabbi Ya’akov Reines, and me.... with a little extra nose... and a little extra beard.
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I love the Kol Nidre. It’s a prayer in Aramaic. I can’t say as I understand it the way Jews are supposed to understand it, and some of the technicalities of this time of year befuddle and even dismay me. 🔥
At times it seems to me that guilt and repentance are a kind of addiction, or to put this another way, I will sometimes intentionally roughen my own path, complicate a matter, because a shake of the energy has a shiver of hope in getting me closer to an experience of the absolute, which my apparatus has been set up to search for, and which so far in what I will now sloppily call the Judeo-Christian world, has arrived in an appetite for punishment and a yearning for absolution.
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This is obviously a carceral appetite.
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But to err is also, or I think it could be understood to be, an appetite for intimacy and an appetite for witnessing. There is something about those mistakes we feel inclined to hide, those “sins” we bury in our cells, build the architecture of our bodies around, that are also demands for witness, even commands for same.
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God, whatever they are, is something like the vertical sensation, like a flame, of witnessing— or so it seems inside my body. This heat emanates from the same source that spreads between me and the ones I love, when we are laughing. And crying. And when we don’t give a fuck. And when we want to be sorry, when we want not to have gotten away with something, with it, with anything, when we want never to get away with anything, but to be seen and known, to be held to account, to be commended to the eye of heaven, not just marked out upon the record our interiors and the auras all about us
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Who punishes us for destroying the planet, for choosing the sorrowing and narrow path and not the bright one, who punishes us for reproducing upon ourselves the rapes and slights done to us, who punishes us for turning our self-cruelty upon others, for erecting our science fictions out of the air, instead of our own blood? Who punishes my father for his silence, or my mother for her madness?
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Hineni
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I am ready to do the terrible thing, the impossible thing, the ungovernable and unthinkable thing, for you my lord, which cannot be addressed and with whom I continually command and demand dialogue. I am the father and the son. Inside both of me is a weeping, sensitive mother. I am the old destiny of my lineages and my people, many of whom do not understand me, many of whom I do not understand.
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I am the product of an ancient argument. And I am that argument. I tried all the temples: they were approximations. I tried walking up to the ark. But it was inside me.
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#yomkippur #daysofawe #kolnidre #carceralimagination #guilt #atonement #absolution #climate #addiction
