Now don't get me wrong, the Rabbi has been trying to ecourage people to prostrate during the Yom Kippur morning Aleinu for the last five years, so I'm not in trouble with the authorities. It's more that the High Holidays are seen as a social event, not a religious one. It's a chance to dress up fancy, to see and be seen by the congregation. Religious behaviour belongs strictly on the bimah, and any religiousity in the crowd is suspect. It upstages the clergy we've hired to do our religion for us and besides, it's just not "nice". The breast beating we can handle in a ritualized way but not all this covering of heads with tallitot (prayer shawls) and swaying. It smacks of the shtetl. And G-d forbid we should start bowing in prayer like those awful uncivilized Muslims!

Now I was in the back of the room alone, at the time of the Aleinu. How I got to be there was for the same reason I was in the back at Rosh HaShanah; I have allergies at this time of year, and somebody's perfume or cologne was setting me into such a sneezing and nose running that I feared for my brand new Mahzor. Moving to the back was sensible, as it got me away from the source of my misery and closer to the bathrooms and tissues. As "annointing" is forbidden on Yom Kippur, I had high hopes for staying in my seat that were not to be. I was confronted with the Yetzer haRa of another set of congregants.

Yes, that pesky Yetzer was around in full force during the holidays, making a fine distraction from my own heshbon nephesh (soul searching). It's hard to repent while you're grinding your teeth in annoyance because you can't hear a word of the service for the first hour straight due to the flighty and twittery little bird of a woman who has chosen to leave her assigned seat and alight right behind you to set a whole row to chattering. Finally she wandered back to her own seat to set that whole section off.

Not that it was a great improvement, the Torah chanter was a tiny young woman with a beautiful voice and lovely trope who nonetheless could barely be heard, even amplified by microphone and speakers. Given the amount of conversation going on, I wonder if even Paverotti could have made himself heard. Synagogues tend to be laid back, and rather relaxed about wandering and talking but this was an enormous breach of synagogue ettiquette, especially on the High Holidays. The Torah reading is supposed to command complete respectful silence.

I had thought that Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the year might bring some improvements. No perfumes and no sneezing for starters and less noise for another. I was wrong on both counts and found myself at the back of the room again, in the odd little space of what is normally the social hall, away from the noise and the prayers I could barely hear anyway. I found myself thinking about my remarks the evening before. The Rabbi had been discussing the list of confessions we make and had remarked that he was certain none of us had done everything on the list and I had suddenly had an urge to shout out "We'll do better next year, Rabbi!" (implying we'll get through the whole list) which I had confided to my friend next to me, to her great amusement.

And there it was. The thing I felt was "missing" all month, the something I needed to repent of that I couldn't figure out. There was my Yetzer haRa. I hadn't stolen, or murdered, or had any improper sexual entanglements no, but I still had that inner sh*t disturber....that class clown...that inability to be serious and need to cause laughter at inappropriate moments. And I felt badly about it. Such a silly little thing, but what a distance it represented between myself and G-d. How often do I hide from G-d in distancing humour....in cynical cleverness? And then the Rabbi was announcing the Aleinu and I knew I was going to bow, and middle-class, civilized sensibilities be damned.

To my great horror, I would see my Yetzer haRa again at evening services when I remarked without thinking that I couldn't see the Cantor's white suit without wanting to sing "Stayin' Alive". I was intending to refer to my desire for the proverbial "brain bleach" so that I wouldn't have such thoughts popping into my head but I suddenly heard how flippant and meanspirited it could easily come across. Now the Cantor would probably have laughed, as he once photoshopped his head onto John Travolta's classic disco posed body for a shul advert, but still.

And then my "closing" thoughts for Ne'ila were interrupted by a smell. A smell like rubbing alcohol and baking all at once....someone had sprayed perfume or used hand wash in the sanctuary, some sort of vanilla or cinnamon concoction. Thankfully I had taken allergy tablets beforehand but it wasn't much help. This wasn't allergies, more like chemical burns to my throat. I managed to make it to the end of the services by breathing through my shawl, and I could hear others coughing around me. Making our way out after, I heard some interesting commentary. I wasn't the only one put out by the communal behaviour.

Aside from all the complaints about noise and the perfume at the end, there was a great deal of commentary on dress. Having seen young women go by in hot pants and heels, I wasn't surprised to have one gentleman confess that he found all the immodest dress too distracting (and he meant immodest by modern Western standards, not by Orthodox tzniut ones!) and while discussing the perfume incident a woman confided that she was sure who had done it, "the woman, and I'm not saying this to be mean but only as a fact, the one who looks like a pole dancer; you know, the one that wears the tight low-cut clothes and the 5 inch stripper heels" She struggled to find as nice a way to say it as possible, but there it was. If there had been some pressing need to identify that woman in the crowd, "the one that looks like a stripper" would sadly have been the fastest method of doing so. Despite all the "Slutwalks" in the world, we still haven't invented a nice way to say that someone looks like one.

And it's this slide into Modernity that perturbs me. No matter how low standards of dress and behaviour get, and how many congregants grumble about it on the QT, if they were to send out an email on appropriate synagogue behaviour it would go unheeded, and if they sent one on dress, hysteria would ensue. Certain things are expected in our society and women's right to wear what they want is one of them. Any hint of a communal standard that intervenes in that is anathema. So, my desire to return to religious dress and worse still, to behavioural standards of tzniut is likely not going to go over well.

It's about me, really. My feelings and my temptations. I'm not married, and I feel lonely and touch-deprived. For those reasons and others related to my upbringing, I am more sensitive to touch...it just affects me more. I'd rather be shomer negiah (one who guards against touching) and I considered being so when I first returned. It's just too difficult there, though. Everyone wants to shake your hand constantly and the only way to do it is to be constantly rude to everyone, by community standards, and refuse their hand. I would have to make a big deal out of it in a Liberal community, and in doing so, it would be likely to be seen as an implicit criticism of everyone else's behaviour. And that leads to bad feelings and criticism in return....fanatical, overly-pious, vain, judgemental.

So now, despite having been looking forward to completing my conversion in just a few more months, and looking forward to getting called up to the bimah for my first aliyah, instead I find myself having to consider starting all over in an Orthodox shul, in which I will most certainly not get an aliyah. All over one issue of personal preference that can't be accommodated within the Liberal framework. This is why I don't like repenting, it's too revolutionary. Stirs up the pot.