‘And yet we dance’

When Rosh Hashanah starts, it will have been almost a year.

When the shofar sounded for the holidays that marked the start of 5784, none of us had any idea how traumatic this year of tragedy, torture, rape, and death would be. We had known that antisemitism was rising in this country, but we didn’t know how it would intersect with barbarity

Then, we had no way of knowing. Now we know.

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Normally the month of Elul builds to Rosh Hashanah, which ratchets up the intensity until it culminates in Yom Kippur. And then the chaggim keep going, with the green-thatched acted-out holiday of Sukkot finally ending in the wild joy of Simchat Torah, when, we’re told, God has asked us to stay together in Jerusalem, on pilgrimage, just one day longer.

So how are we as a community going to approach the holidays this year?

Because of the interplay between the Jewish and Gregorian calendars, October 7, 2024 falls between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. That date will hit hard. And then we’ll feel it again, because the pogrom happened on Simchat Torah in Israel, and because of the divergence of the Jewish calendars in Israel and here at the end of Sukkot, we heard about it on Simchat Torah here.

How will we deal with it? To be clear, there are no answers that we can provide with assurance in advance. Human emotions and behavior are far too complex for that.

But our tradition can provide guidance.

To that end, Dr. Ora Horn Prouser of Franklin Lakes, the CEO and academic dean of the Academy for Jewish Religion, and Rabbi Menachem Creditor, the scholar in residence at UJA-Federation in New York, teamed to solicit contributions, edit, and produce “These Holy Days: A High Holidays Supplement After October 7.”

This is not the first supplement Dr. Prouser and Rabbi Creditor have published since October 7. “Seder Interrupted” provided readings for Jews still shell-shocked by October 7 to use during Pesach.

Although back then few of us had firm ideas about how and when the situation in Israel — with hostages in Gaza and the war raging there — would end, not many people were thinking about it extending to the high holidays. Certainly it would have ended by then, the general thought seems to have been.

Kibbutz Be’eri was demolished on October 7.

But it didn’t. It’s still going on.

“Seder Interrupted” was a response to “one of our students who came to me and said, ‘Ora, I feel like we are not serving the community enough,’” Dr. Prouser recalled. “She said, ‘We need to tell people how to deal with Pesach this year. It’s just too hard.’

“So AJR put out the post-October 7 supplement, to address what we think about freedom, and our festival of freedom, in this time of so much pain and so little freedom.

“And then someone said, ‘You know, we’ll need something for the Yamim Noraim,” the High Holy Days. “And I said, ‘yes, but it’ll be better by then.’”

It’s not.

“So we put together this supplement,” Dr. Prouser said. It’s not at all intended to replace the traditional machzor. Instead, “it’s a collection of pieces contributed by rabbis, Jewish educators, poets, liturgists, scholars — by a wide range of people with a wide range of ideas.

“It’s like the AJR — it’s a big tent, with a lot of approaches that fit into the tent.” The one thing that’s necessary is that somehow, in some way or other, the approach is Zionist.

“People will find that some pieces really speak to their hearts, and other pieces really don’t,” Dr. Prouser said.

“This book is a real combination of approaches. There is a lot of poetry. Something that I found moving is that a lot of different poets all ask, ‘Ad matai?’ Until when? ‘Ad cama?’ How much longer?’”

There is great pain and much anger in this book. “It shows the struggle that we’re having with liturgy right now,” Dr. Prouser said. Some of the pieces are poems that engage directly with the poetry of the liturgy, challenging it.

To dip almost randomly into the book, some pieces use parts of the liturgy — “On Rosh Hashanah It Is Written,” where Dr. Bill Liss-Levinson takes the High Holy Day refrain, “On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it will be sealed,” and riffs bitterly on it; “The 13 Attributes after October 7,” where Rabbi Margaret Frisch Klein repeats those 13 attributes, which we say often on the holidays, and asks, among other questions, “What sin did those children commit?/Or their parents?/Or their grandparents, those elderly peaceniks…?”

In a take on Unetak Tokef, Rabbi Marc Phillip asks, “God/ You didn’t have enough martyrs/That you had to make more?”

Red poppies grow all around Israel’s border with Gaza; they’re seen as a sign of hope.

Alden Solovy writes “Eileh Ezk’rah After October 7.” He adds names to the traditional martyrology. “For Re’im and Be’eri/For Pittsburgh and Toulouse/For Kfar Aza, Netiv HaAsara/For Mumbai and Colleyville/For Ofakim, Nir Oz, Nirim, and Sderot…” The grim list in the poem is far longer than this section of it.

James Feder takes Psalm 27, subtitles it “A Psalm of October 7th,” and breaks up the psalm with quotes from people who were under siege but survived, or released hostages.

In his “Mealtime Prayers for Rosh Hashanah Eve,” Rabbi Joseph Prouser of Temple Emanuel of North Jersey in Franklin Lakes — he’s Dr. Prouser’s husband — takes some of the traditional prayers we say over new fruits and connects them to the hostages. For example, he takes the bracha for an orange, or an orange-colored fruit or vegetable — a pepper, a cantaloupe, ginger, or orange grapefruit squash — and writes: “May it be Your will, O God, to turn Your Providential attention to infant Kfir and young Ariel Bibas, and their parents, Shari and Yarden.”

They all were taken hostage on October 7. The little boys are redheads — that’s well-known by now because of the hostages’ posters that show their heartbreaking, smiling, innocent pictures. “Kfir has now spent over half his life in captivity,” Rabbi Prouser writes.

He also has a bracha that mentions Eden Yerushalmi. It’s for “the liqueur or beverage of your choice,” he writes, because she was working as a bartender when she was kidnapped on October 7. There is a terrible irony in this bracha because Ms. Yerushalmi was one of the six hostages that Hamas murdered in the tunnels below Gaza. Her body was discovered on September 2, after the book had gone to press.

“Some of the pieces use that kind of detail, including specific names,” Dr. Prouser said. “Others are more general.

“Two that I found really moving were about the shofar service. One says that if there are no words, there is shofar.” That’s “Kol Shofar” by Rachel Posner. It’s “…the wordless cry of our people,” she writes. “I was whole, I became broken, I will be whole again/A hundred times: Whole, broken, whole.”

“The other hears the shofar as the wailing of hostages, and the wailing of the women as they are attacked and raped,” Dr. Prouser said. That’s “Shofar to my Lips” by Shari Salzhauer Berkowitz. “Can you hear machine-gun fire in the staccato of the Teruah?” she asks.

Despite this work, we won’t know how we will react to the holidays until we are in them, Dr. Prouser said. But because grief often hits hardest when we are unprepared for it, the book is an attempt to help with that preparation.

To that end, “we started with what I think is a beautiful poem, a hopeful beginning by Alden Solovoy, and it ends with a beautiful piece by Talya Werber about dancing. ‘This Jewish Rhythm’ ends with ‘And yet we dance.’

“We hope that this book gives people another place to find some support for their feelings,” Dr. Prouser said. The traditional liturgy will seem exactly right to many people — “and I think that’s great” — but not to everyone. “I think that some of us will need a little help with the liturgy this year. The goal is that we can find a way to do that.”

“These Holy Days” is available on Amazon; it costs $9.99, because the goal is simply to cover costs, not to make a profit. It’s also available on the Academy for Jewish Religion’s website, ajr.edu, where it can be downloaded and printed out entirely free. “It’s a service to the Jewish community,” Dr. Prouser said.