How to Experience an Emotional Whirlpool

Maya Berezovsky
University of Minnesota
Editor
KOACH-on-Campus

This year, I will participate in my fourth year of High Holiday services. For 18 years before that, I was either a participant or a teacher at the children’s program downstairs at shul. I am pretty new to this service. I still remember my first Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. I can precisely compare how I first felt in the service to how I felt last year.

As I mentioned in my last article, my fiancé recently converted to Judaism. This will be his first High Holiday service experience. Our Jewish friends warned my fiancé about the length of the service, and how awful it can be to fast.

I spoke up.

High Holiday services are actually a gripping experience for me. An emotional whirlpool, if you will. Even if you won’t, please keep reading.

I don’t like motivational speeches, nor do I like being told to feel. If I feel, I feel. If I am unmotivated, so be it. Someone pushing me to change my emotional course is not only irritating, it is counter-productive. Nobody told me to love the High Holidays. If they had, maybe I wouldn’t. I won’t tell you to love anything. Just trust me that it is possible.

There are many ways to experience strong feelings during those ten days. Maybe if I tell you some ways I make the most of the holidays, you will realize "that fasting holiday" and "the one where you eat apples and honey" can be even more enjoyable than "the eight days of presents."

Four years ago, before I sat through five services (including Kol Nidre and Neilah) I was worried. The thought of sitting—even worse, standing--in shul on no food, not recognizing any tunes, on a day that is supposed to be the most spiritual day of the year and possibly not feeling any more spiritual than the day before, terrified me.

The first year went just so-so. I felt frustrated about not knowing tunes. So much of the service was chanted by the hazzan, while I tend to like participatory prayer. About one-fourth of the people appeared to be intensely emotionally involved in the service. I wondered what was going on in the minds of these people. I imagined they were searching their minds for a single mistake they had made in the past year, and apologizing profusely to God. They seemed to be unaware of hunger pangs, they were in another place.

I decided that no matter what, I would be emotionally involved in the service. Trust me -- it is so much more enjoyable that way.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the only holidays in the Jewish year that are purely religious, not related to any historic event. Unlike the other holidays, this is the time to be totally self-absorbed. This holiday is not about patriarchy or Jewish oppression or survival. This holiday is about you. God wants you to look at yourself. Plan for the next year. Look at last year, at the future, at today. Make pledges. You have a clean slate. How will you do things different tomorrow?

While you plan and erase regret with new ideas and promises, listen to the notes of the hazzan’s chant or the choir’s prayer. Let each separate sound embolden your promises and more vigorously erase your mistakes. The music can represent your passionate hopes. The intensity of the hazzan’s voice can voice your thoughts.

Imagine the hazzan in a direct conversation with God. As you join in with the hazzan, think that he or she is delivering your message.

Put yourself in a different place and do not pay attention to any other person in the room. Listen to the words from the bimah, of course, but do not let a congregant interrupt your emotional travels. This is the time to start over and do right and be the best for the next year and every year. Think of the past, the good things and pack them to come along for the future.

When the service ends, re-enter reality and give a big smile and handshake, wishing a Shanah Tovah to everyone around and know that you just experienced something mesmerizing. When you hear someone complain about this or that from the service, remember your emotional journey and consider yourself blessed.

[Posted 9/29/05]