Religion: Holy Days

TEKIAH SHEBARIM TEBUAH TEKIAH

TEKIAH SHEBARIM TEKIAH TEKIAH TERUAH TEKIAH GEDOLAH*

Happy is the people that knoweth the sound of the trumpet; in the light of thy countenance, O Lord, shall they walk.

Through the dimness of innumerable U. S. tabernacles, the shofar, the ram’s horn, shrills in onomatopoetic cadences, reminding the Jews that the world was created by God out of void and a howling darkness 5,687 years ago. The horn rings at eventide, as candles, sombre and fierce, like thin yellow hands up pointed in prayer, shine in the synagogues and wag incongruously above the mahogany grain of apartment breakfast room suites where prosperous Jews keep the feast of Rosh Hashonah, the New Year, after their own fashion.

The Book of Life, in which all Jewish deeds, the good and the bad, are mystically inscribed, closed at sundown, Sept. 8, upon the Year 5686. This time, the Book contained few records of Jewish miseries—a few anti-Semitic outbreaks in Central and Southeastern Europe, a few new restrictions against their education. In Europe, the Jews shared with their co-nationals in common economic depression. In Palestine, Zionism was proving itself a curiously practical philosophy. In the U. S., the condition of the Jews is better than in all their recent history. None the less, ten days after the opening of this New Year 5,687, U. S. Jews will pause to contemplate their sins and to repent them. That will be Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, unusually solemn this year because it occurs on the Jewish Sabbath, a Saturday (Sept. 18.)

In temples the repentance will be decorous; in synagogues† vigorous. Men will beat their chests and proclaim conventional errors. The very orthodox will pray with covered heads and unshod feet. Children will play with apples spiked with cloves; men will rub snuff at rheumy noses; women will sniff at phials of aromatic spirits of ammonia—for the pious do not eat that day. It is a day of repentance, to be concluded with the cry: “May he who maketh peace in his high places, make peace for us and for all Israel; and say ye, Amen.”

*These iterated sounds, untranslatable, centuries ago, voiced the joy of the nomadic Hebrews.

† Reformed Jews usually call their houses of worship “temples,” Orthodox Jews “synagogues,” that is, “assembly places.”