Stuff That Counts

Every year I make these "12 steps to a better matthue" lists. This year I decided not to. Decided there should only be one item on the agenda this year: Spend more time doing stuff that counts, less time doing stuff that doesn't.

Right now I'm doing mindless Internet stuff. But doing it in the kitchen as Itta cooks. Counts, I think.

I Just Nullified My Sins, and Now I Can Do Anything

I've been going to synagogue every morning this week, which is rare for me. I used to skip synagogue all the time because I slept too late, and then it was because my kids were up too early. I never got to see them any other time because of this full-time-job thing (you know, the one that enables me to write stuff like this, and for you to read it)...so mornings seemed like the perfect opportunity to do that, and let my wife sleep late (bonus points).

But this week I've been getting into the swing of it. Putting aside my religious snarkiness, and telling myself that I've got a four-day weekend for Rosh Hashanah, and I'll spend plenty of time with the offspring then. Also--I'll say this quietly, because I really don't want to jinx it--the kids have been sleeping later.

Also, services have been keeping me on my toes. It's not just the normal routine of praying and saying amen. There are different things you do every day. All week, before services we've been saying selichot, this really intense 15-minute-long prayer where you recount all the bad stuff you've done this year and then ask G-d to forget about it. And then tachanun, which is another confessional sort of thing, not to be confused with Catholic confession, because when we take account of our slip-ups, we do it directly to G-d. And then the shofar blasts at the end of services, which are supposed to literally scare the living sin out of you.

And then, this morning, hataras nedarim.

If you're saying what?, rest assured, dear friends, so did I. We all gathered round a makeshift rabbinical court -- that would be three of the old dudes at the synagogue, because according to Jewish law, basically anyone can be a judge (well, sorta) -- and we all recited this liturgical thing that listed all the oaths and promises we may have inadvertently made, and asked them to nullify those things. I'd never done it before. Or maybe I just don't remember? But now that I have, I sort of feel the infinity of infancy. Like I've sworn away all my oaths and all my sins, and now I can do anything. I just have to not think about taking a nap or checking my Google Reader stream.

I have this irrational idea in my head that, just because I wrote a book with Yom Kippur in the title, I'm some sort of authority on repentance. Whereas the truth is, I'm probably just an authority on how to mess up really badly, and on a grand scale. But that's what the High Holidays are most fundamentally about, I think -- coming face to face with the stuff you've done wrong, and trying to make it better. And then, being able to do anything.

12 Steps to a Better Matthue

I wrote this last year. Stumbled across it on the Intertube. I don't know how I got there, but it feels like a sign from somewhere. I hate reruns, but this one's pretty intense. I hope you like it.

Oh, yeah -- we hit it again. Two parking tickets this morning, and one's more than $100.

Man, this Rosh Hashana is shaping up to a great start.

I flipped. It's not pleasant to say, but I felt steam coming out of my nostrils and ears. There was a very small phone, and I started yelling into it -- to a friend, who really didn't deserve any of it. I mean, he didn't write the tickets.

"How do you do it?" I asked my friend. "You're always growing." It's true: he's always talking about how he's waking up at 5:30 a.m. instead of 6 in order to get more stuff done, or the vegetable patch he's tending on his balcony, or new recipes for cobbler (I don't even know what cobbler is).

He told me: "It's hard to perfect your butterfly stroke when you're struggling to keep your head above water." And I feel like this is hitting pretty much everyone I know right now. How do the Lehman brothers (assuming there are brothers, and that they're Jewish) focus on being better people? How do we keep from going bankrupt? How does the girl I know who just tried to kill herself work on the abstract idea of "improving herself"? How do I start helping out with the cooking and the laundry when I'm in the office for 8 hours, the subway for two more, and there's this book I wrote that I'm supposed to be promoting?

Pretty much the only one I know who's having an easy time of it is my editor David, and that's because he's being played by Michael Cera in the movie of his book. Okay, stop. Not to pick on David (L*rd knows he's pick-on-able), but he could probably tell me about problems of his own. Problems that seem at least as dire as the $160 worth of tickets we racked up today...or the innumerably worse sin that I keep on committing by telling the rest of the world about it.* Everyone's in a different spot in life. And even each of us -- we're in a different spot than we were last year, or last month, or 5 minutes ago. And we don't do penance in Judaism. Instead, the idea is to constantly be moving up -- ratzu v'shuv, we call it. One of my friends just moved to the South last year, met an amazing rabbi, and blasted through Rosh Hashana. This year, he got fired and she's skipping it. I was better at doing a lot of things last year than I am this year...and I can say that having a screaming 7-month-old got in the way of some of them. (Sayonara, complete-and-uninterrupted morning prayers.) Most of them, though -- well, I spent some time trying to do the perfect butterfly stroke, and some of that time trying to sink myself.

Every year I put together a top-12 list of ways to a better Matthue for Rosh Hashana. Last year, it took me till Simchat Torah. But here's my Rosh Hashana resolution for this year: Try to stay in the moment. Don't worry about things until they're right in front of me -- but, as much as I can, try to see everything that's front of me, and try to keep them from turning into things to worry about. When Zusha came to the Ba'al Shem Tov and mourned that he'd never be perfect, the Ba'al Shem Tov told him, "Try to be less like me, and more like Zusha."

This Rosh Hashana, I'm going to try and be more like Zusha.

And I'm going to be better about seeing what's in front of my face.

* - It's true. Lashon Hara, or gossiping, is one of the worst things you can do to a person. I'm praying as I write this that her good humor, together with the faint possibility of teaching people a constructive lesson through it. D'oh.

iHappy Rosh Hashanah

Okay -- maybe you get more email forwards and cheesy Facebook photos sent to you than I do. (It's not that hard to achieve, I assure you. Between getting Jewniverse ready, re-watching the awesome new G-dcast video, and keeping on top of office gossip, I barely have time to read my own email.)

So -- yeah -- maybe you are cooler than I am.

But my grandmother-in-law is cooler than you are.

Check out this Rosh Hashanah card that she emailed us. Yes, my grandmother-in-law uses email. She escaped the Holocaust by walking barefoot through Siberia and she has an email account. And she has an iPhone. An iPhone! My cell phone can barely still be held together with a rubber band and some chewing gum.

Happy New Year, everyone. And may all your computational devices taste as good as hers.

G-dcast's Rosh Hashanah Music Video!

Prodezra, the hip-hop sensation out of Savannah, GA and Mayanot Yeshiva and into our ears, stars in G-dcast's new Rosh Hashanah video -- dropping rhymes, mixing beats, and playing his own shofar backup. Prodezra and I wrote the song. And then we made it into a music video.



And don't forget to come back the second Rosh Hashanah goes out -- we've got Yom Kippur on deck, with the cowriter of the new Sleepless in Seattle musical, Josh Nelson.

The Blaxploitation Shofar

This post came our way courtesy of Alan Jay Sufrin, singer/guitarist/bassist/keyboardist for the band Stereo Sinai. He's also the official shofar blower at Anshe Shalom in Chicago this year (and is tremendously excited about it). Here he is with his newest instrument in the recording booth.

So, here we go.

It's the Hebrew month of Elul, during which it's a custom to sound the shofar every day. The blog HearingShofar (which, amazingly, is a year-round blog about shofars) just reprinted a page from the comic Teen Titans #45, from 1976, in which Malcom "Mal" Duncan, DC Comics' first black superhero, is attacked by a shadowy figure who promises to kill him. Then, randomly, he receives a magical ram's horn from the angel Gabriel.

According to HearingShofar:

[T]he tale seems kind of goyish. But hey, Superman was invented by several Jews and much has been written postulating how Jewish legends and archetypes influenced the creation of his character. And we are instructed to sound shofar in times of crisis, just like Mal is.

Which reminds me of a joke that my friend tells way too much -- as illustrated by the illimitable comic artist Mat Tonti. What do pirates say to each other on Rosh Hashanah?

Happy Elul, everyone. T-kee-yorrr!

Regina Spektor Blows (Shofar)

Oh, Jewish blogging world, you are losing your touch.

Or maybe I'm just losing touch with you. Last Rosh Hashanah, Regina Spektor -- whose song "Laughing With," by the way, was just named one of the Best Lyrics of 2009 by, um, us -- blew a shofar at one of her concerts.

This might be Regina overkill. After all, we've already reviewed her new album and blogged about her song lambasting Holocaust deniers. But as long as she keeps being cheeky and inventive and writing crazily good songs, we'll probably keep writing about it. And, with the recent tragic loss of YIDCore -- the only band I've ever seen with enough chutzpah to blow hummus out of a shofar and onto their audience -- well, somebody needs to step up and take the mantle of introducing traditional Jewish instruments into pop music.

Thank you, ReSpekt Online, for keeping me in the loop. *Ahem.*

I Am My Beloved's...But I'm Not Only That

For the month of Elul, I've been trying to get myself into shape. One of the things that Rebbe Nachman (and basically everyone else) suggests doing in order to achieve this goal is learning Jewish laws. My father-in-law recently gave us this tiny, awesome Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, which is a handy guidebook to what Jewish stuff you're supposed to be doing at any given moment. It's much more of a Judaism for Dummies than the actual book.

So I've been reading up on my life as a Jew. Sometimes a line or two at a shot (the entries are mostly really short, which plays to our advantage) and sometimes -- like this morning, on the stalled 5 train -- an entire chapter. Part of what got me so excited was the talk of Psalm 27, which we read at the end of morning prayers all this month. (If you've ever seen a horror movie, you've probably heard it in some form; it's the one that starts "The Lord is my light and my salvation; who should I fear?") I know that our article says it's a slightly schizophrenic psalm, I still like it. I get a shiver every time I read "The only thing I ask for is to live in God's house all the days of my life." Not that I have any clue what God's house looks like, but it seems like it would be a good place to be. Just the idea of having a house to curl up into, metaphorical or otherwise, sounds like a pretty good deal. And like a pretty comforting thing, especially in the

(My other favorite line, "When evil men come close to eat my flesh, they stumble and fall," clearly plays to the action-adventure author side of my personality, but that's another blog entry.)

So the Kitzur, whose role usually shies away from the sort of non-how-to thing, goes out of its way to talk about the different acronyms for Elul. Usually, people like to say how Elul is the healing time after the catastrophes of Tisha B'Av, and the strain on our relationship with God that things like massive destruction tend to cause. They point out how the Hebrew letters alef, lamed, vov, lamed -- the four letters that spell "Elul" -- stand for "Ani L'dodi v'dodi li," or "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is for me."

But wait! There's more!

Apparently, Rabbi Isaac Luria, the Ari, was the first to play with acronyms. He first cites the verse in Exodus that talks about someone accidentally killing a man: if this happens, God says, "I will find you a place to which he can flee" (21:13). The words "I will find you" begin with aleph, lamed, vov, lamed.

Again with the morbidity, right? But it's actually a comforting verse at heart: even a murderer can find peace. Then he cites Deuteronomy 30:6: "God will open up your heart." This one doesn't just work the obvious (hearts! open! understanding! empathy! Rosh Hashanah!) but also alludes to the exact opposite of what happened to Pharaoh: Our hearts are becoming un-hardened.

Then the Ari proceeds to blow us all out of the water by explaining how each of these three verses covertly refers, respectively, to repentance, charity, and praying -- the three things that, according to the mahzor, dissipate a death sentence on Yom Kippur.

One more cool thing that the Kitzur points out about Psalm 27 and its first few words, "God is my light and my salvation." When the psalm says "salvation," it's referring to Yom Kippur, of course -- since that's the time when some souls get salvated (er, saved) and some don't. But the "my light" part is talking about Rosh Hashanah. It's a complicated holiday, neither 100% good (uh, a lot of us are about to die) nor 100% sad (it's the birthday of the world, and a lot of us are going to get good decrees)...but we do what we can. And that's where the light comes from. We're saying that God should reveal everything...and that God should make it all good.