What We Leave Behind

During Yom Kippur services this year, I came up with the best praying strategy I've ever had, I think. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to write it down and look it up next year...except, of course, I never do.

I'm a regular Ashkenazic guy. Blase Hungarian features, thick Carpathian mountain hair, the same prayerbook as half the universe uses...but, for Yom Kippur, I wound up in a Chabad synagogue. Chabad uses a different nusach than most of the rest of the universe. (It's technically called "Nusach ha'Ari," after the Arizal, except that he'd been dead several hundred years when it was invented by the Alter Rebbe, the first Rebbe of Chabad.) To make a long story much shorter, it's mostly the same prayers, in an almost completely different order than, ahem, normal...or, "normal" if you're a Carpathian like me.

We prayed all day yesterday, except for a 20-minute break at 4:30 or so to pop home and see my daughter. Most of it was silent, to ourselves, punctuated sporadically by a call-and-response hymnal, or a sudden moment on the part of the prayer leader of "Hey! This would sound really good sung aloud." (I can only guess that's what he was thinking. I was praying with a 100-year-old machzor that used to be my great-grandmother's; there's no call-and-response instructions, only big text and little text.) Anyway, for about three-quarters of those responsive readings, I was on a totally different page -- in a different section, and on a different mental plane.

And it was totally great.

With nothing to cling to, all I could cling to were the words. As a result of working here (and from a couple years of praying every day) my Hebrew's getting better, and individual words stuck out at me as I went -- healing; forgiveness; screw up. ("Screw up" is my personal translation of "to sin," since there isn't any literal sinning in Judaism.) But the more I went, the closer I got to that ideal relationship that all the rabbis talk about when they talk about Yom Kippur: the idea that it's just you and God alone in a room, and you're not sure whether to say "thank you" or "I'm sorry," and you end up saying both.

That's where this whole confusion about YoKo comes from. Nobody ever says "Happy Yom Kippur!" But people who regard it as sad and mournful aren't getting the whole picture, either. There's a story in the Talmud about how, when we fast, God is fasting, too. Not because God is getting ready to make harsh judgments on us, but because God doesn't want to make harsh judgments, and God's hoping not to have to.

It also got me thinking about the recent exhibition of the diary of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut killed in the Columbia crash. Thirty miles from the crash site, in the middle of a field in Texas, a farmer found the pages -- literally the last thing in life that he left behind. Paper is one of the most intangible, temporary things to leave. But praying, talking, our secret whispers -- if we die this coming year, that's all that we have left, too. Words? Emotions? Complaints? But if you're saying something good, it's nothing to be ashamed of at all.

crossposted from MyJewishLearning

Losers Press

And there's a ton of new press on Losers. Check out the site for the whole megillah, but here's some of it:

Bookami
"As the volumes of YA novels published each year continue to grow, it's going to be less and less about what happens, and more about how you say it, and I think Matthue Roth knows how to say it."

The Bloody Snow
"Losers...shows that not all kids want or like to be popular, that some strive for something more meaningful, and that awkwardness is an art form. The resulting product is a story of not only meaning, but also hilarity."

Vilde Chayas

I'm the first person to 'fess up to my Maurice Sendak obsession -- Where the Wild Things Are is the only book that my daughter actually asks for on her own. (The fact that I toss her around during the Wild Rumpus probably has a lot to do with it, but I think she admires the strong narrative tone, too.)

Anyway, I kept telling everyone that the Wild Things themselves were given traditional Yiddish names from the 1940s and '50s: Moishe, Emil, and Tzippy, but no one seemed to believe me -- even when I tracked down references).

Anyway, here's a site where you can buy mini-Wild Things of your own -- named, as it turns out, after Sendak's uncles and aunts. Even the term "Wild Things" comes from the Yiddish vilde chaya, which is what your grandmother called you after you had a little too much salt water taffy and were leaping on the furniture.

Doctor Who geekout moment

I don't know if anyone I know will find this riveting, but I do: A catalogue of every time anyone has said "What are you doing here?" on Doctor Who.

brother-in-law karaoke

today the masses of family-in-law converged upon our house, filling up the living room and dining room for possibly the first time ever. (here i should note that the terms "living room" and "dining room" are location-specific, meaning that, in new york city, the only way to divide a postage-stamp-sized living room from a postage-stamp-stub-sized dining room is by putting a bookcase that takes up half of both rooms but does, nonetheless, create the illusion that you have a normally-segmented (though microscopic) house.
annnyway....

itta spent the afternoon babysitting niece and nephew, and i spent it finishing the passably beta version of the candy in action website. then tonight, my in-from-melbourne brother-in-law dov and i went off in search of a bar.

i'd passed this lounge/bar/internet cafe a bunch, so we went there first. turns out the "bar" part was...well, false advertising. "we might apply for beer," said the hostess. "what do you think?"

we walked around. we found a place that, according to a hipster on the corner, "might be sketch or might be not." we took our chances. dov's tall. i have payos. who in brooklyn would be threatened by us?

so we went into the bar. dov asked them to put on the eagles game. three people worked the TV until green uniforms appeared. and, as the bartender returned with our drinks, she bore a deathly serious countenance as she told us:

"it's karaoke night. and you are both going to sing."

we did. eventually. dov kept flipping through the book, asking should we do this? we can't do this. and telling me that his voice wasn't good. then i signed myself up, and i told the host that he was going to sing "land down under" right after me.

i went up. we were the only white people in the bar, did i tell you that? and the only people who had gone before sang mary j. blige. i was freaked out. usually, when i do karaoke, i do cheesy white-people songs. the dixie chicks and madonna are my friends. alanis. god, alanis. but tonight i did stevie wonder. signed, sealed, delivered. and everyone started clapping along with me. after i was done, dov sang, and he even hit the whistling chorus. and then a middle-aged man sang a note-perfect rendition of luther vandross.

and we all felt like we'd earned our keep in this world.

candy, cooking, and what not to do at parties

before i forget, let me tell you that Candy in Action is signed, sealed, on its way to the printers, and you can pre-order it from me or from amazon through that link there. if you order through on amazon by clicking through my page, i get a very tiny percentage, so yes, it's cool if you do that. if you order through me, of course, mention if you'd like to have me write anything special.

a mere few hours before shabbos, and we are both in the kitchen cooking up a mad storm. as if there were any other kind of storm, especially in cooking. we have carrots so big, i almost stabbed itta's stomach with one. no hard feat, of course, since it's getting bigger than christmas, and hard to avoid, especially when carrying armfuls of spices with names like Pottery Barn colors.

last night at the Jewcy party, i spent a good deal of the night getting drunk with marty from ROI 120, and having him introduce me to people in the most abrupt of ways:

MARTY: "Hey, this is Izzy. She's the one who pays you and tells you when your stuff is shit."
ME: Oh. (pause) Was it?
IZZY: (longer pause) Erm, what was your name again?
ME: Matthue. Matthue Roth.
IZZY: Oh, no. Mostly not, anyway.
Me: (sigh of mostly relief)

toward the end of the night, i pitched them what i remember as being a sequel to my memoir in maybe a hundred and fifty columns. i remember being really excited about it, but i wasn't the person whose reactions i should have been watching.