Saturday Night Sukkah

Just when you thought Yom Kippur was over -- I mean, it is -- Sukkot shows up and blows all your expectations out of the water. There's a Hasidic custom that on the night Yom Kippur ends, after bellies are stuffed and children are put to bed, you get out your toolkit and wooden planks and palm fronds and you start building your sukkah.

So Saturday night, still in my Yom Kippur clothes (minus the white robe of a kittel that I spent all the holiday in, which my 2-year-old still insisted was a "papa dress"), I descended into the murky spider-lined depths of our garage and started fishing out the fake-wood panels that our cousins in Crown Heights had bequeathed us -- yes, the cousins with a zillion kids, the ones who also always have a gabillion guests over to every meal. They're the sort of consummate entertainers who are so stunningly perfect that you'd totally hate them...except that every time you're at their house, they make you feel so welcomed and loved and, well, stuffed with food. That's the genealogy of our new sukkah.

And then Saturday morning, when my kids woke up and came into the kitchen for their cereal, something weird was taking up the whole of the view through the back windows.

If it doesn't look 100% done to you, congratulate yourself, you sukkah expert! I finished the frame, but then my wife had a catering job and she had to move all the food (that's food for 150, if you're curious) through the 2-inch margin between the sukkah and the wall. So I deconstructed a little -- I am an author, after all.







Sorry for the gratuitous tushy shot. But there you go. Now you can only mildly make fun of me for my nonmechanical construction abilities.

It still wasn't fully done, though. We had to get schach -- the natural wood/tree/foliage sort of thing that covers the sukkahmy friend Ethan (a harmless and inquisitive friend, who happens to be an amazing comic artist, who's not Jewish, and has no clue about all these tabernacle things we're building). For that, we had to go into the wilderness of Coney Island Avenue, the main street of Flatbush, where a 12-year-old boy selling lulavs and etrogs heard me asking someone for directions, and summarily wriggled in between my potential navigator and myself. "You need schach?" he said. "I got some schach for you." He proceeded to give us an address -- a corner of two streets, where, he promised, "this great guy" would be standing outside with bushels of schach.

Ethan, like any right-thinking person, was dubious. But, after all, this was our adventure. So we trekked across Flatbush, and there was a synagogue, and there was our man. And, long story short (the long story involved some very Do the Right Thing-type lines from our 12-year-old hustler, a fourth-story sukkah, and an ATM search) -- we got our bamboo sheet.




And there you go. You have a new story, and I have a new sukkah. My older daughter's been talking all week about how she's going to sleep in the sukkah. I kind of don't believe her, if only because she never actually sleeps.

The Sukkot Song

Just when you thought Yom Kippur was over (I mean, it is) we get started on Sukkot:



Ecclesiastes/The Sukkos Song by Hadara Levin-Areddy, animation by Jeanne Stern, and the holiday brought to you by G*d. Everything else, that's just G-dcast.

A Tashlich Confessional

I am a slacker, but a repentant one. The tashlich ceremony, where we ask forgiveness by praying at the water, is supposed to be done on Rosh Hashanah, or right after. I did it this morning, erev Yom Kippur -- not a new phenomenon, even for me, as I sort of publicly confessed in a book (gulp). But today I did it on the subway, riding over the Manhattan Bridge on the way to work.

Which gave me even more things to confess. Last night we went to an engagement party for the producer of my movie, and afterward stopped near our old home to shlug kappores -- that is, to throw a chicken over your head and transfer your sins to the poor bird. (At least, my wife did. I went looking for the PETA people, but since they'd all bailed, I stood by myself and yelled "YOU MURDEROUS BASTARDS!" at her and all our friends.)





But: back to this morning.

"Yom Kippur is said to be a day k'purim – "a day like Purim." This linguistic and thematic connection reflects on the tone of both days, Yom Kippur giving a sense of life's random absurdity and Purim a feeling that even the most outrageous celebrants are in fact approaching the work of reconciliation with God."

- an article on MyJewishLearning.com



My older daughter ran outside wearing a King Achashverosh mask as I left for work. She is seriously the most spiritual of us all.

Casting the Perfect Baal Teshuva

Just spent way more time than I realized on the phone with some folks at National Geographic, who are planning a documentary on the baal teshuva lifestyle -- that is, people who weren't born Orthodox who somehow or another wind up that way.

"Yeah," I said with a nervous giggle that I wasn't sure where it came from, "I'm a baal teshuva." And right away, it felt like I was admitting something, like I'd come out of the closet with a deviancy that was way too obscure for anybody in the room to know what I was talking about, but which was nonetheless embarrassing the hell out of me to say aloud.


And I wasn't even 100% sure why. Admitting that you didn't grow up Orthodox should be as easy as admitting you didn't grow up Buddhist (for a white person, anyway) -- it's not like anyone expects a fresh-faced kid who can't pronounce Hebrew right and just barely knows how to keep a kosher kitchen to be undetectably Orthodox.

But when you're first starting to be a religious Jew, the last thing you want is to stick out. You want

So I told her my story. I told her how I became Orthodox on my own, outside of a community (in San Francisco, with a bunch of middle-aged gay men teaching me to be Orthodox and a bunch of female-to-male transsexuals teaching me how to act like a guy). I told her about wanting to do Orthodoxy my own way, and then marrying into a family who'd been Hasidim ever since Hasidism started. I told her about how you start thinking in two different languages, one in your job and with your old friends and another with your new friends and the new places you hang out with, how you spend all your time inside a synagogue with random men who you'd never hang out with on your own, and how even your wife doesn't totally understand the life you used to lead.

I realized about two minutes in that I was basically just narrating my memoir (the seasonally-apt Yom Kippur a Go-Go -- read it now! Let it inspire your thoughts of repentance! Or just get a kick out of me explaining Shabbos to my stripper girlfriend!). But I kept talking anyway.

And then, about half an hour later, the National Geographic person (who was being very kind and patient with me) told me that, uh, they were looking for recent baalei teshuva. That is, people who were just starting to become religious, and had just moved into religious neighborhoods.

"But I'll tell my producer about you," she promised.

And then she asked if I could find a baal teshuva (or a few) who might be interested in being profiled.

I reiterated her biggest problem -- that recent baalei teshuva don't want to be stigmatized as baalei teshuva. Not to mention the whole film-crew-following-you-around-as-you-try-to-learn-about-your-new-life thing. But hey, if they cast Jersey Shore, that shouldn't be a problem. Also, for most people I know, Orthodoxy isn't really a gradual process -- people wade in the pool a little, and the next thing you know, they're either living in Bnei Brak with a pile of Shabbos stones or they're straight back to being hippies or investment bankers or reggae singers or whatever they were doing before they started being frum.

So there you have it. Are you a baal teshuva? Do you know anyone? Give me a shout, and I'll hook you guys up.

Half a Life, by Darin Strauss

In Torah times, when someone accidentally killed another person, the victim’s family was allowed to make a revenge killing. The inadvertent murderer’s only protection was to flee to a City of Refuge–one of six cities where the victim’s family was forbidden to take revenge upon them.

It’s a bizarre concept, but it’s kind of thrilling, in the same way that watching horror movies is thrilling: the inevitable chase, the will-he-get-there-in-time?-ness, the fact that you’re not really sure who to root for: the grieving family, or the poor sap whose fault it was.

Darrin Strauss’s new memoir Half a Life, which comes out this week from McSweeney’s, is a case study of this sort of event. At the age of 18, two weeks before graduation, Strauss was driving when he killed a girl from his school. The police called it an accident. But for the past 20 years, Strauss has been haunted by her memory, guilty for having survived, and tortured by the girl’s mother’s plea to him at her funeral: “You’re living for two people now.” (Strangely — and, as in real life, this is never resolved in the book — soon after they promise not to hold it against them, Strauss finds out that the girl’s parents are suing him for several million dollars.)

Through Half a Life, Strauss’s most painful memories are the ones he causes himself. He confesses the accident to women he dates. He constantly confronts her memory in his actions, in his writing, in major life events like going away to college. And he lets it get in the way of his marriage and his fatherhood: “How often do you think about it?” asks his wife, and Strauss is startled by his own answer: “A lot less than I used to think about it.”

These days, the Cities of Refuge no longer exist. But that feeling of guilt that the Torah acknowledged in creating them is no less real, and our basic human need to let this guilt transform us and give our life a new direction–whether it’s starting over again in a new city or transforming that sadness into a profound and moving book.

Yom Kippur with G-dcast

After the onslaught of Rosh Hashanah videos, seems like the least that G-dcast could do would be to make something that full-on fist-pump rocks us out to the Day of Repentance.

And that's not all! Sukkos is coming next week. The holiday, and also the video.