I am, generally speaking, not much of a practicing Jew. An odd adjective, that: “practicing”. Does it make perfect? No, alas; we Jews are realists. We don’t have to make perfect. We just have to do what we can toward tikkun olam, the repair of the world. In that sense, I like to think that I *am* a practicing Jew. I’ve raised two good children (now young adults), both of whom are committed in their own ways to tikkun olam. I am married to a good man, and I think I do pretty well at making a welcoming home environment for him. Not perfect, I know, but hey, I’m practicing. I’ve done some good in the world, too: I’ve been active on the Board of Visitors and Governors of my college; Dan and I give them and other worthy causes money each year (okay, a weak way of doing good, but still a way); I do not participate in the unnecessary torture of animals that is part of our mega-industrial American culture. I try to be kind. I keep tikkun olam in front of our family as a goal.

But in the other sense of following the rituals, I’m not doing so well. This year, I lost Yom Kippur in favor of a trip to San Francisco to visit Margot. I told myself it was okay because my mom and I would still be going to Rosh Hashanah services together. But then that fell apart too. Through her senior housing, my mom got a ticket for the morning service. But as a prospective member with no ticket I could attend only the evening service. (A ticket would have cost $350–more than I was willing to contribute for one service.) Without a ticket, Mom wasn’t comfortable going to the evening service, and so she went to services with my brother and his family. So I had no one to go with. This was upsetting for a while. But I got over it. I thought, This is God’s way of telling me that this year I am not a practicing Jew.

It didn’t seem so bad not to be a practicing Jew. I got used to the idea quickly. Hey, I told myself, it’s just this one year. I’ll try it out. After all, Dan’s not a practicing Catholic, and he does okay. Lots of our Jewish friends–Steve, Archie, Howie, Diane–are not practicing Jews. Some of them probably don’t even know when Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur takes place. And they’re all good people and good friends. So this year, that’s me, too. Not a practicing Jew. Not this year.

But apparently some higher force in the world did not agree.

On a recent Thursday (the last in September), Diane and I walk out of Whole Foods in (I think) the Mt. Washington section of Baltimore; and there’s this guy. White shirt, perhaps with a tallit underneath, suit jacket, yarmulkah. He is with a little boy also in white shirt and yarmulkah. They looked like orthodox Jews, but not extreme. No payot, for example. The man was carrying a bundle of various leaves. “Are you Jewish?” he asked Diane, who came out ahead of me. We glanced at each other. The guy didn’t appear harmful. Quite the opposite. He seemed very kindly and mild. “Yes,” she answered. “Would you like to shake the lulav?” he asked. For a moment we were both nonplussed. “Do you know that this is the first day of Sukkos?” Sukkos, not Sukkot. He spoke Hebrew with an Ashkenasi accent. No, we weren’t aware of that. “Have you ever done this before?” “No,” Diane said, “no, I haven’t.” “Would you like to?” “Yes,” she decided,”I would.”

The man fished an etrog out of some pocket (“Esrog,” he called it). “I’m going to give you these,” he told her. “They’ll be yours. But you have to promise to give them back to me when you’re done.” “Okay.” Then he handed the etrog and lulav to her and instructed her in the ritual and the blessings. I said the Hebrew mostly along with him, except I didn’t know the part “al … lulav”; and because it was the first day we said a shechechayanu. After shaking the bundle north, south, west, up, down, and to the east, Diane gave the etrog and lulav back to him.

(For more on the ritual see: This page about the Sukkot lulav ritual).

There was a moment of awkwardness. Despite my having said the Hebrew along with him (displaying my shining Sephardit accent), he hesitated. He didn’t know whether it was all right to ask me. But I met his eyes, and he said, “Are you Jewish?” “Yes,” I told him. “Would you like to shake the lulav?” At that moment there was nothing I wanted more. “Yes,” I answered firmly, “I would.” And I said the blessings again and shook the etrog and lulav to the north, the south, to the east, up, down, and to the west as if the world depended on it. And I even gave them back to him. “It’s a mitzvah to shake the lulav,” he told me. And, with tears behind my eyes I answered that it was a mitzvah to give people the opportunity. We thanked him deeply and went on our way.

Five minutes later, we looked out of the neighboring store, and the man and the child were gone, as if they had never been there. Or, more likely, as if they had been there only for us. And we thought that perhaps today we had encountered an angel. In the form of a man and a child and an etrog and a lulav.

I guess I am a practicing Jew.

In my dream this morning, a business-suited high-school teacher was lecturing to the class (mine?). He stated that in the past – and in many cultures today – people fought or even murdered others because there was too much hatred. He then went on to explain that this hatred grew directly out of the directive to love your neighbor and even to love your enemy. It’s hard enough to love your neighbors, much less your enemies, so naturally most people fail. But if they believe they are supposed to love these people but they don’t, then they are faced with a dilemma. Either they have to accept the idea that they are in some way inferior or deficient, or they must turn against the ones they were trying to love and blame these others for the failure. But cognitive dissonance works against finding the fault in oneself. Therefore, people naturally blame others. And if the others are to blame for making a person fail, then it’s natural for that person to hate them and feel he must destroy them, so that he can eventually succeed.

So, the teacher proceeded, it is clear that as long as we have the injunction to love others, we are doomed to have hatred and murder in the world. Clearly, the system of relying on emotion to obtain right behavior is fundamentally flawed and primitive. But here in America we have a better system. We require only that people learn to live with the presence of others. Live and let live. And he wrote on the board, “Love = getting along”. It’s the only reasonable thing to do. We have replaced emotion with reason. If we don’t have to try to love, at least we can avoid outright hatred.

At my side, the student teacher shook her head and whispered that somehow, she was not sure that was right. She couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong with it, because it seemed, somehow, so reasonable. But she felt there must be more to love than just toleration.

Somehow, it seemed a fitting dream for Yom Kippur. Asleep or awake, it is a time to examine the roots of our beliefs and to consider whether we are living the lives we ought to be living.

To me, this dream speaks of the cheapening and trivialization of values in our culture. Let’s just schmear over the differences and all learn just to get along. Let’s not make ourselves look or act so different that we are too hard to get along with. Let’s all dress more or less the same (within normal cultural, age, fashion variances), speak the same, do the same kinds of acceptable things. We try our best to tolerate the people on the edges of acceptability, but we know we don’t have to like them (much less love them!) or even have much of anything to do with them. In all fairness, it’s not a bad compromise. Most likely, there will be no krystalnacht in America. We have probably come further in learning to live together than most places in the world. I am not putting it down. I’m glad to be living here.

But let’s not fool ourselves: This is NOT love. This is not what Jesus and Hillel and Gandhi and other men of God were talking about when they urged us to love our neighbors (and even enemies) as ourselves.

God made ocean beaches and the rugged mountains of the Andes. Luminous icebergs and sweltering jungles bejeweled with birds. Rivers of grass and oceans of sand. We can love and appreciate all these things, in their (sometimes deadly) beauty, for just what they are, without wanting to change them. God also made people and cultures and religions in profuse variety. We find it much harder to see the (sometimes deadly) beauty in these, and to love them. But surely, THIS is the task we are called to. Not to change them. Not to bring them to the inoffensive norm. But to revel in our differences. To love one another.