We lived in Bradley Beach, New Jersey, until I was 10 years old. We always lived near the shul (synagogue) and could walk to services every Shabbos (Sabbath) on Saturday mornings. The distance was important because driving on Shabbos was, "Nit Fayn" (not nice) according to Mom.
My mother was part of the sisterhood, and so would excuse herself early from the brigade of older women in wash-and-set hairdos with golden hair nets pinned to their high bouffant tops sitting on the women's side of the Orthodox shul and go into the kitchen to help with the Kiddush.
The Kiddush involved blessing the wine, then all 100 or so of us would get a shot of sweet kosher wine if we were grownups, or grape juice if we were kids. By the time I was 7, I figured out how to snag the real wine and would down two shots before I was busted. Even then, I was ready to party.
The Kiddush spread consisted of fresh bagels and blocks of Philadelphia Cream Cheese, just unpeeled and put out in the shape in which they had come (I always though it might be nicer to spread it in a bowl or something), herring in sour cream, which I thought was the most horrible food I had ever seen, until I saw a beef tongue hanging over the deli counter at the kosher butcher. There were Pareve kosher cookies straight from the box, star-shaped cookies with a jelly dot in the center. Coffee and tea, too. Mom always volunteered to clean up.
On the walk home, it became clear why Mom volunteered. She had us three kids shlep part of the five pounds of rewrapped cream cheese, bags of dozens of assorted bagels and brown super market bags filled with broken star cookies.
One Saturday, tipsy on three shots of wine, I let loose with my commentary on the situation.
"Mom, if we can't drive on Shabbos, isn't carrying all this stuff worse?"
"Vey iz MIR!" my mother yelled. She trimmed the OY off of the OY VEY iz mir when it was time to show real emotion, "Honor thy father and thy mother and stop kvetching!"
Once we moved to the swank, uber rich town of Rumson (my parents attempt to move us up in the world, didn't work), the shul was no longer within walking distance.
At first we tried Friday night services at the posh, Conservative shul in Rumson where everyone drove Cadillacs and nobody wanted my mother stealing cream cheese.
So we joined the tiny Orthodox shul in Red Bank that looked more like a real estate office then a shul and drove there on Saturday mornings. Mom felt the Lord would rather have us show up than not drive.
Once again, she joined the sisterhood, but the Red Bank shul was paying off their mortgage, so our trunk was filled with broken Archway cookies, which nobody liked, even when they weren't broken.
I don't know if it was the fact that nobody in my family wanted to wake up on a Saturday morning or the lack of cream cheese blocks, but eventually we stopped going to shul on Shabbos. My family's shul visits trickled down to just the high holidays from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur.
I had an Italian friend in high school named Sandy Valentino. Her mom would sit on the front porch with my mother while Sandy and I hung out in her room.
"It's amazing how much Jews and Italians are alike," I said to Sandy as our two moms compared recipes between tears over their rotten children.
"Yeah, but you don't have to go to church and confess all your sins!" she said. "It's embarrassing!"
In fact, Jews do go to church or rather shul and confess, only we do it once a year, not all year long.
We start the wind up on Kol Nidre, the eve of Yom Kippur, when we are supposed to stop eating and drinking and have to fast and then have till sundown the day of Yom Kippur to get all our atoning done.
It's like a huge annual crash course PURGE.
We Jews love to purge.
"Eat a plum; it will push your food through," my mother would say.
She wasn't wrong.
When I was growing up, Yom Kippur services were all about starving and begging for forgiveness, or so it seemed to me. Rosh Hashanah was fun! We dipped apples in honey and kissed each other and said, "Le shanah tovah," Have a sweet new year!
But Yom Kippur was deadly serious.
It was Darth Vader with yarmulkes.
This was the time to mourn for the dead, pray for forgiveness and hope to make some brownie points with the Lord, since the great book that decided who would live or die was said to be closed at the end of Yom Kippur.
I don't go to Orthodox shul anymore; the whole women and men sitting separate and only men allowed on the bema does not suit my feminism. The shul where I am a member, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, has a female rabbi and celebrates all Jews, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, queer-identified. You don't even have to be Jewish!
Yom Kippur services are so packed, they have to rent a huge hall in the Coliseum-size Javits Center. Thousands of people come to sing, listen to the choir and pray in their own way.
One year, during the portion of the service when we gently tap our chest as if to beat our heart in remorse over each of the sins recited, I stopped tapping my chest and listened to my own heart.
It was not the Lord from whom I needed to beg forgiveness; it was myself.
I was still mad at myself for telling my mother to shut up 40 years before! There has to be a statute of limitations on guilt! Doesn't there?
And then there is the other hard one, forgiving others.
Mom. I forgive you for stealing so much cream cheese; we had to eat four plums to push it through the next day. But I'm still working on forgiving you for that green maxi dress with daisies sewn on it you made me wear for my bat mitzvah.
Vey iz mir!!