I. A Prayer for Living

On Yom Kippur during the prayer known as Vidui, we rise and symbolically beat our chests while confessing to an alphabetical series of sins. Two and a half years ago, when my mother died unexpectedly, I learned that the Vidui is also recited at the end of life. If it’s too late for the person dying to recite it, then someone recites it for them.

I wasn’t at the hospital when the young rabbi on call came by to recite it with my father on my mother’s behalf. I had come home briefly, to take care of something else. Soon as I walked into the house, my father called me from the hospital.

“She stopped breathing,” he said. I got back in the car.

The end-of-life Vidui, or deathbed confession, is personal rather than communal. It acknowledges the imperfections of the dying person and seeks a final reconciliation with God.

For the not-dying who hear the Vidui communally on Yom Kippur, the prayer reminds the living to not wait until the end.

II. Change

In a song titled “Change,” the great Tracy Chapman writes, “If you knew that you would die today / You saw the face of God and love / Would you change?” Tracy sings that last line twice, for emphasis. Hearing the question posed once isn’t enough.

Would you change?

I’ve long struggled with positivity-infused / “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” / “it’s all up to you” notions of change that divert the focus from the structural realities that underlie all things and plague, in particular, those who lack money or power.

Not all change is personal.

I wrote an entire book about the difference between personal versus systemic change as pertains to feminism. It took me a while to write my next book, but I’m nearly finished and this one is about the personal and cultural seismic shifts that break and remake us. This one is far more intimate, as it turns out, but it is deeply political, too.

Writing through the heartaches of recent years has helped me sort what is mine to change, what is ours to change, and what just is.

I’m still sorting, of course, but writing my way through some difficult years has been my own form of Serenity Prayer: God/dess grant me the wisdom to transform myself, the courage of collective action, and the acceptance of a Bodhisattva.

The rub lies in the distinguishing.

So you can understand why, when it comes to the Vidui prayer, I’ve sometimes had a hard time with the physical beating of the chest.

III. On Knocking and Wounds

My rabbi has taught me that there is a way to think about this breast-beating not so much as beating our chests but knocking on them, gently, to open.

For breast cancer survivors, even the act of gently knocking on our imperfect chests is weighted with meaning.

Long after the scars are healed, we feel vulnerable.

Therefore, I’ve found that the best way to tap is ever so lovingly, berating neither ourselves nor the universe. Though sometimes, if I’m being honest, berating the universe helps.

But sometimes too, if we’re open to it, wound is where the light gets in.

Speaking of wounds. The week before Rosh Hashanah, I underwent a minor medical procedure that turned out to be a little less minor than anticipated; they sent me home with Norco, and I wore a bandage for a week. The people I encounter through my job are kind and lovingly inquisitive, but after a few explainings during that week, I didn’t feel like explaining anymore and because I have a public-facing role, I decided to disguise—augment?—the bandage on Rosh Hashanah ostensibly so as not to attract attention. A dear friend helped me find this feather:

Because I have little filter, I ended up telling everyone who complimented my feather why it was there.

I felt like a feathered-up kintsugi vessel. I am a feathered-up kintsugi vessel.

Kintsugi (golden joinery) is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. With kintsugi, there no attempt—no reason—to hide the damage.

We all are wounded. The question is not whether we’re broken but how we treat the tears in the fabric of our being.

This is the moment we are living in. And we cannot run from what is broken. Instead, we are called to repair.

In the face of death, we are commanded to live.

IV. Breathe, Dance, Repeat

At my mother’s funeral, we played a song whose lyrics my mother had once given me in the form of a little book, a prayer book really, titled “I Hope You Dance.” When I play that song in my car on my way to stare at the lake two and a half years later, it still brings me to my knees—one line gets me every time: “May you never take one single breath for granted.”

(Becca, this mofo seagull is for you. Because life is a pizza crust.)

Not taking a single breath for granted is a tall order. Most days, most breaths, we take for granted. We’re human. It’s what we do.

And then, things happen that take your breath away. The world, for instance.

On Sunday, with only a few days’ notice, they closed the Starbucks store where my husband had found work and comradery nine months ago—after nearly five years of more or less not finding steady work in his chosen area due to a pandemic layoff and an ever-contracting field (he’s in branding; incredibly talented; please hire him). The store was one of the most union-active stores in the area. It was the first in our urban town to unionize, and apparently the first among 200-250 nationwide to take that step.

The “partners,” as Starbucks called them, remain connected to each other, if not to Starbucks or the store. During the pandemic layoff, my husband’s coworkers’ ghosted him, fearing, perhaps, that they might be next. But when your entire workplace shuts down, that’s when you truly partner up.

In 5786, a year fraught with uncertainty, with both personal and communal safety and well-being up in the air, may we partner up, however we can.

May we find even just a few intentional breaths over the next few days to not take for granted.

May we learn, before we die, not to take the fact of our breathing for granted.

May we love ourselves in and for our brokenness.

May we love each other for the ways we can, together, help repair.

And when we have a choice to sit it out or dance, as the poem says, I hope we dance.

With love and heartache,

Deborah

PS. For those ready to feel cracked open, here’s the soundtrack I’ve been listening to this High Holy Day season. Pass the Kleenex.

The Plowshare Prayer by Spencer LaJoye

Loosen, Aly Halpert

We Rise, Batya Levine

Be the Light, Cantor Natalie Young